All right, my name is Greg Burns. I'm the analyst at Sidoti, covering ePlus. From the company this morning, we have Mark Marron, the company's CEO, and Elaine Marion, the company's CFO. They're gonna run through a presentation, and at the end, we'll get to some Q&A. If you do have a question, just enter it through the function in Zoom, and we'll get to as many of those as we can at the end. So with that, I will hand it over to Mark and Elaine.
All right. Thanks, Greg, and, good morning/ good afternoon, everyone. So we'll walk through some slides and try to leave some times for Q&A. So Elaine, if you can just advance the slides. I'll try to move through these at a fairly quick pace, just to give you a high level on ePlus. Our Safe Harbor statement, I won't read that for you. If you look at ePlus overall, so a lot of folks may or may not realize, we've got basically four segments to our business. One is the technology. I'll call it technology segment, which is a combination of our product, our professional services, and our managed services. And I'll walk through some of those parts of our business as we move through this presentation. The other side is we have a financing segment. All right?
We actually started as a finance company, a finance leasing company, and over time have evolved into a technology provider that provides financial solutions to our customers as well. What's nice, we've been in business for over thirty years, so we've adjusted through all the ups and downs of the market, both from a technology standpoint as well as from what goes on at a let's say macroeconomic standpoint. We're one of only 11% of companies listed on Nasdaq that have been in business over thirty years. So that, I think, shows some of our staying power and ability to adjust through the market, no matter what that is, whether it's cloud, AI, or what have you.
Elaine's gonna touch on the numbers, so I won't delve in there, but as you notice, we've got a lot of certifications and OEM partnerships, so we have the ability to provide the solutions our customers are looking. We've got over 4,600 customers and 1,900 employees, and the team has done a nice job of consistently growing our business year over year. I'm not gonna drive on this too much, only because Elaine's gonna really touch on it in more detail. The thing I'd highlight is some of the consistency that I just talked about, that you know, if you look at our CAGRs over the last five years, whether from net sales, services, gross profit, or diluted EPS, all up nicely.
You know, and that's really our, I think, our ability to adjust with where the market goes and also some changes we had made years ago, moving to more of a services-led organization, and we've seen that in our services number, we've seen it in our gross margins, as well as our gross profit. On the team, you know, the key thing here is, if you look at it, one, we get along well, so we work well as a team. So, when we sit down and strategize, everybody's got a seat at the table in terms of things they think we need to consider as we move forward. Every year, we build five-year strategy plans, so we update that each year, as a management team.
I think the thing to note is, many folks have a long tenure at ePlus, overall, and have been in the industry for a period of time. All right, and then if you look at it, we continue to grow, overall, both in revenue, but also in terms of, not so much the locations, which we've scaled back a little bit, since COVID, but we have the ability to kinda support some of our biggest customers. We've got our integration centers strategically placed throughout the U.S. to be able to support our customers. And we've got the ability to sell and support in country for many of our customers and in many countries. Okay, I'm gonna touch on this one a little bit more, 'cause then there's subsequent slides, which I won't go into too much detail.
If you look at it, right now, everybody's talking about AI, which, you know, we've got a strong AI program and solutions that we're taking to market to customers. But what's really interesting about this, if you look up the blue on the top, that's our traditional, you know, data center, cloud, networking, you know, security, and things along those lines, is what we've been doing for years and years and years. What's interesting with this is AI, you know, right now we're helping our customers understand where the market's going with AI, walking them through some of the security concerns they should have, walking them through a data strategy, trying to help them understand exactly where they can get the biggest return, based on use cases and what have you.
What's interesting there, what we're seeing as well, is even as we're doing those, there's still a lot of opportunity for infrastructure and cybersecurity and all the areas that we're in already. We kinda overlay that with services. And when you look at our services, we've got a few service offerings. One, consultative and advisory. This is where we'll sit with a customer, let's say, in cybersecurity, and help them build their security roadmap for three to five years out. We also have professional services, where we'll install and implement those solutions. We have staffing capabilities, where we'll provide bodies or people to help our customers implement these solutions or train their teams or whatever it might be. And then we have annuity services. So this is where we proactively monitor and manage our customers.
