Thanks for joining us today. My name is Steve O'Hara. I'm Vice President of Investor Relations at Patrick Industries. First, before I dive in here, I'd like to just let everybody know we have vests for everybody. If we don't have your size, we can get it. That should be, you know, on your way out or way in. First, I think we got a good day for everybody here. Just this is forward-looking statements. I'd like you to just please take note of the cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements in the deck here. I'll pause for a minute to let everybody just look over it. There's a little delay. There we go. Okay.
With that, you know, kind of give you a brief overview of the agenda. First, we'll have Andy Nemeth come up. He'll give you a kind of a overview on Patrick, our vision and strategy, we'll have the end market presidents speak about each end market. We'll do a short Q&A, break. We'll have, we'll dive into operational excellence, Advanced Product Group, our M&A strategy, marketing with Empowering Enthusiasts before hitting our BETTER Together culture with Todd. We'll wrap up with Andrew Roeder and our financials. With that, I'll bring up Andy Nemeth, our CEO.
He's been with the company over 25 years, held the position of CEO since 2020 and also has been our CFO and President as well. Thank you.
Thank you, Steve. Welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today. Just to let you know, we had a great morning this morning. We were able to ring the opening bell for the first time in the company's 65-year history. We brought 40 of our team members out and their spouses to really recognize and celebrate the company's evolution over that period of time. Just been a great day for us and to kick it off and finish off with this is going to be a lot of fun. We really appreciate you coming and taking the time to spend with us. As Steve said, I'm CEO. This is my 29th year with the company. I started. I have a finance background. I was CFO for about 15 years, President, and now the CEO.
I've seen a lot of the growth of the company over that, let's call it that last 29-year period. Any questions you have, feel free to ask me. We want this to be a collaborative session. We want you to feel free to ask any questions that you have. Just to give you some overall takeaways on kind of what I think you should expect for today. First of all, we'll give you some idea on what the vision is. We do have a vision. We've got a strategy. We've got an executable plan, and we spend a lot of time thinking about this and where we wanna go and really making sure that we stay focused on delivering upon that plan. I also want you to take away the strength of our team.
I think we're gonna have a nice presentation from or presentations from a lot of our key team members today. You'll see the depth and breadth and how they think, but just showcasing some of the talent that we have. Competitive advantages as well. We'll share, you know, what we believe our competitive advantages are and why we think that should be able to make us successful in executing upon our plan. The earnings power of the business, which Andy's gonna talk a little bit about, and the leverageability of this platform that we feel really good about. Overall shareholder value. Just some key takeaways for you that you should expect throughout the day and at the end of the day. Sorry. Who we are.
I'm gonna talk a little bit about who we are, how we got here, and where we wanna go. Okay. Overall, the company from a purpose perspective, we are enthusiasts. Okay. We're a component solutions supplier to the outdoor enthusiast market, RV, marine, and powersports, and as well the housing markets, which has been a core part of our business since our inception. Our team members are RVers, boaters, campers, hunters, fishermen, snowmobilers, you name it. The team is very passionate about who we are, our products, our customers, what we do, and how we represent those products. You know, again, I can look across this spectrum. This is a sampling of kind of our senior team members, but overall, I look across the company and everybody is an enthusiast in our company. We live the lifestyle.
We are extremely proud to wear our brand jersey, wear the Patrick brand jersey, and as well wear our individual brand jerseys, which we'll talk about. We definitely are thoughtful about impacting our team and our culture, which Todd Gongwer's gonna talk a little bit about. We also wanna impact our communities. We do a lot of philanthropy in our communities to give back, and the bigger and broader we get, the more impact we can have amongst our team members and our communities. From a purpose perspective, we're very well-defined in our organization as far as what we wanna do and how we wanna contribute. Who is Patrick? Today, Patrick's about a $3.7 billion company. We're about 10,000 employees in 23 different states. We operate under a brand platform.
We've got more than 85 brands out there today and look to continue again to execute upon that brand-fronted strategy. I'll talk a little bit about that. About 75% manufacturing, 25% distribution. Just from an aftermarket perspective, we're gonna share some information on that as well. We're about 7% aftermarket today, but certainly have plans to grow that business and continue that development. Diversification has been a key part of our strategy and vision over the last several years as we entered various markets. You might say, "Okay, well, you're in cyclical markets in the outdoor enthusiast space." That being said, they cycle at different times, so we've seen the benefit of that over the last four or five years, certainly. Our RV markets generally are the leading indicators into and out of economic cycles.
Marine market follows RV by about six-12 months, the powersports market follows the marine market by about six months. That has played out very well from our perspective as we moved into these markets. As well, our housing business has been very resilient over the last two years. It's helping support some of the volatility in our enthusiast markets. When we look to talk about margin resilience, again, we'll show you some information on that. That should be reflected. You think about content and how we've grown the business. We're gonna go back to 2010, that's really the launchpad for the strategy for the company and how we started thinking about this model. We're very simplistic in the way we think about it.
We keep things simple and try to make sure that we stay focused on where we wanna get to. You can see at the bottom half of the slide kind of the information on content per unit, where that's gone over the years, and how we've been able to diversify that business and how much potential there is. We're gonna show you some TAM out there as it relates to each of our markets and why we think there's continued opportunity for both organic and strategic growth inside those markets. How did we get here? Just to give you a little bit of history on the timeline. Patrick was founded in 1959, incorporated in 61. It went public in 1971.
Really the company operated and started as a manufactured housing supplier in those years. Did a little bit of RV. 2005 was a turning point for Patrick in that a private equity group called Tontine came in and bought out the founder's shares at that point in time and really changed the opportunity for the company. Allowed us access to capital, gave us the opportunity to create strategic vision, and really focus on a forward-looking approach, which had kind of passed along or kinda died a little bit along the way. 2005 was really an inflection point for us.
In 2007, we acquired our largest competitor, a company called Adorn, which was a merger of equals, which really was the transformational event for the company. It was a result of Tontine's support and investment in Patrick. In 2010 is when we really kinda launched on our M&A strategic growth strategy, and that's when we started to acquire in the RV space in particular. It was right close to home. We're based out of Elkhart, Indiana. Elkhart, Indiana, is the RV capital of the world. Everybody is within, I'm sorry, about a 50 square mile radius of each other, whether it's suppliers, the OEMs, the banks, everybody is right there in this community. It was easy.
We knew everybody, and it's very easy to do M&A because it takes about 15 minutes to get to any place that you wanna get to in Elkhart. We executed on the RV strategy in 2010. In 2016, we dipped our toe in the marine market. We like to get a feel for what the market looks like before we go in, and we dipped our toe with an acquisition of a company called BH Electronics and really liked that market, found it to be very similar to our RV markets and continued to execute on the same strategy that we did in the RV space from 2010 to 2017. Once that we did that, we then moved into the powersports market in 2022 through the acquisition of a couple of audio companies.
Then in 2024, we just did an acquisition of a company called Sportech, which is really our platform launch into the powersports space. Aftermarket as well. In 2024, we bought a company called RecPro, which Jeff is gonna talk about, which is an incredibly leverageable platform for us that has so much opportunity to really expand across our markets. I'm gonna tell you it has more than we even anticipated. Today, the issue with RecPro is not finding the opportunities. It's prioritizing and executing on them because we've found so many. Very excited. When you think about the strategic direction and evolution, we replicate the same strategies that we've been successful at in the past. Again, keeping that very simple. We are a brand-funded organization. We go to market through our brands.
You might ask, "Hey, why do you do that? Why are you not consolidating all these up into one company?" I'll tell you that our brand platform is made up of incredibly strong businesses, incredibly strong principals and entrepreneurs that are very proud to wear their brand jersey, and our customers associate with our individual brands. We try not to disrupt what the brands have accomplished over the years in their development. I'll talk about our acquisition M&A a little bit later on how we categorize targets. Our brands are what our customers associate with. That's where each one of them has their own DNA that's made them successful. We buy successful business models, and we allow the brand entrepreneurs to continue to wear their jersey and run the business. Again, it's keeping it simple.
We do execute on the synergies behind the scenes. All that is with the brand platform in front. We kind of say, "Okay, as long as our customers know that the brands have the resources of Patrick behind it, whether that's financial, operational, structural, you name it, that's what we care about, and that's what our customers enjoy." They wanna continue working with the individual brands, and they do like the fact that Patrick can support that. Then we work on synergies behind the scenes. We'll talk about that in our M&A section. Maintaining brand DNA is critical for us as it relates to our M&A strategy, and we're gonna continue that philosophy. It's not as complicated as you would think.
It's really about making sure you're acquiring tremendous talent that has the ability to execute. We don't buy broken businesses, these brands are successful in their own right. It's very simple. If it's not broken, don't fix it. We try to stay very, very true to that. If it is broken, we will fix it. Just so you know, we don't let things fester for a long time if we see something that's not working inside of one of our brands. For the most part, like I said, we're buying successful businesses, and we just want them to keep doing what they're doing. All of this has translated into a track record of consistent and steady growth. You can see the COVID years there in 21 and 22.
If you trendline this, again, to me, it's up and to the right as it relates to the performance and the growth of the business from a revenue perspective. This is a result of the accomplishment of our strategic objectives as well as our organic growth over this period of time as well, which we will talk about again. I'm gonna talk about how we are able to execute upon this plan. This is kind of the model that we look to continue to replicate, and our hope and goal would be that we continue to do this into the future. The other thing that this has really delivered from our perspective is resilient and increasing margins over the course of time. The top line here represents our gross margin profile going back to 2010, the inception of the strategy.
Again, our goal is to continue to deliver accretive margins. We'll talk about kind of how that works and how we get there as it relates to the strategy. All this plays into, again, continuing to look forward to accretive margins on a go-forward basis, which is what we certainly want to accomplish. Vision, just to give you some perspective, we do have a vision on where we want to be. We do five-year strategic plans every three or four years, and we hold ourselves accountable internally to these strategic plans, which include various components to them as it relates to capital allocation, which is very important to us. We throw off a lot of cash flow. We're going to reinvest that cash flow back into the business. I'll point you kind of to this slide, which is kind of where our goal is.
Today, we're about 70% outdoor enthusiasts, 30% housing. Our vision for the future, for the next three-five years, is to be 85% outdoor enthusiast, 15% other, which could include housing, may include housing, may include something else. We're not looking to step too far out of, you know, our sweet spot today, which is gonna be RV, marine, and powersports. Our goal is to continue to penetrate into that market. As we look to grow the business, we've got a vision and a pipeline that's there. From an execution perspective, how do we execute upon this? From a capital allocation perspective, we're looking to redeploy capital back into the business. Just to give you some color on how we build the model, this three-year strategic plan.
We take our content per unit. We use an industry assessment for growth in each of our markets over that period of time. Pick a number, 3%, 5%, 10%, whatever you wanna use, okay. We generate a model that generates cash flow. We're gonna reinvest that cash flow back into the business. We're gonna use a leverage target of 2.25x - 2.5x. In periods of growth, we may spend more than $400 million or $500 million, depending on what that operating cash flow looks like, to reinvest in the business and grow that. If you build that out, that should deliver continued accretive margins that you saw on the previous page, both on the gross and operating level. Aftermarket overlay is part of our vision, and we just started that strategy with RecPro.
Again, like I said, RecPro is gonna be able to fold over our Outdoor Enthusiast space today to be able to really incorporate the products there organically and then continue to grow strategically, as, especially as it relates to some of our OEM customers that are looking to buy RecPro products today. A lot of opportunity in the aftermarket, but tremendous opportunity organically inside our existing Outdoor Enthusiast business to leverage that RecPro platform. We are gonna prioritize Outdoor Enthusiasts, okay? It's gonna be RV, Marine, and Powersports is where our focus is at. That's where we wanna grow strategically. I'm not saying that Housing is not a strong business for us. We've just quite candidly outgrown the M&A candidates that exist out there in the Housing space. I'll talk about the key components that we look for in an acquisition candidate.
They're more fruitful in the outdoor enthusiast space, which we know very well, and we look to continue to be able to deliver upon. From a financing structure perspective, we're gonna continue to make sure that our financing structure is positioned to be able to support the growth model that we have today. We just, we just re-upped our senior notes two months ago. Andrew will talk a little bit about that. We moved out our debt wall, we're well-positioned today with tremendous liquidity to execute upon this plan. Again, it's gonna be about redeploying cash flow, utilizing leverage of 2.25 x-2.5x into the business, and we'll talk about capital allocation and those priorities, but M&A is a big piece of that to deliver this growth strategy. Our markets today.
Not only do we feel good about kind of an executable strategy that we have in place, but our markets today are in a really good position. To me, this slide is really the 33, 35-44-year-old age demographic, and it is really simple to me. This is the group that's starting to accumulate wealth. This is the group that is buying RVs, first-time home buyers, remodeling homes, buying boats, buying powersports. This is kind of the sweet spots for our market today. The average age of new RV buyers today is 32 years old. That's down 10 years. It used to be 42 years old from what it was just four or five years ago.
The age demographic continues to move to younger buyers in the RV space, this age demographic, 35-44, is expected to continue to grow for the next 10 years, okay? That fits right in the sweet spot of our market. Just from a demographic perspective, we feel good about the demographics that are out there in play today. When we look about kind of our model and how we're positioned today, a couple of things. First of all, we've got a high variable cost model. We don't hesitate to take cost out of the business. We're very operationally focused. We are flexible and nimble, and we're looking to be able to move up and down as it relates to our revenue stream. Our revenues, our markets don't move in 3% and 5% increments.
They generally move in 10% and 20% increments. We have to be very scalable and nimble both up and down. We've got flexing working capital, flexible working capital, highly scalable capacity, so we can move up or down as fast as we want to. Now we've got an advanced product group, which we're going to talk about, which is going to be able to accelerate our organic growth platform on a go-forward basis and strong customer relationships. Where are our markets at today? You can see kind of the charts there as it relates to where wholesale shipments are at, to me, it's about inventory balance in the channel. In the RV space, there's 16 to 18 weeks of inventory on hand out in the dealer space today, compared to an historical average of 26 to 30 weeks.
We don't expect it to get back to 26-30 weeks, but we don't think 16-18 weeks is sustainable. In the marine space today, there's 19-21 weeks on hand. There's a historical average of 36-40 weeks. Again, we don't expect to get back to 36-40 weeks, but we don't think 19-21 is sustainable either. We believe there's a restock. We think our markets today are bouncing along the bottom. Our powersports market is calibrating a little bit. It's the third in that outdoor enthusiast cyclicality, as I mentioned before. Q4, probably Q1 is what we're anticipating now, maybe a little bit into Q2. Overall, we think that market's calibrating from an inventory perspective, and our other markets are positioned well.
In our housing market, there's just a lack of affordable housing out there today, and there's a lack of affordable inventory. We're seeing resilience today and a possibility that the MH narrative is going to start taking some hold. That's been a positive for us as we look out across our markets. Strong demographic trends and industry conditions look very well positioned to support this next upcycle. How are we going to do it from a growth perspective? Strategically, through acquisitions. We're going to deploy capital on M&A. Over the last 15 years, we've done 75 acquisitions of over 85 different companies. We've spent $2.5 billion Executing this strategy, which I showed you on the chart. Organically, we have organic targets that we target our team to.