You know, we've seen a CAGR on our managed services of 22% over the last five years. This past quarter, we saw an increase year over year of 28% on our managed services or annuity services, if you will. Then the other thing I'd mention, we've got. That's the technology side of the house. We also have a financing arm, where we can provide very select offerings to our customers, both in terms of how they can procure these technology solutions, but consumption models, OpEx models, and a whole host of other things. I won't. I kinda touched on this, but I think the biggest thing is, as it relates to the cloud and data center, we're able to help our customers customize, modernize their data center, move their workloads to the cloud.
You know, cost optimization, you know, in the cloud, repatriate from the cloud to on-prem. On the security side, it's really about being able to not only provide the, I'll say, the OEM solutions, but the services that our customers need, like vCSO or helping them build a roadmap of what they have to put in place to protect their organization. And then, AI or artificial intelligence, our AI Ignite program, this is where we'll sit with the customer, we'll assess what they're trying to accomplish, we'll assess where they are with their data strategy in terms of the data, whether it's on-prem, in the cloud, the different applications.
You know, data cleanliness, governance, and risk issues, building use cases for them, and then defining what, what are the right vendor solutions or overall solution that's right for their organization to enable them to take advantage of AI. Look, the important thing there is, if you think about it, AI is infrastructure, which we've done forever with compute and storage. It's networking, so in order to do the analysis, you know, with all the data in AI, network bandwidth, network modernization, and then obviously security. So it kinda fits right within our wheelhouse. The services I touched on, so I won't go through this again. But really, the way we look at it is, first to really...
We're services-led, so we'll first sit with a customer to understand what's important, so kind of strategize on what they're trying to accomplish. We'll then recommend what we think the right solution is for them, or right roadmap. We'll look to figure out how to optimize that, whether it's with annuity services or what have you. When we look to accelerate it, it's really trying to help our customers figure out whether it's expense savings, return on investment, you know, TCO-type things, so that they get the full breadth there from the actual consultative strategizing, to creating or architecting the solution, to optimizing that for their environment, and then accelerating either expense savings or return on investment, or what have you. All right, touched on this, on the finance or, financial services.
We've got a segment that's been doing it, in many cases, a lot of the folks have been doing it 25, 30 years here. Basically working with our technology team, but also working with vendors and customers on their own. It's a dedicated team, just providing financial solutions to our customers, that give them some options on how they pay and account for certain solutions. Here's an interesting one that we always get asked a lot of questions. We try to map out where we think we fit within the market, and where we're different as compared to some of our competitors. On the far left are the OEMs. They can go direct to customers, or they can go through distribution, or they can come through partners like ourselves to an end user. The first column is distributors.
There's value-added distributors, and broad line distributors do a great job. Logistics, supply chain, came in handy with COVID, with some of the supply chain issues, right? Little tighter margins, though. As you move up the stack, you have a CDW, PC Connection, Insight, really good companies. You know, traditionally centralized, if you will. I think they're trying to expand out as they move forward, and you can kinda see the difference in the gross margins, and then when you come to an ePlus, where we think we differentiated. Years ago, we kinda went from a product fulfillment to more of a services-led company, so that's kinda helped our margins, our blended margins. We've moved away from commodity products, so that's normally a, you know, pretty competitive business over time, and we're really focused on the solutions that our customers need.
On the right, you have an Accenture. We're not an Accenture, so I don't wanna play that off you. It's just there to kinda show you the margins. They're more kind of business process and things along those lines, where we're more, I'll say, technology-oriented. Being able to provide solutions our customers need to run their businesses day to day. Acquisitions, just a... I won't go through each acquisition, but in the acquisition history here, the thing to point out, we look for four things. We look for territory coverage, so a lot of these have either gotten us into a new territory that we're able then to expand, based on ePlus capabilities. They may have a particular expertise, whether it's in security, whether it's in cloud, like with OneCloud, or whether it's services-related, so we look at that.
We then look at their customer base, and a lot of times they have some really good customers that we're then able to go back with everything that ePlus sells. So kinda, you know, enhance what we're providing to that customer, and then we look at the teams. And a lot of times, we've picked up some really talented folks, both in sales, service, or support functions, and what have you. I won't go through this too long with the customer base, but as you can see, we've got some, you know, Fortune 100, Fortune 1000, Fortune 500 customers. If you look down the bottom, it kinda shows the breakout in the percentage. Normally, our top five verticals are, you know, technology. I'll call it SLED, state, local, and education, telecom and entertainment, financial services, and healthcare.
And those are pretty much the top five every quarter or every year. As you can see, some of the customers that are in that sector, in those verticals. Then, last, I'm not gonna go into this in detail, but the point of this slide is to highlight, no matter what the customer's doing, so whether it's around disaster recovery and backup, whether it's around a vCSO, so where they need help building their security roadmap and may not have the resources in order to do it, whether it's around data center migration and modernization, right? Or storage-as-a-service. We've worked with a few of the top storage vendors to create a storage-as-a-service solution, where it gives our customers the option where they don't have to pay for everything upfront. It's paid for over time.
It's kind of a consumption model with SLAs, so and then allows them to expand their storage capabilities as needed, as compared to having to make that decision all upfront, so with that, I think I'll turn it over to Elaine here. Pretty sure. Oh, nope, sorry. One last slide I forgot about: the Customer Innovation Center. The only reason we put this in, we had a lot of clients that, you know, when you think about AI, you know, walking them through all the capabilities we have with warehousing, logistics, configuration, all the things that go with it, a briefing center. We have the ability with our labs that we're building, not only here, but also with one of our colo partners, where we can actually show them the technology in action.
So this is just kind of another step in our growth as we continue to expand, of how we can support our customers' needs and also show them what we're able to deliver for them from core to edge effectively. And now I will turn it over to Elaine.
Thank you, Mark. Hello, everybody. My name is Elaine Marion. I'm the Chief Financial Officer. Wanted to give you a quick overview of some of our results over the last five years. We are a March year-end filer, so we just finished our year-end and published that in May. Our net sales CAGR over the five years was 9%, and our gross billings CAGR was 11%. The gross billings consist of what we actually bill and collect from our customers in a quarter, right? So how much did we bill in a quarter? And the reason why this is important is because it really goes to show our market share, and it also helps to explain some of the balance sheet metrics you may be running, for example, a DSO.
Because the amount that we're billing is this gross billing number, but the net sales number is lower, and it's lower because some of the revenue that we produce or the billings that we produce has to be netted down, because it's being transacted or being provided by someone else. So, for example, if we sell Cisco Smart Net, which is a maintenance product, Cisco is providing that maintenance, not ePlus, but we are selling it, so we're billing and collecting it. But under the accounting guidelines, I can only recognize the gross profit in that arrangement as a net sale. So you can see there's a pretty big delta. It's about $1 billion, from $3.3 billion to $2.2 billion in fiscal 2025.
So it's an important metric that we like to show, folks, from the perspective of our balance sheet and also market share. We conduct our operations through really two businesses. Mark touched on the financing business that contains our leasing and financing solutions. We have three segments within our technology business, which is product, managed services, and professional services that we disclose. The majority of our net sales are derived from our technology business, about 98% or so in fiscal 2024. Turning to services revenue, we have a very strong push and focus on services that Mark talked about. It's really brings a lot of value to our customers, so this is a huge focus of ours.
Our CAGR on our total services revenue has been 11% over the year, with our managed services CAGR being about 22% over the past five years. So that's been growing very rapidly. It's a big focus of ours as well. Our professional services segment includes professional services such as configuration, project-related services, cloud consulting services, and any security services. Our managed services include service desk, monitoring devices, storage-as-a-service or cloud-hosted services. Our cloud managed services and managed security services are also in that segment as well. Our gross margins in both segments have been increasing over time. Our PS margins are affected really by the mix between staff augmentation and our project-related services.
Our managed services margin has been increasing, and that's really due to our scaled growth as our solutions that we offer in this category continue to mature. Our managed services gross profit CAGR has been 30% over that five-year period. Turning to total consolidated gross profit, it's increased at a compound annual growth rate of 9% over the past five years. Our consolidated gross margin ended in fiscal 2024 at 24.8%. Our technology business gross margin, so that's consolidated on the technology business, has grown from 22.3 to 23.4, and that's really as a result of expanding our services solutions portfolio, as well as the netted down sales that I talked about a little bit earlier.
In terms of net earnings and EPS from fiscal 2020 to 2024, our net earnings compound annual growth rate was 14%, and our diluted EPS growth rate was 14%. So both obviously above the top-line growth that we had in both gross billings and net sales. Our non-GAAP EPS, just so you know, is pretty clean. It excludes share-based comp, acquisition expenses, the acquisition amortization, and other income and expense from that perspective. Turning to adjusted EBITDA, our compound annual growth rate for our adjusted EBITDA was 12%. Our definition of adjusted EBITDA does not add back the interest expense and depreciation expense from our financing segment. We really believe that those are cost of goods sold from our perspective, so we do not add those back.