2%-3% organic growth, net of inventory and net of pricing is our expectation amongst all of our brands on an annual basis. We look to deliver both strategic and organic growth. You've got end market growth, which we're anticipating. We think we're bouncing along the bottom right now. Again, as I talked about, weeks on hand, demographic trends, all we need in our minds is a little bit of interest rate relief and some consumer confidence to kind of give us a little bit of push to start our markets moving. We're hopeful that we'll see that here. As we do, we'll expect to be able to be very scalable. Aftermarket runway, as I talked about, really simple from my perspective. It's executing upon the organic opportunities that exist in our aftermarket platform today.
We feel like we're in a good spot. Our markets are, like I said, demographics are strong. Our markets are kind of bouncing along the bottom, ready to execute with low inventories in the channel, and our business is sized according to the current revenue stream. All this, bringing it together, as I said, 2010 is kind of the launching point. 2010 to 2024 is the execution of a strategy and a proven track record and ability to execute upon a strategy and vision that was defined in 2010. As we look at 2025, we're just gonna continue to replicate that model. We look to replicate that model.
Like I said, market's poised, demographic trends, strong customer relationships, our aftermarket platform, then not only our advanced product group, but we have moved from being a component supplier to our markets to a component solution supplier to our markets. What I mean by that is not bundling products together for a customer. It's putting product solution packages together. I use ski and wakeboard tower. We do ski and wakeboard towers. We can incorporate audio systems, wire harnesses, dash panels, all systems into a plug-and-play solution for our customers that makes us that much more sticky. We can put IP on it. We can be very progressive as it relates to where we wanna go and looking out into the future of being much more sticky with our customers.
As we look at where we're at today, we feel like we're really well positioned, and we've got a model that we are hoping to be able to execute on that has been proven in the past. Again, we feel like we're just in a good spot and waiting kind of for the next upturn. With that, I gave you a little bit of history on Patrick, tell you about where we're at, but I also wanna turn it over now. We're gonna talk about our markets a little bit. Each of our market presidents is gonna come up here and give you a little bit of perspective on what they see and tell you a little bit about why, again, we feel like we can deliver on this strategy.
Jeff Rodino is the President of our RV Business today. Jeff's got 28 years with the company, tremendous industry experience, and is very knowledgeable and, again, runs our RV Business today, but also helps out in a lot of other parts of the business because of his knowledge and platform. With that, Jeff, I'll let you talk about our RV market.
Thanks, Andy. Good morning, everyone. Appreciate everybody joining us this morning. Like Andy said, my name's Jeff Rodino, the President of the RV portion of Patrick Industries. Really excited to get an opportunity to talk to you a little bit more about our RV business and what we have going on. Like Andy mentioned, I've been in the industry for 31 years. It's kind of hard for me to say that, but it seems like it's been forever. You know, I've seen a lot of the ups and downs, a lot of the cycles that happen in the RV industry.
It really gives us a great opportunity or gives me a great opportunity to kind of express to you kind of where we're at in the cycle with RVs, what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, and what's going on in the market. You know, we believe the industry is really well positioned for a rebound and an upcycle, the way it says, you know, the way we sit today. As Andy mentioned, you know, that 16 to 18 weeks on hand feels pretty lean out there in the inventory channels. Additionally, we've talked to, you know, our touch points to find out that the 2023s are pretty much flushed out. The aged inventory is out of the dealer lots now and really poised for a couple things. We're poised to have the retail rebound.
When that retail starts to rebound, there will be restock that needs to happen. We saw it last year. Going into the end of last year, we were at about 19 weeks on hand. By March, we had dealers screaming for product to get there. I'll talk a little bit more about that when we get to. This isn't changing. Hit it twice? Okay, sorry. Just to dig a little bit more into the RV portion of our business, $1.6 billion, 45% of the TTM consolidated revenue at Patrick. As you see, we've had a 10% CAGR on our content per unit from 2019 to 2024.
I think one of the really neat things on this chart and our teams, our sales teams and our operations team have done a tremendous job growing the business. If you look in 2019 with 406,000 wholesale units, we are at $1.78 billion. This year on a TTM basis at 331,000 units, we're at $1.6 billion. A lot of market growth there and a lot of effort through our teams to grow organically new product and develop innovation along the way. As you see, our content per unit has moved up quite a bit. From 2019 to 2024, as Andy mentioned, we'd talk a little bit about the total addressable market.
We believe we have more than double total addressable market just in the product lines that we currently carry today. Just to talk about our capabilities and expertise, you'll see, you know, there's several items here, but I will tell you that we have a lot of experience in the lamination, hardwood, softwoods, fiberglass. You know, I mentioned a few minutes ago when I was talking about the demand from the dealers, we are the number one transportation company out there. We are taking products from the OEMs to our lots out to the dealers. We have a lot of dealer connectivity, not just OEM connectivity, and it gives us a really good insight on what's happening out in the market.
Just to get to this next slide, we have the expertise on the other slide and the capabilities. This just shows you where some of our products are. I would simply tell you that anywhere you see, touch, or feel on a unit, we're probably involved with it, whether it's the roof, whether or not it's the sidewalls, whether or not it's the interior ceilings, cabinets, countertops, flooring, then the guts of the unit, the plumbing, the electrical, the holding tanks, you know, just throughout the entire unit. If you can see it and touch it, we're involved with it. Andy mentioned this a couple times. We're really excited about the acquisition of RecPro in September. You know, I talked a little bit about our content per unit being at $4,800 on 313,000 units.
Well, in the aftermarket, there's 10 million - 11 million RVs out there on the road. Prior to our acquisition of RecPro, at Patrick, we really didn't have a great platform or an avenue to be able to service all of those products. If you go to the previous page, I mean, we have all of these SKUs without a really good platform to get those to the end consumers that are taking care of these 11 million RVs out there. You talk about, you know, addressable market, it's a big piece out there for us to go after. It's allowing us to expand our product offering into that aftermarket. We're controlling our brands much better on e-commerce just in the first three months.
We've found a lot of places where we can control our brand, control our margin, pick up that direct-to-consumer margin versus giving that up to distribution and other e-commerce platforms out there. We're also taking some of the RecPro product, and we're introducing it to our OEMs, air conditioners, furniture. It's really kind of a great combination with this acquisition. Then we're optimizing the platform to be able to add on after we continue. Right now we're adding on a lot of our RV products into the platform. Next step is to start adding the marine products into that platform. We've got teams working on that right now, creating content and putting that in the right spot. You talk about competitive advantages in the RV business, relationships.
If anybody knows anything about the RV business, it's all about relationships. I've been in this industry for 31 years. All of our teams, you know, our team leaders, 15, 20, 25 + years in the industry, know these customers really better than anybody else. That's really helped us grow the business. It established relationships with the new customers in the space as well as the existing customers.
The experienced and seasoned team, you know, if you, if you talk about the runway where we are acquiring businesses in the RV space from right about 2010 - 2016, we picked up a ton of experience in the industry, whether it's in specific product categories and a lot of those owners and team members that were running those businesses when we acquired them are now our vice presidents. It's pretty amazing. Then our Patrick Studio, if you ever get to Elkhart, our Patrick Studio, we've just done a nice refresh on it. We have an RV in there. We've got a boat in there. Our teams also, we put our whole RV, I'm gonna say our RV executive team there. We have our operations there. We have our sales.
We have our advanced product group there, we have our designers. What we're doing is we're bringing customers through there on a regular basis, we're designing and developing their units from the start all the way up to the finished product. With that, appreciate your time today. I'm sure we're gonna be asking questions and answers later, any questions you have for us later, I'd be glad to answer them. With that, I'm gonna hand it over to our President of our marine division, Rick Runger, to talk more about the marine business.
Thank you, Jeff. Everybody hear me okay? Is the mic on? There we go. Good. I appreciate the opportunity to be here this morning and really look forward to sharing a little bit of vision on what we're doing in the marine space of our business. It's a business that I'm very passionate about, and that starts with really a 40+ year career in the marine industry. When I look back at my career, I've done everything from propulsion to boats to components to parts and accessories. I've really covered the gamut in leadership positions in the marine industry for a long period of time. Prior to joining Patrick 6.5 years ago, I had started and partnered with a private equity group about 20 years ago.
We were doing the same thing that we're doing today at Patrick. We were looking at consolidating and rolling up component businesses. Over that period of time, we built a very successful business. We weathered some storms. So, you know, I pretty much have seen it all in terms of the marine industry and some of the cycles that we go through. That being said, we sold the business to Andy in 2018. About that time, I was about ready to move on. I think I told Andy at the time that, you know, I probably had about six months left in the tank and was gonna move on.
I can't tell you at that time how energizing it was for me, having stepped back for a couple of months and really looking and getting to know the team at Patrick, understanding the vision, the strategy that was in place, knowing that they were gonna be very aggressive from an acquisitive standpoint, and I'll show you the history there. I really got energized and excited. Here I am, fast-forward almost seven years later, and I think I'm working harder today than I have in a long time. It's been a heck of a ride. It's been a lot of fun. The vision that's in place here at Patrick, I think, is second to none in terms of what we're trying to do and what we're trying to drive in the industry.
Wanted to start off, and this slide really represents talking about, you know, kinda where we've been. When you think about the pandemic, I think you saw some of the charts where all of a sudden, when the pandemic hit, people wanted to do things outdoors and, you know, started buying boats and RVs, and so you saw a huge spike during the pandemic. At a time when we were pretty engaged in acquisitions, the business was really growing, and so we were really focused on that growth, and we were focused on taking care of our customers out there. Kinda during the last 18 months is we've kinda seen this cycle turn on us and turn down. You know, we started to focus on how do we optimize the group and collection of businesses that we have.
We've spent a lot of time the last 18 months optimizing how we look and what our business looks like today. Along with that, we've also invested in developing innovative products. Andy mentioned Advanced Product Group. You're gonna hear more about that. We think we've got a lot of good things in the works, and we think that, you know, as the business starts to turn with the things that we've done over the last 18 months, we're gonna be in a great position to really accelerate and drive growth as this industry starts to rebound. What do we look like today? Roughly $600 million in revenues on a TTM basis. That accounts for about 16% of the revenue for Patrick Industries.
From 2019 through 2024, about a 13% CAGR in revenue. One thing I wanted to mention on the right-hand side, you can see kind of our peak in 2022 and the dip in the market since then. I think when you look at the number of units dropping down in the 140,000-145,000 range, we've really kinda maintained and held pretty steady and actually grown some on the revenue side. The content per unit is more of an issue relative to a mix. We are very strong in the ski/wake market and in the pontoon market. Those two markets have been affected deeper than the market in general. A mix is impacted our content per unit.
We see that starting to change into this quarter and into the fourth quarter. We've got a pretty good trajectory going forward and starting to make gains on our content per unit. Okay, this is what our portfolio development looked like starting in 2016, as Andy had mentioned, with the acquisition of BH Electronics. Through 2022, 2023, we've acquired 26 different businesses. Today our portfolio consists of about 36 brands. We've really, you know, over a pretty short period of time, really got aggressive in terms of putting this together.
When we think about our capabilities and expertise, I guess the takeaway that I want you to have here is we cover a lot of ground when it comes to putting things on boats, and the next slide even shows that better. Significant list of what we do and how we position ourselves on boats with our customers. We tend to be more highly engineered and in a lot of cases, customized products specific to certain boat models, certain boat customers. We're very good at what we do, and I think, you know, being more specialized and highly engineered is definitely a competitive advantage. I wanted to highlight just a couple of things on this long list here.
A couple of years ago, we started to think about kinda some greenfield opportunities that we looked at out there. One of them was carbon fiber. We launched the carbon fiber business with some expertise that we brought in-house and supported with a lot of the resources that we have. You know, we're trying to be a little bit disruptive in terms of offering things that aren't necessarily. You don't see a lot of carbon fiber on boats today. We're manufacturing components, and it's covering the gamut from saltwater fishing boats up through pontoon boats. We're finding a lot of opportunities and interest in carbon fiber components. The second one, you're gonna hear a lot more about it from Jim Schultz earlier, but we also greenfielded the windshield business.
Windshields have been pretty stale for a long time, we're using technology, using innovation to really go after and capture a big piece of the windshield business. You'll hear more from Jim a little bit later on that. Finally, aftermarket right now, just wanted to make a quick mention there. That accounts for about 8% of our overall business in marine and growing and tremendous focus. Once again, this is a slide that just kind of shows you know, the footprint and, you know, kind of how we position ourselves on boats with the different components that we offer to our customers. You're gonna hear a lot more, and you've heard about full solutions model and us being a full solutions provider.
This, this concept and this company that we have called Marine Concepts is state-of-the-art engineering, design, tooling, mold building capabilities in the marine industry, located in Sarasota, Florida. We also, as part of that operation there, have developed a showroom where we can showcase all of our products with customers. Now, why is that important? When a customer comes in to design a boat, whether he comes in with a design on a napkin or however we want to pursue it, we can take it all the way up with the, with the staff that we have. So at that time, the design phase of a boat and a new boat is the best time to try and spec in components to that boat. You can engineer around different components that you offer.
We take a great deal of pride and effort into working with customers and looking at what opportunities we have. It's not a must deal for a customer. You know, they have preferences, but we wanna showcase what we have. We wanna show them what we can do. We wanna show them how we can integrate. What we do best is a full solution as they're developing their new boats. Another competitive advantage I think that's important for us, and I've always believed this, is our proximity to customers, is, you heard before, we wanna get real sticky with customers. Like RV, marine is a relationship business. Always has been. Hasn't changed a lot in the 40-something years that I've been doing this.
If you look at the map there just quickly, you can see the shaded areas of where the main customer base is in the marine business, and you can see our locations. We're all over it. In fact, in some of our customers, we actually have some of our people embedded in our customers on a daily basis that really makes a difference and really puts us kind of on the leading edge as things are developing, to talk about products and really, you know, be able to talk about the entire Patrick portfolio, as we think about it. Finally, you know, I talked about most of these competitive advantages that I think we have. The one thing I did wanna highlight was the seasoned team that we have.
I just think it's a huge advantage in terms of trying to develop a marine business through acquisition. To me, the biggest part of that is the talent acquisition that you make, along with really good companies that produce really good products out there and the relationships that they bring to it. We've got a fantastic team. A lot of it has come on board through our acquisition process, and I can't be more proud to be associated with the team that we have and the team that we have on the marine side. You're gonna meet more of them here today. The overall support from the whole Patrick team, it's just been a wonderful, great experience for me as you know, I'm kind of towards the end of my career. Anyway.
Just finally, on a TAM basis, we think we've got potentially, 4 x in over our current TAM, as we kind of look over the future and a lot of things that we have going on. Once again, I appreciate your time, as I said, I love talking about the marine business and what we do every day and look forward to further questions as we get into the Q&A. Thank you. At this time, I'd like to introduce Kip Ellis. One thing I love about Kip is he's a real team player. He just ordered a brand-new Malibu ski/wake boat. We appreciate the help, Kip.
Thank you, Rick.
Yep.
Appreciate letting everybody know that. Yeah, I've been a boater. I've had a wake and ski boat for a number of years. I think it's a testament a little bit to the evolution and the innovation in the space. You know, as I've looked at, kind of what's out there with the current models, it's really impressive. Intrigued by that, and it's great to be a part of that. As Rick mentioned, my name's Kip Ellis. I'm President of Patrick's Powersports, Technology and Housing End Markets. I've been with the organization since 2016.
Shortly after joining, I became the Chief Operating Officer of the company, and I served in that role until the first part of this year, where we shuffled things around a little bit internally and focused our business structurally on an end market basis. I've been in this role since that time. My background prior to that's engineering. I did a little bit of Tier 1 automotive early part of my career. Spent enough time in that and a couple years to realize I didn't want any part of Tier 1 automotive. It's just the lack of the ability to impact dynamically a business and a market.
Jeff talked about relationships, and that's one of the things that in the specialty vehicle space, I've been in that particular specialty vehicle space, including RV and Marine and Powersports since that time, really kind of embraced that connectivity we have with customers and the opportunity to really be dynamic and pivot quickly and adapt. More importantly, as Andy Nemeth talked about, we're all enthusiasts. I'm certainly an enthusiast in every category. I mentioned boating, but snowmobiling, side-by-sides. Anything that's got a throttle, happy to jump on and punch an accelerator pedal. With that, I'm excited to talk about Powersports.
We're really excited with this being the third leg of our outdoor enthusiast stool, something that we foundationally jumped into in earnest this year with the acquisition of Sportech. We think about this in terms of being outdoor enthusiasts and seeing consumers that are out and about, that are RVing or boating, hunting, hiking, whatever the case may be, whatever doing outdoor activities. A lot of times you're gonna find pieces from these different end markets that we serve. These are discretionary, larger ticket type purchases, and these consumers are enthusiasts. They're really looking at differentiation and innovation. The opportunity to participate in this for myself personally, is something that's incredibly exciting.
It also really seems to align well with the evolution and maturation of our company as we've moved from, Andy talked about being a building component, a component supplier to the marketplace. Today, we're a solutions provider. The Powersports market inherently is looking for solutions. It's a very fragmented supply base. They're engineering-driven customers of ours by and large. It fits really well with where we are at this point as an organization. Again, tons of runway we see from an organic growth standpoint, and I'll get into that as well as on the M&A front. Just talking about our backdrop in this. We talked about this launching of the Powersports platform this year.
Sportech is a foundational piece that does cabin closures for the UTV space predominantly, but also the sport and rec side of side-by-sides, but predominantly UTV. In earnest, we kind of stuck our toe in the water back in 2016 with the acquisition of an organization called The Progressive Group, which is a national rep and warehouse distribution organization that is serving the aftermarket for upfitters that are doing a lot, predominantly in the audio and electronic space. It gave us a little bit of a touch. A lot of these dealers are crossovers, whether it be they are involved in RVs, Marine, and the like. They are the folks that customers go to to think about, okay, what do I want to do on an aftermarket basis? That gave us a little touch of that.
We pushed that more RV/Marine as we kind of got that business rolling. 2022, again, solutions. Big brand, Rockford Fosgate. The acquisition, Rockford Fosgate has been kind of the off-road, dirt-oriented element of automotive with Jeeps and Broncos and the like. Harleys, now Polaris, BRP. We've pushed them effectively into the RV space. Really premium audio solutions they're now providing the RV market as well as the Marine market. We've got Wet Sounds, which is another premium brand in the space, which we've been successful in also looking across and over. A nice opportunity to get touches with those customers.
With Sportech coming in being a foundational presence, I'll show you a little bit more about their product offering, but we have the opportunity where we touch effectively every manufacturer and customer in that space with a direct relationship. Trailing 12 months through Q3, it's about a $300 million segment of the business. We're gonna annualize a little short of $400 million for a full year. Keeping in mind we acquired Sportech earlier in the year. It's about 8% of our revenue on a trailing 12-month basis. You know, we've seen good growth predominantly through M&A. We think about where we can take this, the total addressable market. We're comfortable looking at the M&A pipeline organically, where things are going.
A $2 billion market that we see out there, an opportunity for us to jump on. From a capabilities and expertise, we think about this, given everything we've built out in the RV/Marine space organically, our ability to work with metals, tube bending, fiberglass, thermal forming, thinking about those capabilities and then with what we've got with Sportech with the cabin closures. They're doing the door systems, the windshields, the wipers, the roof, the back glass, the mirrors. There's a lot there in terms of crossover in the way of manufacturing capabilities. We're excited about the thoughts of where we continue to work with these customers and where they wanna take these.
They think about somebody getting out of their dressed up truck, pickup or Jeep or whatever the case may be, in which they're towing these units to the playground. Those creature comforts that they see within their automotive vehicles, they want to see in these units. We're at the forefront of working with customers on that. That capability, both from a manufacturing standpoint, but from an engineering connectivity standpoint, is really a differentiator for us. I talked about some of their products just to kind of point these out. Powersports can mean a lot of different things, and we're active in a lot of different spaces. The UTV space within side-by-sides is the largest segment. It's where Sportech has their heaviest presence.
We certainly are involved with other aspects of the market on a smaller scale. Harley-Davidson uses Rockford Fosgate audio exclusively, and Anna will mention that in our marketing presentation about how that brand's leveraged. Good relationships, good connectivity, really the opportunity to kind of take ownership in some form of the cab segment of UTV is really what Sportech's allowed us to do, and as we think about incorporating audio and our other capabilities. Heating and air conditioning is a driver for this. It's a differentiator. The mix continues to grow, but where consumers are looking for that opportunity to put heat and air conditioning in a unit, and you gotta enclose a cab in order to do that. I've talked about some of the innovation. We see continued growth potential.
We think about within those cabs, the dash systems, controls, the seatings, as we've got into this, we've talked to these customers in depth about what do they want to do over the course of the next three to four years? What is it from an ownership standpoint we can take to help them really focus on producing units? We see RV can flex incredibly nimble. Marine's a little slower to flex. Powersports to volume trends is the slowest of the three in terms of their ability to flex when volume shifts so quickly. That capability and mindset that we bring to the table with our other businesses is something we're looking to bring to the table and show these customers. A couple wins noted there. One of them is an audio integrated roof.
You'll see we've got a UTV down on the plaza that shows that, with about 20 different speakers in it. It's pretty remarkable. Competitive advantages, just to summarize, customer relationships, good crossover connectivity. The big players in this space tend to be a marine, you know, business as well, as we think about BRP, you know, in the marine space, Polaris with Bennington. We see good crossover there. We're developing the customer relations at the depth. We've got a good step in with that. Really, innovation in advanced products is gonna be the lifeblood for this. We see continued opportunity, continued hunger and thirst for innovation from these OEMs.
We're excited to be a trusted partner in bringing those opportunities to the table, as well as continuing with our M&A mindset and looking at providing the opportunity for these folks to kinda get the supply base maybe a little better under control. $2 billion, as I mentioned earlier. One of the other things I talk about, we are a data-driven organization. You see a bunch in here about content per unit that we've got on an RV or on a boat. We're digging into the data in the powersports space. The data's probably the most difficult to come across of the three markets. We're beginning to make some inroads, but it's fragmented. Some people don't register them in that.
There's a little bit of differentiation you're seeing here, and we certainly note that. We're beginning to make some inroads, and we'll have a little better way of capturing the successes that we're taking on here. With that, I'm going to pivot to our housing end market and just give a quick walkthrough of a similar form of what's going on in the housing space. We're excited about that. Andy talked about affordable housing in this country, the pent-up demand for affordable housing. It's not lost on anybody in this room, I'm sure. The availability of those homes, the inventory that's in space.
We're about 50% manufactured housing and about 50% site-built, and the site-built can be single-family or multifamily, but all within the affordable housing realm. A lot of the finishings that go into a manufactured home are similar to what you're gonna see in some of the site-built homes now. Certainly different paths to market in terms of how we're thinking about delivering product, but we'll get into a little more detail on that. The mystery of what it is that, you know, how the stars need to align for manufactured housing to really take off, given the demands, is something that, you know, we've wrestled with over the last 10 - 15 years.
One of the things we're certainly seeing now, the refinement in the manufactured homes that are being produced, is creating a more attractive product for folks. Today, the backlogs are strong, the demand is strong. The rate environment would lead you to believe that MH has got a good runway ahead of it. We'll see. We'll tell you that we're entrenched, and we'll continue to grow with it. We'll talk about why that business is a good fit for us, as well as what we do on the, on the residential, site build side. About $1.1 billion-$1.2 billion, 31% of our revenue, currently, with strong CAGR. We're not M&A focused within the housing segment. As Andy had mentioned, this is really an organic push.
We've got the customer touches, we've got the geographical footprint to allow us to sit and be in front of these customers on a daily basis. The fulfillment piece and allowing them to keep their inventories lean through that network allows us to do that. Continued steady growth on a content per unit basis. We use MH here as a proxy for that, and good growth from a housing revenue in addition to the content per unit that is going on as the market's bounced along a little bit here. Capabilities and expertise. This is a little bit more of a distribution-oriented business for us. Certainly a solid manufacturing presence as well, and I'll talk about some of the crossovers in RV here in a little bit.
Really, you know, finishing touches, you know, a lot of similar type product offerings that we have in the RV space and capabilities. We have some facilities that kind of cross over both, is kind of where we're focused and thinking about what is it that we can kind of pump into this infrastructure that we have to serve these customers. We've got really strong vendor partnerships I'll talk through here in a bit. Just kind of a quick rundown of what you see from a capabilities and expertise standpoint. From a component standpoint, in more detail, you know, Jeff talked about everything you touch, within an RV or, see, feel, what have you. In a lot of ways, that's the push in what we're trying to do from an MH standpoint.
A lot of those capabilities we've got on the manufacturing side, again, from the RV standpoint, we carry over to the housing sector. Long-standing presence in this market. It's Patrick's earliest presence from the beginning of Patrick's founding. We've got strong long-term relationships also with all the key players. The Clayton Homes, the Skyline Champions, the Cavcos in the MH space, the Lennars, the KB Homes on the site-built homes. We do some big box work in some key geographies. We've got solid surface countertops, granite, quartz countertop producers in the Denver area and up in the Northwest, in Seattle, and we're in Southern California and Arizona.
Bigger markets that are growing quickly is kind of where we're focused on a, on an aftermarket refurb basis, if you will, with the Home Depots and that. That's how that kind of plugs in addition to our national home builders, where we do a lot through our businesses that are based out towards the western part of the country. Long-standing vendor partnerships, Rheem and Carrier, a couple I'm drawing attention to here. The Department of Energy is providing credits to home builders for energy-efficient appliances. We're at the forefront of that and working with these vendor partners to bring that into the manufactured housing realm. Nice high-ticket pieces for us.
Good pull-through given some of the incentives that are out there for these home builders to include them, and certainly a differentiator as they start to talk about the benefits of their product versus some of the others that are out there. USG is one I certainly want to mention as well, United States Gypsum. We are a long-standing partner of theirs. Been a terrific partner to work with in serving the MH market. excited about that position we carry as well. Lean fixed cost model and scalable operational structure. This is one of kind of the, you know, the diversity element and the relative stability that we've seen in our housing business this year in particular is something that has served the organization well.
These are lean models. Not got a little bit of maintenance CapEx, but not much really in terms of, you know, expansive capital for equipment and what have you or facilities. Then, you know, we're very lean kind of thinking. We're more bolt-on oriented from an M&A standpoint with these businesses. So not a ton of activity in that regard, but high variable cost businesses gives us the opportunity to flex and to generate a good deal of free cash flow for us to help kind of deploy, you know, kind of along the lines of what you'll see, what Andy talked about a little bit and what the other Andy will talk about in terms of our deployment model. That's a key piece of this.
The other side of it is the capacity utilization opportunity that we have with our RV facilities. 40% of our Patrick businesses sell into both RV and housing. You think about an RV as a, in the simplest terms, a box on a frame going down a production line. A manufactured home is the same thing. As we think about fulfillment and working with them, the ability for us to use capacity in our facilities to serve both markets and pivot in a dynamic, quick manner, which our businesses are expert doing, really serves the organization well and gives us a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Last slide here, competitive advantages. I talked about the long-standing customer relationships. Just like Rick, I wanna talk about the experienced and seasoned team.
These folks are passionate. You don't hear a lot about housing from Patrick Industries, these are some of the longest standing team members we've got within our organization. We've got people that have had, you know, as much as 40 and 50-year track records that are still working within our organization serving the housing market. They're enthusiasts. They're passionate as well. It's something that I wanna recognize and certainly speak to. The other piece is just the geography, Rick touched on it on the marine side. We have an infrastructure that we can pump products in, continue to think about organically growing. You know, it's relatively inexpensive for us to think about, okay, another item on a truck that's already going somewhere.
Gives us a key competitive advantage, and we see an opportunity to, you know, nearly double, you know, given the expertise and capabilities we got now, double our current, our content from a total addressable market standpoint. With that, I believe we're gonna slide in some Q&A. Steve, I think you're gonna facilitate.
Okay. We'll do about 10 minutes of Q&A, and we'll take about a 10-minute break. I'll have Meg and Amelia grab the mics, bring them over to you so we can ask 1 question and then give the mic back. That would be great. Just identify yourself and your firm, and we can start, go to Dan first.
Morning. Daniel Moore. What's up?
Hello.
Daniel Moore, CJS Securities. Thanks very much for taking questions and doing the overview today. In terms of where we're going from here, I think you've been targeting $400 million-$500 million annualized, you know, acquisitions potentially. Obviously, some years will be higher, some years will be lower. Just given your enhanced scale, talk about, you know, maybe on the top end size, can you go up to, you know, $1 billion at this point or higher? How high would you lever for the right opportunity?
Sure. I'll talk a little bit about deal pipeline in a little bit, but we've got more deal pipeline potential than we have capital to deploy over the next five years. As it relates to kind of deal size, I will tell you today that the $50 million-$75 million deal is kind of in our sweet spot. I'm talking about kind of a one-to-one revenue to purchase price, if you just wanna think about it based on accretive margins and how we think about the model. Probably not likely to do a $1 billion deal. I would tell you $350 million-$450 million is kind of the top end on where we see things today. Would we flex that a little bit for the right deal? Yeah, we would. There is some deal potential out there, you know, that exceeds that.
We're gonna stay fairly disciplined to the model. Like I said, maintain the two and a quarter to 2.5x leverage. We will flex that up to 3 x if we need to, maybe a little 3.1x, you know. The intent would be that we bring that back down to the 2x and a quarter to 2x within two to three quarters. We would immediately shift and pivot and focus to get back to that leverage fairway is how we think about it. On the larger end of the deal-
$300 million-$400 million is top end of how we think about it, just in general.
In terms of the opportunity funnel, is there a rank ordering of those outdoor enthusiast markets where you see, you know, most opportunity down to maybe less exciting near-term things?