So it's a nice, clean definition of Adjusted EBITDA as well, and has been growing at a good clip from that perspective. Turning to our headcount, we ended our fiscal year with 1,900 employees. We're obviously focused on acquiring sales and engineering-related professionals, which resulted in customer-facing personnel increased by 264 employees from fiscal 2020 to 2024, which represents about 82% of our total increase in headcount. It really shows that we are leveraging our operational infrastructure as we continue to expand. And then we held our employee count heading steady at June thirtieth, with 1,907. Okay, in terms of the balance sheet, really strong balance sheet, unlevered. We have $350 million in cash at the end of June.
That's about $97 million dollar increase from $331, our fiscal year end. Our financing portfolio investments are about $194 million. The corresponding debt to those investments are the non-recourse notes payable that you see on the balance sheet, and that was $41 million. So the delta between those two numbers represents cash that we have invested in our portfolio. We can monetize that portfolio by selling those lease streams for a transactional gain should we need additional cash on the balance sheet. In addition to that, we have a $500 million dollar credit limit with Wells Fargo for our technology business, had a very long-standing relationship with them as well. Just to highlight, our operating cash flows have improved from previous years.
We ended the year with operating cash flows, inflows of $248 million, versus cash used in the prior year, $15 million. And that's continued for this quarter as well, where we see positive effect on that. In terms of our guidance, we did issue guidance in May of twenty twenty-four, when we announced our year end, and that guidance was reaffirmed on August 6th during our conference call, and that is revenue growth between 3%-6% over the prior fiscal year, and Adjusted EBITDA of between $200 million-$215 million. And that's all I had for prepared remarks. Greg?
Okay. Okay, all right, great. Maybe we could just start off with a broad or general comments about the economy, what you're seeing in terms of spending intentions amongst your customers. Have you seen any changes there? Or, you know, I guess, you know, the markets you're in have been pretty robust, and the demand's been there, but are you seeing any changes in the conversations you're having with the customers?
Yeah, so far, no dramatic shifts one way or the other, Greg, as it relates to prior quarters, with our customers in terms of their IT spend or what have you. We are seeing some things that's interesting as it relates to AI. We're excited with AI and where we're positioned within that market. I think it's a little bit of a headwind because a lot of customers are trying to figure out how to take advantage of AI. So it's a little bit of a headwind before it becomes a tailwind. The good thing, you know, I kind of noted we've been in business over 30 years, and we've kind of adjusted, whether with COVID, the fiscal cliff in two thousand and nine, you know, you know, and technology changes from cloud to AI to what have you. We feel pretty good that we're in the markets that our customers need solutions, and we're well-positioned there.
Okay, you mentioned AI. Could you just, maybe give us a little bit more color on exactly what your AI practice looks like now?
Sure. If you look at it, we call it AI Ignite, but if you think about it in its simplest term, is we've got consultants or engineers that'll meet with our customers to basically walk them through the checklist of things that they have to think through. So we do AI envisioning sessions, we do data strategy sessions, we do workshops, we do proof of concepts, and this is where we'll sit with the customer to make sure they understand, first, you got to start with your data. It's all a data-first strategy, 'cause you gotta understand where your data is. You've got to understand what data you want to make part of your AI project or use case. You've got to make sure that there's a data cleanliness.
You've got to make sure there's governance and risk in play, you know, in place, in terms of who has access to that data. Once you've decided on that, you then got to decide what use case you want to use it for. So whatever that might be, that'll help you drive your business or, create expense savings and things along those lines. Then, you start to get down to think about the analytics that goes on with AI, and the compute power you need, the storage you need, the network bandwidth that you need, the power and cooling, and is your data center capable of what is needed from a power and cooling, or do you have to leverage a colo or do something different?
So, it's really from start, is more of a consultative understanding what the customer is trying to accomplish, and then are they really ready, both from a first from a data strategy standpoint and a security standpoint, and then we start to talk about the infrastructure that's needed in order to provide the results that they're looking for.
Okay, great. And I guess, is there any way to quantify, like, how much revenue is coming from AI right now? And I kind of talk about the AI opportunity, and I look at what you do with security, cybersecurity, and building up that practice. So I'm just trying to kind of get a feel for, you know, how big AI is right now and, you know, maybe what you think the potential is there. Could that grow to a 20%+ part of your adjusted gross billings over time?