The largest piece of the pipeline today is gonna be in marine and powersports, so that's where the majority of the candidates are at. We still have RV runway, though, so in each of our markets, we've identified that pipeline. I would tell you that's probably our focus, you know, as it relates to prioritization. That being said, because of the pipeline flow that we have, we have the ability to prioritize across those three platforms based on return models and what makes the most sense at the right time. Just in general, if you were asking, probably powersports and marine is where we look to go first.
Craig next.
Good morning. Thanks. This is Craig Kennison from Baird. Question on RecPro. How do you avoid potential channel conflicts with any of your OEM partners as you try to expand in an aftermarket they may see as their opportunity as well?
Jeff, why don't you do that?
Yeah. I mean, really, I would tell you that on the aftermarket side, where we see our OEMs kind of pushing product through is into the dealers. RecPro, their primary function is direct to consumer, right? We're using the e-commerce platform that we have out there to take the products, you know, from Patrick, whether it's the RV, marine, and get that directly to the consumer. Where we don't see a lot of that activity where our customers are trying to work right direct with the consumer, they're going through their dealer network. We still are going to use that dealer network as well, we're gonna be very careful to make sure that we're working with our OEM partners, that we're not stepping on them when we're going into that dealer channel. It's a little bit different.
What I will tell you is that we've been very careful to look at all the distribution of our product out there, and we're finding out that, you know, a lot of distributors will take our products, and they'll get that direct-to-consumer margin, and really, they're not doing anything. We're gonna try to clean that up and clean our brands up on the e-commerce side.
We'll go to Scott.
Scott Stember with ROTH MKM. Thanks for taking my questions. On the aftermarket side, could you just give us an indication of how much higher aftermarket margins are versus OEM? Where do you see, I guess, break-fix versus attachment rate business over the five-year period that you talked about? I think you said 10%-15% of sales or 15%+ percent. Where do you see that at that point?
Sure. On the margin profile, RecPro is an accretive margin business for us, both at the gross and operating margin level, is what I can tell you. We do see If you're just gonna size it up against OE, I'd tell you that it's gonna be a certainly a higher gross margin, and accretive op margin, but not as much. There's a lot of SG&A OpEx that go into the aftermarket. That's where you see the most of the expenses, and that's where you're gonna see it in our P&L is below the line or below the gross margin line is you'll see it. We'll see a little bit of uptick in OpEx because of aftermarket.
As far as attachment versus break-fix, a lot more attachment versus break-fix at this point is what I'd say. As we again look across the platform and the opportunity that's there, that should equalize out over that period of time to be about 50/50 is what I could tell you today and based on our kind of vision and where we see it going. We're still identifying those opportunities again that we have in our existing organic products.
Go to Tristan first.
Tristan Thomas-Martin, BMO Capital Markets. Can you just bridge some of your content TAM forecasts? How do we get there from where you are now?
How do we get to the TAM?
Like, is it product? Are you introducing new products? Is it M&A?
It's gonna be a combination of the organic growth, the targets that we put out there. Again, we target our businesses with 2%-3% organic on an annual basis, and then the rest is going to be M&A to deliver upon that. Just to jump a little bit into M&A. You know, we've got three or four or five competitors in every product category in each of our outdoor enthusiast markets. Our acquisition model is fairly simple in that we look to enter a space, a product category with meaningful market share, and then in its simplest form from a consolidation strategy, we look to buy four of the five competitors and leave one out there. We don't wanna be.
Our OEM partners do not like to be single-sourced. Our goal is not to take away the market from them. We want competition in the marketplace. We just expect to be the best at it and be able to leverage it. We're at various stages of that evolution in various product categories. In certain product categories, we might have 80% of the market today. In other product categories, we might be at 20%. That TAM has a combination of both that organic and strategic component to it.
Just one thing I'd add to that is our teams today have done a really deep dive across all of our current product line categories to understand our market share and content per unit by customer and been able to take all that data and fold that into a really good understanding of where we think our targets are and how we target our business out, and that gives us a good idea of what that TAM is.
Joe?
Thanks. Good morning. Joe Altobello, Raymond James. I wanted to talk about some of the synergies that you guys see between your different end markets. I know housing and RVs is fairly obvious, but maybe help us understand where marine and powersports play either on CPU or maybe even on cost synergies. Thanks.
Certainly. On powersports today, from a manufacturing perspective, we do, in our existing businesses, a lot of the production opportunities that are in Sportech, LLC today. We do rotomold and thermoforming, acrylics, tube bending, harnesses and panels. We do that across our platform today. From a best practices perspective and synergy opportunity across our other platforms, there's a ton of opportunity there. As it relates to product opportunities, there's significant opportunity as well. A simple example is the Sportech, LLC product, which is a cabin closure, as Kip mentioned, over the ATVs and UTVs. We do audio systems, so we can do a roof, we can incorporate a panel, we can incorporate a wire harness into that.
We can incorporate actuators and things like that can do some moving parts inside there to be able to bring a more solutions model together. We can incorporate our existing products into the aftermarket platform or I'm sorry, the powersports platform that we have today. As well, we can go vice versa. Some of our customers have even asked us to bring RecPro, I'm sorry, I get a little bit there tied up, Sportech, LLC to them as an alternative or option when we're quoting other marine products today.
Because of Sportech, LLC's capabilities in the thermoforming and rotomolding opportunity, they've said, "Hey, we'd like to see what Sportech, LLC brings, as well as your existing brands that bring those to life." A lot of crossover, marine and powersports in particular. I'd also tell you, even our capabilities in marine can cross over into the RV market today, especially with some of the things that we're doing from a billet manufacturing perspective and fabrication perspective, audio, like I mentioned. SeaDek is a well-known product that we have today that's a non-skid flooring that has applications in just about any market that we're taking into RVs for RV steps and RV flooring. A lot of crossover between the outdoor enthusiast markets.
Understand, input cost is certainly another key aspect of that. We've got these teams, you know, talking on what we term kind of early stages non-strategic basis to say, "Hey, where can we take the opportunity where we're buying sheet plastic and resins and fiberglass and what have you?" Think about it's less of an end market, you know, focused effort as much as something can cross over each of them. Sportech, LLC's kind of been stepping into that. We've made a point of trying to get them established and exposed to the rest of our businesses where they've got light components that are coming in, and then they've got certainly a network.
We've got network across Asia from a sourcing standpoint as well, where these teams are working together to leverage that and be effective.
Time for maybe one more.
All right.
Alex Perry, in the front here. Yeah.
Did he get mic?
Oh, there's Mike.
Hi, Alex Perry from Bank of America. My question was why downsize the housing penetration as a percent of the total business going forward? Is it just that you find the RV, marine, and powersports end markets to be more attractive end markets from an organic basis? Is it due to the, you know, acquisition opportunities in those outdoor enthusiast end markets? Thanks.
It's the acquisition opportunities in the outdoor enthusiast. We're not downsizing housing. It's a more commoditized product. It's higher distribution content for us. It's a super leverageable business that generates a ton of cash flow that we're gonna redeploy into the enthusiast market. From a strategic perspective, I'll just tell you, the candidates out there for M&A are not margin accretive, and it's one of the boxes that we look to check is margin accretion. Strength of teams and all this other stuff, we'll go into it. You're talking 5% or 7% EBITDA businesses, right? Today, that's not something that we're real attracted to when we can look at 13%-15% EBITDA businesses in the other outdoor enthusiast space is kinda how we think about it in simplest form.
We'll go, one more. Sorry. Mike.
Mike Swartz, Truist Securities. That was a perfect lead-in to my question, which is, you know, over this three to five-year planning horizon, you're talking about your enthusiast end market mix picking up, your aftermarket mix. What are the implications on margins, you know, if you, if you achieve those targets, you know, within that timeframe?
We're gonna show you what that trajectory looks like at certain volumes here in an upcoming slide that Andrew's gonna talk about, Mike. We look to continue to deliver accretive margins above and beyond our historical high margin that we achieve from an operating margin perspective. We'll show you a grid here just in a little bit later in the Andy section, if that's okay.
All right, we'll take a break now for about 10 minutes, and then we'll resume.
Good job.
Thanks.
Good job, partner.
Thanks, Jeff.
You good? I didn't sign the talent.
Yeah, yeah. Why don't you guys, you know, go for the next Q&A.
[Music]
I have to speculate that God himself did make us into corresponding shapes like puzzle pieces on the way. True, it may seem like a stretch but it's thoughts like this that catch my troubled head when you're away. When I am missing you this way. You are out there on the road for several weeks it shows and when you scan the radio I hope this song will guide you home. They will see us waving from the side today. On this highway. Everything is going to be all right. Come what may. Stay with me. I tried my best to leave this all on your machine but the persistent beat it sounded thin upon listening. That frankly will not fly. You will hear its highest highs and lowest lows with the windows down on this blue sky. They will see us waving from the side today.
On this highway. Everything is going to be all right. Come what may. Stay with me. They will see us waving from the side today. On this highway. Everything is going to be all right. Come what may. Stay with me.
If you love some girl, better tell them what they hear. They just may run away from you. You'll never know quite when. Well, then again you just keep saying, "Well, how long of time is left for you?" I've had the highest mountain. I've had the deepest river. You can have it all, but now keep moving. Take it in, but don't look down. 'Cause I'm on top of the world, 'ey. I'm on top of the world, 'ey. Waiting on this for a while now. Paying my dues to the dirt. I've been waiting to smile, 'ey. Been holding it in for a while. Take it with me if I can. Been dreaming of this since a child. I'm on top of the world. I've tried to cut these corners. Try to take the easy way out. I kept on falling short of something.
I could've gave up then, but then again I couldn't have 'cause I've traveled all this way for something. Take it in, but don't look down. 'Cause I'm on top of the world, 'ey. I'm on top of the world, 'ey. Waiting on this for a while now. Paying my dues to the dirt. I've been waiting to smile, 'ey. Been holding it in for a while, 'ey. Take it with me if I can. Been dreaming of this since a child. I'm on top of the world. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh. 'Cause I'm on top of the world, 'ey. I'm on top of the world, 'ey. Waiting on this for a while now. Paying my dues to the dirt. I've been waiting to smile, 'ey. Been holding it in for a while, 'ey. Take it with me if I can. Been dreaming of this since a child. I know it's hard when you're falling down. It's a long way up when you mess around. Get up now. Get up. Get up now. I know it's hard when you're falling down. It's a long way up when you mess around. Get up now. Get up. Get up now. 'Cause I'm on top of the world, 'ey. I'm on top of the world, 'ey. Waiting on this for a while now. Paying my dues to the dirt. I've been waiting to smile, 'ey. Been holding it in for a while, 'ey. Take it with me if I can.
We're gonna get started with the second half here. Thanks, Meg. If you guys can take your seats, we'll get going here. As we kick off the second half, I'll just give you a quick refresher on who we're gonna bring up. We have Hugo Gonzalez, our Chief Operating Officer, Jim Schultz, who is heading up the APG. Anna Parker, who will talk about marketing and empowering enthusiasts. Todd will talk about our BETTER Together culture, followed by Andrew Roeder who will cover financials. Andy will give a quick recap. Just a quick intro on Hugo. Hugo's been with Patrick Industries, I think almost as long as Andy Nemeth, about 18 years.
You know, started on the floor of the facilities and he's worked his way up to Chief Operating Officer level over the years. With that, I'll turn it over to Hugo. Yep. Just need the radio off. This is you. You requested this music, Hugo? Yeah.
Right.
Yeah. Okay. Okay.
[Music]
There we go. Good morning, everyone. My name is Hugo Gonzalez. Thank you for the opportunity to be here with you guys. I function as a Chief Operating Officer, as Steve mentioned, and I am gonna have an opportunity to try to explain a little bit about our operational structure, how it works, how we get those synergies, as Steve and Andy were talking, when Joe was asking about that and how we create those bridges. We're gonna talk about the simplicity of our scorecard and that fairway that we allow the brands and entrepreneurs that come to join Patrick to perform with. And at the end, I'm gonna talk a little bit about our capital deployment and how we utilize it to not only maintain but enhance our operations.
For me, everything started 18 years ago, maybe not as many as Andy. I started at shop floor. Didn't know anything about manufacturing when I started. It's been a great ride. Learned a lot from a lot of people. We have a fantastic team, and I was able to pick up a lot of what we do and how we do it. I came through Adorn, as Andy mentioned, one of largest acquisition merger at that time, and I was in the lamination facility where I started. Right away, when we were acquired, I noticed how easy it was to work because Patrick didn't interfere on anything that we were doing. They just allowed us to perform.
Right away, I noticed how our executive team started walking through the facilities and just giving us guidance. Correct? As I was participating in some of the walkthroughs and giving us guidance on where we were heading, what were some of the options for improvements, and kept guiding us through that. The other thing that I noticed right away, it was the capital deployed into Adorn. That probably helped us accelerate our growth right away. I became the manager of that facility. Now as a consolidated at Patrick, we're the largest laminator in the United States, which is usually not known, but we produce the most laminated panels on the entire country through different facilities, not just Adorn, but through some of our acquisitions. I noticed through the reviews, the financial reviews, again, that guidance without being forceful.
Correct? Just aligning to those objectives that the organization had for us to perform so the organization delivered results. Eventually became Director, Vice President, and now the Chief Operating Officer, it's extremely excited to now be part of creating those boundaries. Correct? The fairway where our entrepreneurs work. More importantly, as you guys were discussing during the Q&A, create the bridges in between our facilities, not just in one end market, but across all the markets and working with all of our facilities to be able to, you know, deliver better performance. I have the fun to try to explain what is our operational structure. Correct? Very decentralized, but how do we make it all work together? I wouldn't be fair if I don't start with safety. Correct? Operations guy, right away.
The most important part that you need to do is to create the right environment for your teams to perform. Correct? Safety is always gonna be a priority for us. We are gonna be creating an environment where we empower the experts, those brand owners, those brand experts in their different commodities to continue exploring and innovating for the customers. They come and bring the exact same passion that they had when they were the owners of that organization to Patrick, and it is exponential. As you guys have heard through the different presentations of the end markets, it's a very agile model and extremely cost-efficient. Another competitive advantage as the presidents of the end markets were discussing markets that go up and down cyclically. Correct?
We can go up, and we demonstrated that when RV industry went from that 400,000 unit to a 700,000 unit pace that we had during COVID, or marine, also catapulting 30%, 40% production during COVID, and then reducing it by 50% and gaining market share through that. Correct? Everything is Empowered by Patrick. You are gonna hear Anna l ater on talking about our marketing strategy, but it is really not just a marketing strategy, is how we create a foundation for our operation teams to perform even better than what they did before coming to Patrick as a strong, brands that they were before. Who are we? We are people, correct? That's the backbone of who we are.
10,000 employees, over 6,000 of them direct labor employees, you know, teammates that work and collaborate to make all this happen. We have talked about our 86 brands, and we do it across over 250 facilities, most of them are manufacturing sites and then the distribution centers. We have a vast network of vehicles that are ready to deliver anywhere in the country, in the pockets where all of our OEMs and customers are. I always think about our customer service and the 1,000 vehicles come handy, correct? Who do they call when they need something? They call Patrick. They know our network.