Yeah, you know what's interesting on that, Greg? One, we think the opportunity is big, and it's obvious when you look at the NVIDIA's and others that are out there. Right now, it's more of a service opportunity from a consultative advisory, and then over time, it's gonna play within all the spaces. But here's the interesting part: we're doing some of these envisioning sessions, and some customers are seeing that maybe they're not ready to make the investment, a full investment in AI, or they haven't identified a use case that they're comfortable with. What we're seeing is, besides the service opportunity, we're getting infrastructure opportunities, where maybe they're doing some things around their compute or their storage. You know, we've created storage-as-a-service opportunities.
We're seeing some customers that have looked at their cloud costs, and in working with us around AI, have decided to try to move that on-prem, you know, both from a security and from a cost perspective. So it kind of goes across everything we do. There's obviously a big security play with this, along with everything else that we sell. So I think it's gonna fall in a lot of different buckets, but in terms of creating opportunities and the size or TAM of the market here is pretty big.
All right, great. And then maybe you could talk about M&A a little bit. Are there areas of that you need to fill in, in terms of technical capabilities, to fully address these opportunities? Are there areas you're looking to fill out? And then maybe also from a geographic perspective, you know, could you just talk about maybe where you're concentrated and where there might be opportunities for you to expand through M&A?
Yeah, sure. So there's a few things we look at with M&A. So first is kind of territory coverage. So if you look, you know, at the map, there's many areas within the United States. So even though we've got over 4,600 customers, there's still many parts of the U.S. where we don't have coverage, meaning we don't have teams in place to cover those accounts. So that's kind of first thing we look at from an M&A. Second is we look at the expertise that a company has that we may acquire. And we've picked up some great cloud security services companies throughout the year, and then what we do is we leverage the financial wherewithal and all the resources that ePlus brings.
We look at their customers, and a lot of times they have some great customers, Greg, that we're able to go back and sell everything we have, not only on the technology side, but also on the finance side, and then we picked up some great people over time. So, it's kind of limitless. Elaine kind of touched on it. At the end of last quarter, we had $350 million in cash. Our working capital was strong, if we wanted to leverage that, right? So there's a lot of things that we can do, as it relates to a capital allocation plan.
We also have a stock buyback in play, which I know doesn't address your M&A, but from a capital allocation, we have the ability, both from organic hires, M&A, stock buyback, to make moves that should help shareholders in ePlus over time.
And then the M&A pipeline. You know, I know, obviously, you just highlighted how all the cash you have on the balance sheet. What does the pipeline look like? Are valuations reasonable? Like, what's the opportunity set for you looking like now?
The pipeline's always there, Greg, to be honest, even through COVID. The difference, though, during COVID, I think people's expectations on multiples were a little unrealistic. That's starting to change, so the multiples are starting to get more normalized and come back to where they were traditionally. Pipeline's there, and it's across the board, not only in the U.S., I'll say continental Europe as well, and across all the areas that we'd like to add expertise.
All right, looks like we're almost out of time, but I wanted to get one more in on margins. Obviously, you're investing in customer-facing headcount, sales, and technology employees. How do you balance kind of the growth investments versus leverage, and you know, what should we think about going forward in terms of, you know, where we think the operating margin for the business can get to?
Yeah, that's a great question. So, I won't say we struggle with it. We discuss it all the time. I had mentioned on one of our previous calls, we kind of build a five-year strategy. So we kind of identify where our growth is coming from first. We then look, do we have the resources internally, or is that something we either have to acquire and/or organically add? What normally happens, let's say, use AI as the example, or services. You normally have to make the investment in people and you know, resources and tools before you see the revenue. But what we always do is, in our plans, we look to get operating leverage over time. So specific to your question, we believe we're a growth company.
We'll continue to invest in areas that we think there's growth opportunities for us, as well as our shareholders, and then over time, we'll manage the numbers and the metrics to make sure that we're getting operating leverage with whatever model we wind up with.
All right, perfect. Well, looks like we're at the end of our allotted time here, so I just wanted to thank you, Mark and Elaine, for presenting, everyone else, for listening in, and with that, we will wrap it up.
Thanks, everybody.
Thank you.
Thanks, Greg. See you soon.
Bye.