Even if we're not selling them that product, they know that we have it, they're going to call one of our brands, and we're going to get them connected, and we can deliver. It couldn't happen without a foundational culture, correct? You guys are going to hear from Todd Gongwer later on in our BETTER Together culture. The culture that allows to set a foundation for all of our brands to thrive in their own independent cultures across Patrick. How do we measure performance? Simple. Few key metrics, scorecard, we call it, you know, that we give every year. Part of the scorecard is 3% market growth every year for all of our brands, and then we have different operational goals for everybody that align with our organizational strategic objectives.
As long as you align through those metrics, there is that fair way to play and continue innovating as a entrepreneur and brand owner, that many of our facility directors were. Again, safety, correct. Investment and programs, capital deployment. We have decreased 53% of our severity rate this year and 13% of our lost time cases. In essence, a focus on decreasing the severity of an injury. Not only focusing on decreasing the injuries, but investing into our teams and our equipment and facilities to decrease that severity of an injury. Hold on a second here. Let's try number two. There you go. Number two works.
I wanna highlight about our auto-automation and the full solutions model is part of our investment and how we deploy capital, process improvement and harnessing robotics. I'm gonna try to speed these up. I'm gonna talk about three different of our brands, just to highlight some of what we do when we deploy capital. As Andy Nemeth and Andrew Roeder will mention later, part of our capital deployment, about a third of what we do, is investing back in the business, infrastructure and everything, maintenance, facilities, equipment. We develop solutions for our customers, and we're gonna look at some of the robotics and automation that we do. Gravure Ink is the leading PVC rotary gravure printer of the industry.
All the decorative prints of the units inside are made, not all of them, the largest portion from Gravure. The customers wanted to get a solution to all of the wood grains that usually came from overseas, tying a lot of cash and with long lead times, 12 to 18 weeks. Gravure Ink, with their experience in designs, step up to the picture with Patrick's capital and invested in a state-of-the-art machine that now is producing those products in our backyard, right there near Elkhart. Another example is Frontline. Frontline is a top tub and shower manufacturer in the region, all that Midwest, Northern region.
They, through an acquisition that we had, they look at a monorail system that from handling all these tubs manually, applying gel, fiberglass, to an automated monorail system that increased productivity, efficiency, safety, and decreased 33% our labor need on that particular facility, increasing their capacity, and they are selling even in and further regions. North American Forest Products is a softwood mill and a truss manufacturer, they will do all the trusses for the RV, for the roofs and ceilings, and they also go into the manufactured housing. They completely redefined how to manufacture this process through, again, another capital deployment. What used to be completely manual, jigs, where you need to put all these trusses for bending them and doing them after they mill all the softwoods, now is completely automated.
Nobody touches the product from start to finish. It's producing the most trusses for the industry. 15 x faster, safe and efficient. Again, we continue focusing on all that capital deployment, but a lot of what we do, we do it in trying to enhance that full solution model. Our entrepreneurs kind of get us there through extensions of our products, their own innovations. Through acquisitions, we create certain innovations. The focus started a couple to a few years ago. Again, you will meet Jim Schultz here in a second, founder of Geremarie, one of the most automated facilities in the U.S. that is leading our advanced product group.
Our advanced product group is focusing on what is next that is going to disrupt our industries on top of some of the creations. Jim is going to tell you how we're transforming the industry one solution at a time. Jim.
Good morning. Everyone can hear me? Good morning. My name is Jim Schultz, VP of operations for Patrick. We're gonna talk about the advanced product group here this morning. Before we do that, I'm gonna just give you a little bit of background on Geremarie Corporation. Geremarie founded back 27 years ago, and it set off to be a CNC machining manufacturer. What the true core, what was in our wheelhouse was we're not a component provider. We're an innovator. We're a designer. We don't have a catalog of component parts to where you just pick from a catalog and pick. We're gonna work with each and every individual customer out there and build components that fit for their brands.
The video will show you some of the automation. The automation is world-class. People talk about world-class. This is truly state-of-the-art. It's 250,000 square feet, fully robotic. The entire process from material movements to all of the entire manufacturing process to even in the inventory control, anodizing, finishing is 100% automated. Give you an idea of the level of capacity. Geremarie's got about 160 fully automated CNCs throughout. If you were to do the same capacity and did it a more old school as the most of our competitors would, that 160 machines would have to be close to 700-800 machines. We run the entire facility with less than 200 people.
The competitor would need over 600-700 people to do the same thing we can do. Another just fun fact is, we have the capacity to run 84 hours full production, lights out, nobody in the building. It's truly a sight to see. As we were developing, as I was acquired, I was acquired four years ago, our team was rather from Patrick. The one thing we noticed in our model at Geremarie, you know, we really concentrated on what we do, what we did well. It was machining aluminum parts and building assemblies. Really wasn't focused on, you know, what were the other opportunities out there in the marketplace. When we were acquired, we realized the reach that we had, not only through Marine, but through RV, Powersports, the whole gamut.
We've been talking about the full solution, what does that full solution really mean? When we're building that product for that customer, you know, if there's a, you know, if you look at the boat that's out in the parking lot there, you know, you got the tower on the top. Now, that tower we would create, and we would build for that customer, but we wouldn't worry about the console, we wouldn't worry about the audio system, we wouldn't worry about the wiring harness systems. We just worry about what was in our core wheelhouse. With the relationships and the partnership and being part of the Patrick family, now we bring that all as a complete full solution to the customer.
It builds an unbelievable relationship because you're making it easy to do business with us. That was the, that was the basic scope of Geremarie. And really the APG team, the advanced product group, is just an extension of Geremarie to be able to, you know, bring that out to the entire, you know, to the entire family and all the Patrick customers. There's three basic revenue streams that we look at. Customer specific. What we mean by customer specific is we're gonna work with their teams, we're gonna come up with our own ideas, and we're gonna go to our partners, our customers, and work with their DNA. It looks like just an extension of what they do.
When we develop those parts for those customers, they're only their parts. We're not gonna de-develop a part for that OEM and then go sell it to another OEM. It's their DNA, it's their part. It just absolutely strengthens relationships when you have that type of trust with your customers. Disruptive for all. Now, disruptive for all are products that, you know, the design cycle and something like that could be a year, it could be three years or longer. These are truly disruptive products in the marketplace that's gonna change the industry, and we're working on several of them at the moment. The aftermarket solution, you heard about our incentive to push out on growing our aftermarket, and it's the same, you know, working on different creative, innovative innovations that don't exist today.
Now the development cycle. When we say discover, how do we discover? You know, a lot of people would take a group of people, 10, go in a think tank, and we're gonna think of a bunch of ideas. We approach it differently, and as, you know, a great example is last year at the Miami Boat Show, we took the entire advanced product team to Miami. There was about 10 of us. Five full days from the moment the show opened to the moment the show ended, we were there every single minute, and we literally walked the entire booth. The booths, the slips, met with every single OEM and viewed every single boat. Our task, our mission was to come up with three new innovative products for every single OEM, regardless if they were our customer or not.
With that, once come backPower of that is even if they're not our customers, to come up to a potential new customer and come with the engineering and some design, some conceptual ideas of what was possible for their D&A, it just. It's amazing how easy it opens up doors and builds relationships and partnerships. The design, the develop, and the deliver, that's mostly your typical engineering, your engineering cycle. You know, we get into, you know, the conceptual design, the drawings. We get into, you know, obviously all the CAD. We'll develop our prototypes and then we release out to our business units through our release teams. We'll get into some of the products here. GereGlass. Now this is, you know, listening to our customers.
You know, the best opportunities that are out there, just listening. Listening to what people need. What are the challenges our customers are having? I've been in it for 27 years now in the marine industry, and one thing we've always seen throughout was, you look at a boat, you look at a. I don't care if it's a $50,000 boat or a $1 million boat. You look at the integration of windshields on boats. I really think it was something. It was a big opportunity, a big hole in the market, because what was out there, you'd look at the product, and it looked like it was an afterthought. It looked like an. I call it an erector set. You know, you saw the fasteners, you saw the screws. It didn't look integrated. It didn't look engineered.
It looked like a complete afterthought. We set off, and we started GereGlass. GereGlass is up in the Chicago area, 50,000 square feet, and we are truly bringing innovative engineered products that looks like it should bolt on the boat, and we're locking up a lot of IP along with the, you know, with the product. NTXT. This is through the RV group. This was one of the bigger developments that we did. It was a three-year development, and it was again listening to our customers and understanding that there was a capacity issue. There was a quality issue. There was challenges on the production floor on the ease of installation of the previous product. We addressed all of those challenges, and then we introduced NTXT, which has been extremely successful.
Finally, we touched on a little bit. We talked about SeaDek. SeaDek's a flooring company that was very broad in the RV, rather in the marine industry. We cross-branded it, and we got it up into the RV guys, and we're entering in with the new SeaDek flooring, which has been very well received. With that, I will give you Andy. Thank you.
Thanks, Jim.
Thank you. Stay with us. Better? Sorry. Okay.
Okay, we're gonna talk a little bit about M&A. We're gonna talk about why we feel like we are an acquirer of choice in the markets that we play in today, and it's a very thoughtful and dedicated strategy that we've stayed very disciplined to. I believe that we've created a culture in the marketplace as it relates to the acquisition candidates that we look to pursue. It takes a lot of focus, but it's something that I believe we've identified ourselves in the space as an acquirer that the business partners that we look to want to come to Patrick because of the opportunities that exist for them to stay on and run the business. I'll talk about why I think that makes sense. First and foremost, as I mentioned, we're gonna keep a brand-fronted strategy in the marketplace.
We want to go to market through the brands. That's what the customers associate with and the brands and our competitors in that. I talked about four or five competitors, every product category. They live and breathe the brand. Many of them develop the brand from start in their garages. They love to wear the brand jersey. We don't wanna take that away. We just ask that they put a Patrick patch on the sleeve. That's all we want them to do, and we wanna equip them with the resources to be able to be very, very competitive. We are a plug-and-play acquirer. We like successful businesses. We don't like fixer-uppers. We run very lean. We want brand expertise with successful business models, and we also want to fit within our culture and our values, and it's really that simple.
We want enthusiasts in the space, brand entrepreneurs and teams that are passionate about what they do and passionate about wearing that brand jersey. That's something as it relates to our plug-and-play strategy that fits very, very well and makes a compelling landing zone for a lot of these players in the space today. At the end of the day, the value proposition is pretty simple. We allow a successful business entrepreneur to monetize their investment and then stay on and run the business and participate in the profitability of that business on a go-forward basis. A lot of people will say, "Okay, well, you know, what happens? These entrepreneurs get this big pot of money, and then why would they wanna stay? They just wanna leave." That's not what motivates the brands and targets that we're looking at.
These individuals that we look at as part of our diligence process are motivated by all the things that we're motivated by as enthusiasts and taking care of our customers and passionate about their brands, caring about their teams, running a successful business. That's what motivates them and energizes them every day. What I tell you is, yeah, they get a big pot of money at the end of the day at closing, but they basically set that aside, and then it's all about, what am I doing going forward? How am I incentivized? How am I motivated? What is my mission on a go-forward basis? That's how they think about it. That has been successful for us, and it's been something that we again continue to look to replicate. What do we look for? We look for strong management teams.
We look for successful business models. We look for innovative product lines, strong customer relationships, and then accretive margins, okay? It's really that simple. Those are box checks for us when we're looking at any M&A candidate out there. When we look at kind of deal multiples, just so you have a feel, and the standard fairway, and this varies a little bit based on the margin profile, but in the RV space, we're generally gonna pay 5x - 6 x trailing 12 EBITDA, 5x - 6.5 x. Then in the marine and powersports space, we're generally gonna pay 6x- 7.5x . We will flex that depending on, again, the value proposition, the strength of the box checks, the return on investment that we see.
Again, we try to stay disciplined within that fairway and deliver that value proposition. We look for margin accretion. We look for synergies. Within the first 12 to 18 months, we look to get a turn of EBITDA out of these businesses. We absolutely want succession planning. As we're looking at the businesses, again, we're plug-and-play. We're not looking for an owner that's looking to leave a business or just wants to retire and turn it over to us. We wanna ensure that the management team is gonna continue to do what they do best and continue to be successful. We wanna leverage best practices. I'll tell you, it takes six months for these businesses to get comfortable that we're gonna allow them to run.
What we find is we find them turning to us as it relates to the menu offering of opportunities that Patrick can provide and the resources that Patrick can provide. Andrea is going to talk a little bit about that. Again, as I mentioned earlier in the day, don't fix what's not broken. That's harder than you think it is to stay tuned to because you're always looking and noticing things that are different. We really try to stay disciplined to allowing the entrepreneurial spirit to run free. With that, Andrea Williams is going to come up. She is our Vice President of Finance in our Marine Group. Andrea has been a big part of the M&A platform for us for many years in executing on not only diligence, but really working with the teams to ensure an integration.
We work really hard up front for a post-closing opportunity in developing relationships, and Andrea works hand in hand with our acquisition candidates. She's gonna talk a little bit about how that process works.
Thank you. Again, I'm Andrea. I've been given the opportunity over the last 10 years to have a role that's kind of dual purpose, serving on their acquisition strategy and execution of that, and then also our diversification and building in our marine portfolio. One thing that's unusual about Patrick is we don't have a dedicated M&A team that specifically just does M&A. We have a consistent team that does and supports our M&A strategy. Again, I get to be a part of that. Starting with that, I do wanna highlight some of the items that make us differentiate us in our acquisition execution. The first being our dual service due diligence. We diligence transactions with integration in mind.
We're focused on both, obviously, confirmatory diligence actions, but also prepping for onboarding post-closing. Second, each of our deals are assigned a deal champion, there are functional work stream leads that diligence their respective areas, but this due diligence champion aligns all of them and makes sure any risks that are identified or scenario changes or synergies are built in the core financial model that is also reviewed with the executive team. Finally, all of our deals are signed off by the executive team before they close. We review the findings report and the synergy considerations, the onboarding plans, the financial model and targets before we consummate the transaction.
As we advance to the onboarding and synergy stage, we truly allow our BETTER Together mindset to come through with this to drive value and scalability in the organization. From our full solutions model and revenue synergies across markets, across customers, you know, this is where it really starts to take hold. Our strategic sourcing efforts and leveraging our buying powers in certain like products, we're able to do that. Capacity alignment would be the other strategic effort that we do. Having good, better, best products, we're able to utilize capacity and optimize that with our customers' demand. From an administrative and supportive standpoint, obviously, we support with financial reporting efforts, legal efforts, insurance efforts, and what have you for resource and from a savings perspective.
The three main principles that I think are difference makers for how successful our M&A strategy has been is again, the consistent leadership team. As a deal champion myself, I've got to work on all 25 of our marine acquisitions. Not only do I get to meet with the sellers pre-closing and as we're diligencing, but I get to work with them post-closing. Those are the people I work with every single day. I've been able to build trust with those folks and keep that at the forefront of our relationship within the organization. Secondly, the modular playbook that we function off of has been built year after year, and it has a continuous improvement mindset that we're constantly working to make this better, make it more effective.
We don't wanna pore through reams of paper on the diligence perspective. We don't wanna be extremely precise on what we discuss and assess. Delivering on performance expectations. Throughout the transaction and leading up to finalization of it, we spend the time with the target to align on financial and strategic goals. As Hugo mentioned, what the guidelines are gonna look like, just so that we ensure there's no surprises post-closing and that each party feels comfortable as that eases our transition once we close a transaction. How we measure our success of our investment performance with acquisitions. Andy outlined the base multiple in general for you by end market.
From a post-acquisition perspective, within the short term, under three years, we on average have seen a 1x-2x improvement of that multiple since closing. Greater than three years after close, the effective multiple is around 3x lower is our historical average. Obviously, we've got some deals above and below that. Indiana Transport, for example, has more than doubled their revenue since acquisition, they would be above that. Transhield, more recently at the end of 2022, protective covers for the marine industry is what they manufacture and produce. They are on par to hit these averages despite the market cyclicality as we've worked on revenue synergies and cost synergies within that brand. We expect RecPro and Sportech to be in alignment with our historical averages in performance as well.
Wrapping up, M&A has been a core piece of our business and will continue to be a core piece of our business going forward. We believe that empowering these brands and empowering our team has led to financial performance, operational performance, and we're excited to continue to drive that. With that, I'll hand it over to the architect of our empowering brand, Anna Parker.
Thank you, Andrea. Good afternoon, everybody. We really appreciate you spending a good chunk of your day with us. I'm here to kick off the home stretch. We've got just a few more chapters of our story to share with you today. I'm excited to hit on marketing. Todd's gonna introduce you to our culture, then, you know, you'll get really insightful financial data and our outlook from Andy. I'm one of the newer Patrick team members that you'll hear from today. I joined the team just over two years ago. I'm not new to brand building or marketing.
I spent my career to date, last 17 years or so on the agency side, and I worked for a number of global creative and media networks during that time, and was most recently the Chief Strategy Officer for an agency in Chicago. Right at the beginning of the pandemic, we became parents, and we left the city and moved back to my hometown, wanted to raise our daughter near family. That hometown just happens to be in Elkhart County, Indiana, RV capital of the world, and headquarters of Patrick. You know, in a lot of ways it really is the heartbeat of outdoor recreation manufacturing in America.
It's funny, I was before meeting the team, I was like most people outside this room, I didn't know who the company was or really what it stood for. It's funny because here's a brand that between 2009 and 2016 was the fastest growing stock in America. I think a lot of people would be surprised to know how many times we've been named to Fortune 1000 list or a number of others. 2017, we beat out Netflix for the top spot in one of IndustryWeek's 50 best companies list.
You know, it really is an incredible story about performance, and I'd say if there's one thing, you know, that I've really taken away from my career experience is that I think some of the most exciting brands to build and grow and those with the most potential are those that have just awesome unknown stories that deserve to be told. That is so true about a brand like Patrick. You know, you've already heard a few shout-outs from on a couple of brands today. I thought I'd hit, you know, in my first year of the company and just being immersed in the brands and all the business units, you know, I saw the world's first installation at our BetterWay brand in Indiana.
The world's first installation of these dual autonomous robots that work collaboratively, guided by AI to scan and sand exterior components for RVs. Just incredible stories of innovation. Jim talked about Geremarie. You know, Kip teed up Rockford Fosgate. You know, talk about such a, you know, purpose-driven brand in Tempe, Arizona. It's a brand that has such strong customer attachment. You have people with tattoos of the logo. You know, it's a brand that a discerning OEM like Harley-Davidson, it's one of the only brands they'll ever allow on that bike. You'll see the tire brand, you'll see the Harley badge, of course, you'll see Rockford Fosgate branded speakers. You know, just some incredible stories, again, a little bit of an unknown story.
I think for the last few years, Patrick's been a more of a quiet company. You know, we, to be honest, we come from humble roots. It doesn't feel natural, always to tout our successes. We really realize that I think there's a bigger story to be told. When you think about all the, you know, activity and achievements across our network of brands, it really is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and we knew that we needed to tell that story in a new way. You know, I really feel like this team has risen to the challenge of, you know, thinking about how do we build the Patrick brand and raise our profile, let's do it in a way that's true to us.
Meaning, you know, as Andy said, like we want our business units, we want their logo on the front of the jersey, and we want the Patrick patch on the sleeve, and we want them to be prouder than ever to wear it. We run essentially a spotlight strategy. We are doing a more professional job than ever of shining a spotlight on the stories, the achievements, the people, and the products and the business units that we empower. That's what's building our credibility as a brand. I think that's really been a great unlock for the business. In my last few minutes, that's what I brought to show you today, is just a few examples of some of our marketing work and the impact that it's having.
I'll show you a bit of brand work, a couple of examples of how we're supporting our business units, and then just close with just, you know, why we're so excited about the next few years in outdoor recreation. You'll see some visuals, but just to call out a couple of points. You know, our story is earning national media coverage. Might have seen some yesterday, you'll see more today. You know, we're also getting great coverage in the trade press. People are writing up about our presence at shows like IBEX. They're talking about our innovations, and people are picking up the phone and calling our businesses as a result. That's what matters, right? You know, we've been more consistent in engaging on social media than ever. You know, the most engaging content the brand's ever seen.
We've grown our community there with literally no investment by thousands of people in the last few months. You know, that's a great audience for, you know, at the corporate level, that's how you tell your story, that's how you attract great talent, you know, and it's how we continue to drive momentum. We also are building out, you know, a marketing analytics platform, integrating things like QR codes, things we can start to build remarketing strategies off of. You know, it's just really we've been building the system, you know, over the last couple of years, and we're already starting to see just some incredible results. You know, I wanted to touch too on Powered by Patrick as Hugo Gonzalez teed up.
You know, I think most brands wouldn't hesitate to call most of their subsidiaries, you know, a division of Patrick, a Patrick company. That never felt real to us. You know, again, our model is so unique and powerful, and it's a winning model. You know, we said, "Really, we're here to empower these brands," right? Like, let's help them achieve more growth than they might be able to without our support on the back end and resources. What you'll start seeing now is Empowered by Patrick. This is a phrase that now our brands are saying, "I wanna put that on my website. I wanna have that on my marketing." You know, we're now showing up in a trade magazine multiple times.
We have multiple brands in these categories, all those ads say a little Empowered by Patrick, now the scale of our network is becoming apparent in a new way. You know, just to close, I wanna hit too on the way we're starting to support our business units. Our business units, they are free to go to market how they want. They call on our team sometimes for strategic support and also more and more for creative support. You know, when a customer buys a brand-new custom-painted RV from the top brands now, you know, they're gonna get a touch-up kit. On that kit, you know, it links through a QR code to a video that we produce that shows here's all of the care and precision that went into painting this, you know, unit.
It really helps drive that attachment and that value between our brands and the OEM. You know, where you're gonna see a video now when you buy units featuring Patrick products that, again, those customers, those dealers get to learn more about the Patrick products on it. We're just really bringing that full circle. You know, as I mentioned, I'm just gonna close with why we're so, you know, bullish on where we're headed and grateful for where we've been and where we are as a company. You know, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released their outdoor recreation report last week. You know, obviously, it's a massive industry. It's growing faster than the economy overall. You know, again, a lot of my work is in, you know, consumer insight.
The thing that I love is what drives growth in our industries, it is so enduring, it's so powerful, it's so universal. It's, you know, the power of the outdoors, adventure, the pull to find like-minded people, the desire to personalize and customize things, and that's just, you know, driving so much opportunity for our business. I'm actually gonna leave you with a 30-second video that just kinda sums up that Empowering Enthusiast Brand Ethos. You know, so that will play, I hope. Todd's gonna come up and really take you through our culture. Thanks again for being here.
Every individual, partnership, and product holds the potential to unlock a profound sense of purpose and passion. Within the core of that enthusiast spirit, empowerment ignites an unmatched drive. It's more than a mission. It's a movement. We're here to keep empowering enthusiasts. That is the heartbeat of the house that Patrick built, a family of 10,000 strong. A network of over 85 esteemed brands, all Empowered by Patrick. Our essence lies not just in our ethos or strength of our team, but in our ability to bring your vision to life. We are here to empower outdoor enthusiasts, to inspire them to traverse every path, reach new heights, and do it all with unwavering speed and passion. We are a force, a catalyst for growth and transformation, for every stride you take towards progress.
For the millions seeking adventure, finding inspiration, and creating memories that echo through the great outdoors, these are the products we expertly design and build. Patrick, empowering enthusiasts, a lifestyle, and a legacy.
All right. Thank you, Anna. A couple things. The cool thing, if you listen, if you think about everything you've heard so far today, the common thread that flows through everything is people.
People drive performance and results. It's no secret, highly engaged people drive high performance and results. In fact, Gallup just recently released a survey on companies with highly engaged people, and they talked about having an impact on up to 21% on profitability, up to 18% on overall sales, and like a 59% decrease in turnover. Those things obviously affect their bottom line. The bottom line is that strong cultures impact engaged employees. They drive engaged employees. I learned this firsthand about 20 years ago when my journey first started with Patrick. I was brought in actually to Adorn to kind of spearhead a cultural transformation.
In that process, I saw firsthand how the things that we were implementing, the purpose, the effective leadership principles were impacting the bottom line. It did that very effectively, and we were able to, I was able to do that for three years. Patrick bought us in 2007, and was involved in the integration process for a couple more years. I wrote a book called Lead for God's Sake. I thought it was going to be about cultural transformation. The book ended up being about the principles that really drive cultural transformation, purpose and effective leadership things.
That book kinda took on a life of its own and allowed me to go on a journey for the next 15 years or so of traveling around and working with some of the most elite cultures around the country, both in business and sports. I had the opportunity to work with Dabo Swinney with the Clemson football team and Tony Bennett at Virginia basketball, Joe Mazzulla with the Celtics. Through those experiences, was able to see some of the most elite culture differentiators out there, and I'm excited to share some of the differentiators that we apply at Patrick. First and foremost, being my title or my role, it's not a function of HR. It doesn't flow up through HR simply because we don't believe culture is the sole responsibility of human resources.
It's the responsibility of every department within the organization. We're very adamant about pulling that together and making sure that everybody plays a role in that. The Better Together thing. If you think about, you know, about probably five years ago, anytime there's a changeover in CEO, you go through a culture revisit. What do we want to stand for? Who are we? This Better Together thing emerged early on, and it really is the personification of everything we do. If you think of our, even from the very top, our strategic growth strategy, buying these great organizations. We don't buy depressed companies, bad companies. We buy great companies with the mindset that we're going to make you better. Of course, we feel that we're going to be better as a result of that too.
That's a big reason we become the acquirer of choice. They know that. We go a lot deeper. We really try to work with our leaders in defining things. We compare it to Kaizen, this continuous improvement concept. If you think about Kaizen, I think it's a great way to live your life. There's continuous improvement in everything you do. If you think about this as a flat line, okay? I truly believe that there's no such thing mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, whatever in life. There's no such thing as a flat line as long as there's breath in your lungs. You're either trending up or you're trending down, right? You have to understand that gravity is always gonna pull it down.
Unless you're intentional about things, which is what we do with BETTER, you won't get it to go trend upward. We really focus on the continuous improvement mindset. Then, of course, the together part, you've heard a lot of our guys, Hugo and Kip, different guys talking about the synergy opportunities that we have. Very, very serious about that. Constant collaboration. We don't want it to just be a 1 + 1= 3. We want it to be a 2+ 2= 10. Very serious. Then, of course, we have a statement that kinda pulls everything together, just reminds us that whether we're one-on-one with a team, our customers, our business units, BETTER Together truly applies to everything that we are focused on.
Now if you think about kind of our structure, how we're structured, this is the house of brands resting on where our end market leadership experts reside in this shaded area, these pillars. They're resting then on the organizational strategic objectives, which is the collaborative process of determining what we wanna accomplish, okay? That then rests on the foundation of who we really are and why we do what we do, our values, our principles, and Patrick Purpose. I'm gonna talk about those a little bit later, but kind of a unique thing. We do an immersive deep dive process for everybody that resides in our home office area, that shaded area.
The top area, we also deliver a message to our brand leaders and influencers out there, but the message is a little bit different. We want them to take away two big things when we go out there. First of all, is we wanna set the expectation that they have on us as leaders. If you're working with Patrick leaders, here's what you can expect from us when you're working with us. The other thing is, we believe in these principles so much that we truly believe that if you apply these in your own life, it's not only gonna help you as a leader in your brands and your business units, but it's gonna impact your life. It's a very important part of what we do in everything, so all of our pursuits.
The methodology, I always say leadership begins at the top, this is an inverted pyramid for a reason because culture takes intentionality. It demands a systematic approach. You have to target something. We have a systematic approach, which is finding the heart, defining the heart, aligning with the heart, and then the refining process. You do that every step of the way. These first two layers that you see down here, it's so important that there's an internalization. That's not just taught, but it's truly internalized, bought into and lived out all the time. These would be the equivalent of that shaded area on the previous slide that I showed you. The next area, the brand leadership, that would be the house of brands, the leaders, the influencers out there, very important.
Every stage of the way, there has to be a buy-in understanding. If there's a crack in the foundation, things can tip. It's like that for a reason. The brand culture development is really important to us because I think an exciting part of this is we empower our brands then to, you know, basically take on a cultural transformation themselves. If they wanna really lock in on their own identity, mission, vision, values, we have the systematic approach and process that we will then go out and help them lock into who they want to be. Really, really cool how we've been able to impact lives through that whole process. Everything we do goes through these three spheres, okay? Skill set, mindset, heart set is a part of any leadership development process you're gonna see.
The emphasis is always on the heart set. Okay. We truly believe that elite culture flows from elite leadership, and you have to define those things from the beginning. You think about leadership is influence from words, attitudes, and behaviors that flows from and through character. That's the heart of our leadership. Everybody plays a role in it. If we think about culture is simply a reflection of the collective character within. Again, you get this character thing that keeps emerging. You guys, you have to focus on the heart of things. That's where the victories lie. That's where the problems lie. If you think about teammates you've been with in the past, whether it's in a boardroom or on a team, you get eye rolls, backstabbers, people hoarding information, people that you can't trust. Those aren't skill set or mindset issues.
Those are heart set issues. Enron was a perfect example of that. It wasn't skill set, it wasn't mindset. It was heart set. These are very, very important to us as we go about what we do. This is the heart. This is truly what we're talking about when we take our leaders through an immersive process. You have the values over here, the acronym that we work on. You'll notice in the effective leadership principles, the key to us is these are action items. We want you to bring these things to life. It's not just a word that we're teaching. We're really helping them apply it to everything that they're doing in their business units. What does it mean to lead with humility?
We take that a step further, or we cascade it to continue throughout the organization two ways. One is we have these team accountability leadership coaching groups where we really coach our managers and leaders. We set them up on a regular cadence with their leadership team, set them up with peer-to-peer accountability, teach them how to build trust through vulnerability, focus on self-awareness. That can cascade throughout the organization. The other thing is the 360 process that just really, you know, is built specifically around these things, both for accountability and development. The last thing, you saw this at the beginning, we are enthusiasts. It's a big part of everything we do. We love what we do.
If you think about all the components we build, they go in an RV, a boat, an ATV, or a house. Those things all have in common that they pull people together for great times. Relationships, joy, all those things are a very meaningful part of everything that we strive to do. This purpose that we've created fits perfectly when you think about we're enthusiasts passionately focused on positively impacting lives, not only the hearts and lives of our team members, but all of the markets we serve are. That's what we're striving for. For us, you guys, results definitely matter. It's very, very important to us, performance and results. Part of that performance and results is the impact that we get to have on not only our people, but on all of our customers and communities that we serve.
That's what BETTER Together is really all about. With that, I'm gonna bring somebody up here to talk a little bit more about results. Andrew.
All right. Thanks, Todd. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Andrew Roeder , and it's a pleasure to speak with you this afternoon as CFO. It's been my privilege over the past year or so now to see firsthand, here we go, the strength of the team here at Patrick, the resilience of our model, and the earnings power that we have going forward. I'm just excited to be a part of it. A little bit about myself. I'm born and raised in Elkhart County, RV capital of the world. Also, I might add the pontoon capital of the world. After degrees at IU in Notre Dame, got my start in public accounting. I spent the last 10 years on the OEM side in the marine industry.
Know a little bit about how our customers think. I'm an outdoor enthusiast myself. You can often find me on my boat in the summer, or by a campfire, or I really enjoy being on my side-by-side, you know, trolling around our farm. Anyways, over the next 10 to 15 minutes, I look forward to giving you a sense of the strength of our financial model here at Patrick, specifically, the diversification strategy and the resilience it's brought our model. Our margins, just a testament to the organic and strategic execution of the team. Strong cash flows. Team does a great job of managing our working capital. Our capital allocation discipline, but opportunistic. Finally, the opportunities we have ahead in our 2025 outlook and beyond. Jump right into diversification.
In 2010, we were a $300 million company. We've grown that to nearly $4 billion. We've, you know, we were a housing and RV supplier back in 2010. Now, we're an outdoor enthusiast and housing component solutions provider. We, you know, looking over time, we've outperformed our end markets every step of the way. We entered marine in 2016 and grew that segment of our business to nearly $1 billion. As Rick talked about, earlier this year, we jumped in more meaningfully, entered the powersport space, and look forward to doing in powersports what we've done in RV and marine. Looking at our financial sales margins earnings, you see the COVID spike there in '21 and '22.
What I wanna focus you on is that afterwards, we are a bigger, more profitable, more resilient company. We gained a ton of market share during the pandemic when our customers needed us the most. We've acquired many margin-accretive companies during that timeframe. Our gross margin 18% five years ago, nearly 23% now. You know, that higher margin profile has driven higher operating and EBITDA margins. Our operating margin was 10% a couple years ago. We look forward to getting back there when our markets return to mid-cycle and beyond longer term, as I'll show you later in my presentation. Most recently, our margins have been resilient, really a testament to our good, better, best product offering.
EBITDA margin, adjusted EBITDA margin 12.7%, you know, has remained strong here the last couple years despite our end markets being down 30%-40%. As you can see in this next slide, that white line represents RV shipments. Our team does a really nice job of scaling and flexing our business, managing working capital. You can see despite the RV shipment pullback, our cash flows have remained strong. We expect to generate over $290 million of free cash flow this year. I point you to looking at 2022-2023, our revenue dropped from $4.9 billion-$3.5 billion, yet we increased our free cash flow. Again, just a testament to our team's ability and execution of managing working capital.
Our balance sheet is an important tenet of our strategy here at Patrick. It allows us to do what we do to execute our strategic playbook. Earlier this quarter, as Andy mentioned, we executed a credit refinance transaction. We issued a $500 million bond at 6% and 3%/8%, redeemed a $300 million bond at 7.5% , so we reduced our interest expense. We upsized the revolver, so we increased liquidity by nearly $300 million. We pushed out our debt wall, as you can see here in this bar chart. We improved terms to an already strong credit agreement. Feel really good about that transaction and our ability to stay on offense. How do we spend our capital?
As you know, as Andy talked about, the majority of our capital will go to acquisitions. It's been our growth engine and will continue to be so. We're gonna continue to invest in our business. We expect to spend $70 million-$80 million in CapEx this year. About a third of that is maintenance CapEx. The remainder, the majority, is strategic CapEx. You saw in the videos that Hugo showed, you know, a few examples of that. You know, we're gonna continue to invest in automation. We believe not only does it increase capacity, but it improves product quality and consistency, as well as driving operating efficiencies. Dividends, we're gonna stick to our dividend policy. We'll pay out $50 million in dividends this year.
We just increased our dividend 9%, that's to $0.60 a share per quarter. Share buybacks will be opportunistic. It's accounted for 8% of our allocated capital since 2019. Right now, we have over $700 million liquidity, we're well-positioned to strike when an opportunity arises. Our guideposts for target leverage are 2.25x-2.5x . As Andy mentioned, we will go above that opportunistically. We did that with Sportech in January. We were 2.9 x after that transaction, expect us to get back down within target range two-three quarters. At the end of Q3, we were at 2.6 x, that's after the acquisition of RecPro in September.
We're well on our way and feel good about where we sit. Talked about where we've been and where we're at, and now, you know, here is where we're going. We expect 2025 retail for RV and marine to be similar to 2024. Given the destocking and the discipline that our customers and dealers alike have showed in the channel, dealer inventory channel that's healthy right now, we expect growth in wholesale shipments from flat retail. We expect RV and marine to be both up 5%-10%. We believe the demand for affordable housing has plenty of runway. We expect another strong year out of manufactured housing. Our outlook is up 5%-10% next year.
We expect housing starts to be flat to up 5% next year. Kip talked about our powersport shipments. We're expecting shipments to be down 10% next year, but we do expect to continue to gain attachment rate and/or organic content to be up mid-single digits. Longer term, here is what we can show you in terms of op margin relative to our sales. We expect to continue to expand our op margin as we invest in accretive projects, both from a CapEx standpoint and from a strategic standpoint. We're gonna continue to utilize our scale to drive synergies, both cost synergies and growth synergies. All driven by the team that you've seen today that knows how to control costs and navigate our end markets that can be volatile.
We believe the future is bright at Patrick, and I'm certainly happy to be a part of it. Wanted to give you a little more color on the RV and marine channels, specifically in the near term. Our markets are bouncing along the bottom right now, we believe. You know, RV shipments this year will be 320,000-330,000 units. That's compared to what we believe will be mid-cycle average of 400,000-450,000 units. Marine shipments this year will be about 140,000. That's compared to, again, what we believe will be mid-cycle average of 200,000-225,000 units.
MH shipments will be 104,000 this year, and that's compared to 125,000-135,000 units, what we believe will be the next mid-cycle average. Dealer inventory in RV and marine is healthy. Andy showed you that earlier this morning. The lines represent weeks on hand. You can see they're well below historical averages as represented by the shaded parts here. Again, we don't believe that dealer inventory will get back to those historical averages. However, we do believe that we will see a restock when retail influx. We believe dealer inventory right now is too low. Total addressable market, the end market presidents gave you a sense of that. Here it is in summary form. RV, nearly $5,000 a unit.
We believe we have 2x-3x runway in RV. Marine, we believe we have about 4 times. In MH, 2 times. As you know, in powersports, we're just getting started. Plenty of TAM out there to capture. Before I turn it back to Andy, I just wanted to show you this slide just to remind you of the focus that we have on shareholder value and what we've achieved. We've talked about our playbook. Our playbook has worked. We've nearly doubled our market cap in the last five years. We've significantly outperformed the Russell 2000. We're proud of that. We're gonna continue to execute the playbook and look forward to increased shareholder value down the road. That's all I have today.
Appreciate your time, and, I'll turn it back over to Andy.
Great. Thanks, Andy. Okay. Not sure my mic is on. Can you hear me okay even though I have a loud voice. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to the team today. I hope that you had some good takeaways from this session. Hopefully, you saw kind of that we've got a vision. We feel like our markets are at a great place for an inflection point. We've got an incredible team. We've got an executable plan that has both strategy and organic composition to it, and we're poised to flex and scale this business model to support our customers in the next evolution when the cycle does turn. We're very excited, and hopefully, that came through in everybody's presentation.
Obviously, again, we're super excited about where the markets sit today because of what we think could be the next run and the leveragability that we have as an organization. We're gonna stay focused and disciplined on that. It's, for us, it's really keeping a simple mindset that stays focused and then cascading the vision throughout our organization and aligning that team. Hopefully, the strength of the team came out as well, the importance on culture for us. We don't talk about it a lot, but it is very important from an alignment perspective. Hopefully, you see the passion that this team has to be able to execute and deliver results in alignment with not only a financial strategy but because we wanna take care of each other, and we wanna continue to drive the business in alignment with our purpose.
Again, hopefully, you took away some takeaways. We are happy to answer questions at this point in time for anybody that has anything that we've talked about throughout this presentation. I'll invite the team to come up here for any questions that you may have. Anybody? Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah.
It's Craig from Baird again. Thank you. I had a question for Andrea. You know, Patrick has crushed it on the M&A side, primarily in RV for a long time. Are there differences in powersports or marine that make that more difficult given the home field advantage you've always had in Elkhart on the RV side?
Can we take this?
Yeah.
No, I think the process is fairly simple. We look to replicate what we were able to accomplish in RV in marine and powersports. I think the geographic, you know, dispersed markets, you know, we're able to navigate those appropriately and go after who we're targeting. I will tell you, we do maintain a very detailed pipeline, as Andy mentioned, as we know our competitors in each product category. We know who we would like to talk to and kind of look after. As he also mentioned, as we get our deals, a lot of our pipeline comes from just relationships that we have within those industries and actually brands and sellers that have already been acquired that are now on the Patrick team.
We get a lot of referrals from brands that we've already acquired and a lot of these individuals talk to each other. Even the competition in the space is very collegial, they wanna know what it's like to be acquired by Patrick. That's our best source of referrals. When you talk about home field advantage, you know, certainly in Elkhart, because everything is so close, it's easy. I'd also tell you that that's not necessarily a competitive advantage in proximity to customer, whereas in the marine space today, especially with our geographic footprint that we have, I feel like we've got a home field advantage in marine because we know all these regional areas. We're already serving all these customers.
From a pure strategic perspective, the opportunity to acquire in the space is there, but as well, more importantly, I think the organic opportunity in marine, because we can set up small hubs where our lifestyle business competitors who are more family-run business, if you wanna think about how a lifestyle business, as we categorize it, is they can't necessarily set up a hub, but we can put three or four product brands into a regional area very quickly. We're happy to lease space, you know, set up a facility and bring our brands together to be able to bring a solution to a customer and capitalize on that competitive advantage of proximity to customer. I feel like we've got a home field advantage in marine, and the goal would be to replicate that in the powersports space as well.
Hi, Alexander Perry from Bank of America again. Just on the target of the 12% to 16% operating margin on $8 billion of sales, is there a target in terms of timing on that? Maybe just walk us through sort of the key drivers to operating margin expansion to get within that range.
Sure. I mean, I can give a couple points and then I'll let you jump in, Andy.
Yeah.
I think, you know, a lot of it depends on our end markets in terms of timing. I think we intentionally didn't put a timeframe on there. We do believe that they're ripe for an inflection, you know, hopefully sooner than later. I think, you know, you heard today the drivers. I mean, certainly operating leverage, we don't have to add back a ton of fixed costs. I'd start with that, and then I'd look for, you know, think about accretive projects, both strategically and organically.
Right. We wanted to give you a range of op margin at various revenues. We're pretty intentional about not telling you what that number is over that five-year period, but I can tell you how I calculate the model and how we kinda think about calculating the model. I wanna leave the assumptions to you on the industry, okay? It's really simple to me. It's content per unit, okay? Times your industry shipments, whatever you wanna estimate those to be over the next five years. Pick a 5% annual growth rate or something like that. You guys do the math on it, okay? And then on top of that, you're gonna look at our profile. We're gonna continue to deliver accretive gross margins, right?
Pick what you think that's gonna be, that's gonna generate an operating margin leverage, okay? It's gonna generate operating income, operating cash that we're gonna reinvest in the business. We talked about kind of a $400 million-$500 million operating cash target range that we're gonna redeploy into the business from an M&A perspective. You add all that together, that should drive within that margin range, you know, again. I'll tell you, we've used assumptions, but I'll leave that up to you on where you want the industry, you wanna model your industry assumptions out. We've done that to be able to give you kind of that grid. There's more, there's math behind that, just so you know.
That's not us throwing darts at a board and putting some up there so you can see and up into the right trajectory. We put math to it, and that's why it's an executable strategy from our perspective and why we get excited about it is because it's deliverable, it's actionable. We know what we have to do, right? It's just a matter of execution. We do need some margin, or we do need some market help. You might see just inside that five-year time period, market shifts up and down, right? But if you pick a reasonable estimate as it relates to what your market shipments are, right, generally that'll offset over that five-year period, and that's how we think about it. It's, it's fairly simple.
We do this every five years, you know, and not just every five years, we're doing it all the time. On a five-year basis, we've been successful at executing upon our strategic vision. That's what we're hoping to continue to do.
Scott from ROTH MKM again. Can you talk about tariffs? I know it's early, but the questions are starting to come up all over the place. Maybe just talk about how the supply chain is different now versus 2017, 2018, and how you guys are positioned depending on which angle Trump goes after.
Sure. I'm gonna let Hugo answer that question. He's been very, very proactive in looking at this and making sure that we're mitigating as much risk as possible.
Yes, we have been very intentional about de-risking the business. Just to give you an example, in 2019, we used to procure a lot more millions of dollars from some of those areas where tariffs could be a lot larger per the everyday changing conversations, you know. We have been very strategic about de-risking, and we're probably about 1/3 of what we used to procure from those countries that we would consider could have higher tariffs. We're still de-risking the business. Even some of the business that we have from a few of those concentrated areas in Asia, we are calling it today low risk because we already have alternatives that are gonna offset any of those tariffs. For the most part, not completely, but for the most part. Complete plan started a few years ago, and we have been executing it.
We will pass pricing along. I think a lot of you know, you know, kind of from a pricing strategy perspective, we're very fluid in our pricing. We don't have contracts with our customers. In the RV space in particular, you know, we change pricing on 30-day notice up or down within a relevant range as it relates to the commodities. We expect to pass that through if we do see some tariff impact. Where that could impact the markets is on the ASP side of the business. At the end of the day, again, we're gonna do our best to mitigate that as much as possible to keep our OEM partners competitive.
Hello. Noah Zatzkin, KeyBank. Thanks. Just maybe one on the kind of aftermarket opportunity, given the acquisition of RecPro. When you're looking at targets, are you gonna continue to focus on OEM-focused businesses and plugging them into RecPro, or would you look at aftermarket-focused businesses, in addition to kind of leveraging RecPro in terms of going after aftermarket? Like, how is your kind of consolidated aftermarket approach going forward?
Sure. I think right now we're focused on the organic impact of RecPro versus acquiring more aftermarket businesses. That doesn't mean we won't acquire other aftermarket businesses. We've been looking for quite some time for the right platform for an aftermarket direct-to-consumer model, RecPro fit that space for us. Like I've said earlier, the opportunities that we see today across our product spectrum are significant. We've got plenty to do, from my perspective, to keep focused on that and really leverage the scalability of the platform that we see today. I would say from an M&A perspective, probably more OEM solutions-oriented product. That doesn't mean we're not gonna go look for an aftermarket.
I feel like we've got the platform that we need, that we have the leveragability to execute off of this on an organic basis and really put our focus and attention to that. That's why we're so excited about RecPro. Probably more OEM-focused than aftermarket. I wouldn't preclude us from doing an aftermarket deal though either.
Thanks, Joe.
Thanks, Joe.
"Hey, this is why this is such a great landing zone for you to come and live after you decide you want to, you want to de-risk a little bit.
Raymond James. On M&A, a couple questions. I guess first, who do you typically, and I'm sure this differs by end market, but who do you guys typically compete against for that acquisition? Is it usually a founder-led business, who may be looking for an exit, for example, or is it more of a corporate type?
From a competition perspective, I would tell you that we've been fairly advantaged over the last several years in that we've been in a position to be on offense where a lot of other people have been on defense or either out of the market. In the RV space, there's really nobody that we compete with. I tell you on RV deals in marine, there's a few players. There's a little bit more private equity because the margin profile is a little bit higher on the marine side of the business, and there's some larger revenue players out there. Private equity's been out of the game for couple of years now. I do think that could shift when we do see a market inflection, and we do start to see kind of the next run.
That's why I wanna stay on offense right now and make sure that we stay competitive, have the liquidity to be able to execute on M&A. I'm not saying that we're not gonna have competition in those spaces. So far, we've been kind of the acquirer of choice with, I'm gonna say, limited competition. One of the reasons I say that is because we organically cultivate 70% to 80% of the deals ourselves. We don't rely on investment bankers to bring deals to us or run a process. We participate in processes, okay, when we get a compelling deal. We're out there all the time knocking on doors, making sure that we're the first one, you know, in line when it comes to an entrepreneur principal that wants to sell.
Like I also mentioned, if they're looking to get out, that is a warning sign for us that something is going to change with that business. It is more about us being proactive, talking to the deal pipeline, planting seeds, saying, "Hey, you know what? When you're ready to kind of de-risk a little bit," like I said, "monetize your investment, stay on and run the business, we want to be first in line." We are buying successful businesses. These guys do not have to sell to us, okay? We have got to sell them on the Patrick value proposition. That is a big part of the story that we try to leverage when we go in and talk to these customers is,
Just to follow up on that, how long is the cultivation process typically?
It depends. I mean, it could be as short as 60 days. Otherwise, you know, depending on where these players are at, and we're always touching people, so we get a read on what their appetite is, what they're thinking about. You can tell when you're talking to them, you know, whether there's enthusiasm towards, "Hey, you know what? I might be interested in doing something sooner," or, "I'm not ready right now, but, hey, I'm gonna keep you in mind." We get a feel on that. Typically, I'd say it's six to 12 months to plant a seed on a business that isn't actively thinking about, you know, selling their company.
Yeah. I'll just add a quick point that certainly, a close has been something that's been a legitimate differentiator for us as well, particularly in the last couple of years.
Yeah.
Have the reputation we've had, you know, with M&A still just turning a number of times, you know, we enter in deals with the intent to get the deal done. We're not gonna game it. We look to be efficient in that process. That has been a differentiator for us, and it's been a, certainly a value element that we've heard from, you know, be it private sellers or even the private equity. It's been something that's put us near the front of the line.
Yeah.
Just another question about margins. In the illustrative example, going from $3 billion - $8 billion, you had, you know, margins as a percentage doubling. I guess, can you give us a feel for how much of that is actually volume driven versus business mix, whether that's aftermarket, whether that's, you know, marine powersports? Also, what would the implications be on gross margin? Would we be thinking mid-20%s, high 20%s? Just get a general sense there.
It's gonna be volume primarily. We're not looking to. It's gonna be a combination of that entire strategy, right? Of 2%-3% organic growth and redeploying capital in from an M&A perspective with accretive margin successful businesses. I'm gonna tell you, we look at in small increments, right? We're looking at saying, "Okay, we want base hits." We're not looking for home runs to drive that type of operating margin level. From a volume perspective, we look to continue to deliver slow and steady, let's just call it accretive margins. Gross margin, mid-20s is kind of a target range with better leverageability on the op margin side because we just don't have to add a lot of overhead to support significant increases in volumes.
Thanks again. Dan Moore of CJS. Maybe one for Andy and Andrew and one for Andy and Anna, if I could. Just going back to the 2025 outlook on slide 101. What are your expectations for Patrick's content growth, either by vertical or kind of overall in addition to the growth outlooks that you gave for each of the verticals on a market basis? Beyond 25, do we think about going back to kind of the 30 to 50 basis point annual op margin expansion? Is that the right way to think about it? Then one follow-up. Thanks.
Correct. I think in the content, we're looking at 2%-3% organic content on an annual basis. It's kind of how we've built our content model. And yeah, I'd say 30-50 basis points or more once we kind of hit the inflection point, depending on kind of what that scale is. Again, pick a, pick a number, but if it's, let's just say it's 5% industry growth, right, and you add all this together, that's probably the 30-50 basis points of op margin. If it's more than that, you know, I think we can leverage a lot better because we just don't have to add that overhead.
Great. It's gonna sound like a backhanded compliment, but it's really a compliment. You've had this incredible success obviously over the last decade plus without really a cohesive brand strategy. My question going forward is, what does kind of marketing spend growth look like, and how do you think about allocating additional marketing dollars across those brands that you wanna spotlight, and how will you think about measuring the return? Thanks.
I do think that there's a ton of opportunity in helping our individual brands become more present. As Anna talked about, it's really about empowering the brands, right? We want Empowered by Patrick. We still want the brand in the front windshield. We want them wearing the brand jersey, right? It's about empowering them, showing them what other brands are doing, especially to be able to generate incremental growth. We're gonna look at what that looks like. I'll give you a simple example. Rockford Fosgate for us is probably one of the best marketing brands that we have out there. They are aggressive. They're forward-thinking. They're forward-looking. They have the most material marketing spend of any of our brands out there.
As Anna mentioned as well, you've got guys tattooing Rockford Fosgate on themselves. I mean, that's how powerful their brand is. They are present. They are out in the marketplace. They are purpose-built audio. Well, we've got a brand called Wet Sounds, which is an equivalent premier audio solution model that isn't well known and has the opportunity to replicate a brand strategy like Rockford has to gain additional penetration and opportunity. A lot of our customers don't want to look at a product that they haven't heard about or don't know about. Making sure we've got that presence is something that we're focused on as it relates to this. We're not gonna become a marketing agency, right, or a retail branded model. There is a ton of leverageability to unlock in our individual brands to make their presence more well known.
We're gonna do it thoughtfully. We run a lean organization, and we all roll up our sleeves and dig in where we need to. A lot of the things that you're seeing, you know Anna's doing and herself. That's just how we think about it, but it's gonna be a thoughtful, return-oriented model that's related to the, to the brand marketing strategy. Tristan.
Tristan from BMO again. Just curious, post the election, has there been any sentiment shift among your customers or maybe dealers?
I don't know that we've felt anything. I think if you just look geographically at where our markets are at, there's probably more enthusiasm based on the election. I'm not commenting one way or another on what I think. At the end of the day, I would tell you that I think there was optimism either way. I think people just wanted to get the election over with. As consumer confidence builds, again, that's where we see the opportunity in our markets. That's really what drives a lot of our markets at the end of the day when it comes to the outdoor enthusiast space. Hopefully, that will translate post-election with the uncertainty that was there and, you know, we'll see where it goes.
Okay. Just one more question. At some point, there's going to be an RV content upcycle. How do we think that plays out? Slow and steady? We wake up one year and we just see a big content jump?
History has shown that it's not slow and steady. We've seen the pendulum swing between low-end, less content of units to high-end, higher content of units. I didn't think the mix of units could get any worse, is what I'd tell you probably midyear in 2024, and it actually did. Our content numbers held up despite the fact that there continued to be a mix shift to smaller units and single actual units. That's why we have some confidence in kind of where we're at today, the organic growth potential that's out there, the business that we think we can achieve. The expectation is that that pendulum's gonna swing back as consumers become more confident.
You know, once you buy any unit, whether it's RVs, boats, you name it, the general model is, I want three more feet on my next unit, right? We expect people that have bought these low-end units to upgrade. 70% of existing RV owners typically upgrade within three-five years. They're generally going to move to a larger scale unit with more content in them. Slow and steady is how we build a model, I guess, but that's not what history has shown.
Richard Zimmerman, TD Bank. Thanks for the presentation. You know, it's sometimes easy when things are going well and you're growing revenue just to say status quo. We went through one of the most difficult time probably in anyone's history with COVID, and you had a tremendous amount of growth, obviously, because of that. Can you talk about, like, some of the things that you learned as a result of that, post that, with obviously the decline in some of the businesses? What made your, what made your company a better company today because of what you've been through in your experience? Thank you.
Certainly. A couple things. First of all, the scalability advantage that we have over, again, I'm gonna call it the lifestyle business competitors, these $20 million and $30 million companies versus our, let's just call it $200 million product portfolio in that particular market. Our ability to scale with our customers is a competitive advantage. We have the ability to invest in inventory to be able to support them, invest in teams, bring additional innovation looks that our competitors can't. When our customers could not get product, we were able to not only be able to source better than our competitors were, but because we operate under these different brands. I use fiberglass as a simple example. We got 5 different fiberglass companies today, all running with different capacities, right? Throughput.
Well, we can flex that behind the scenes and be able to deliver our customers. If one of our businesses is running at just, you know, 100% capacity, doesn't have any more room, and one of them's running at 50%, we can shift capacity even. This is the advantage I was talking about. Without consolidating facilities and getting rid of the brand DNA, we can move that capacity around to be able to take care of our customers. Our customers remained loyal to us, in my mind, for one of the first times that I've seen in many cycles post-cycle, when we had inventory coming in. You know, we were talking to them in advance of the slowdown saying, "Guys, the music is gonna stop here at some point in time.
We're bringing in all this inventory to make sure you're good on the way out. Don't leave us on the other side," right? "Don't all of a sudden, if someone comes through with a competitive quote on the back end, take that competitive quote and take away the business and leave us hanging with inventory." Well, that, for the first time, we saw a lot more loyalty from our customer base after it kind of cycled down or after kind of the pullback, where customers stuck with us. We were able to leverage our inventories. We were able to dollar average down in price. Our team's done a fabulous job of pricing. I think it's part of the margin story.
Our team is as good as it gets from my perspective in being able to go to market, deliver thoughtful pricing to our customers, and it's really because of being proactive, number one, but it's also trust, and it's being proactive on the downside when pricing comes down as much as it is, you know, in transparency. Our customers know that we're going to let those prices flow through up or down, and we're gonna be as proactive giving back prices as we are giving price increases to our customers. Those are two things I can think of, but the scalability of the business, without question, is a competitive advantage from my perspective that we don't wanna lose. Mm-hmm.
Hi, David Landry from Domain. I was wondering if you guys could clarify how you manage incentives at the business unit level and related to that, how you adjudicate between them when you're shifting capacity between different business units, they're collaborating or sharing costs in those types of situations.
Sure. One of the things in our M&A model is, again, we're plug and play acquire. If it's not broken, don't fix it. Whatever comp structure was in place at the time prior to acquisition, that's generally the same comp structure that's in place post-closing. We want them incentivized to be able to grow the business. In fact, we'll add a little bit of a kicker as it relates to incentive to deliver above and beyond expectations. We work with varying comp structures. In general, what I tell you is, as an organization, as we think about it, our mindset is 25th percentile as it relates to base and 75th percentile as it relates to incentive compensation. We want our teams highly incentivized based on the operating profitability of the business.
As it relates to moving business amongst our brands, we promote a spirit of goodwill, right? You might have to give up a little bit today, but you will get that back in return. Because of the culture that we've been very active in as it relates to kind of BETTER Together, I would tell you there's an understanding of being patient. You know, "Hey, I might have to give up a little bit right now, but I will get that back in the future," because we remember those things. By refereeing that, if you will, or kind of coaching that model and quarterbacking that, we're able to allow our brands to collaborate and give up a little now for something in return. We always remember those things, though, too.
That's part of the model, that's part of the way we think about it, we don't forget about that. We're not just pure profitability based either, right? It's about, "Hey, we're working towards the good of the organization and the team, and how can we help you be better?" All that kind of plays into that model.
Hey, Griffin Bryan, D.A. Davidson. You know, we've been in the down cycle here for a while for both RVs and Marine. Bump along the bottom, as you said. I guess, what would it take for you to get, like, excited? Is it, like, two or three months, like, positive retail data, or does it take a little bit more than that? I guess just overall expectations for show season coming up.
I would say yes. Retail inflection, so we'd like to see some positive retail momentum because we do believe that there's gonna be a restock that's gonna be needed based on increasing retail. That's really what we're looking for today. Signals consumer confidence, right, is something that we obviously absolutely look at. I think we will start to feel that. We'll start to feel kind of some bubbling up, and that's what we would look for. I'm excited about where we sit today. I will tell you that just from an operating perspective, you know, I think one of the things that we talked about in our last call, and especially as it relates to kind of Q4, is I feel like we're approaching an inflection point at some point here in the next couple of quarters or several quarters.
We're gonna have a little bit of inefficiency right now in Q3 because that scalability factor that I think is a competitive advantage, we don't wanna lose that. We can certainly take more costs out, just so you know. This business is very scalable, and we'll size the business according to the revenue stream. While it's inflecting here a little bit, while people are being very cautious about adding inventory in Q4, we stayed and said, "Look, the team's ready for the inflection. Let's not lose that competitive advantage." I feel good about where we sit today as it relates to the scalability and the flexibility. To your point, I think we're looking for some retail inflection.
Just to add to that, when you talk about the show season coming up, I, you know, as I talk to a lot of our customers, executives at our customer level, they're excited about the product they're putting out there right now. They've made a lot of changes. They're putting innovation into their product, and they're really doing some unique things. You know, not to get granular with what they're doing, but in our conversations, I'm pretty excited about how aggressive they're getting to get people onto the lots, get people into units, and really kind of start that momentum again. I'd like to think that, you know, as we get into the Tampa show, which is gonna be the first one in January, we'll see that, you know, that momentum start to build.
That's it? Anybody else? No?
Anybody else?
Yes.
Okay. Good.
I think that wraps it up today. Appreciate everyone's time. We do have boxed lunches for you to take. If anybody can get a vest, let us know. We'll give you one of those. You know, feel free to follow up with us after the fact, and we can, you know, jump on a call or something like that.
Yeah, thanks so much for taking the time out of your day to spend a couple hours. Our team's here if you need anything. Thank you.