Thanks, everyone, for joining us this day one of the Wells Fargo TMT Summit down in sunny, tranquil SoCal. Michael Turrin with the software team here. We're pleased to have Roper Technologies, Jason Conley, CFO, Zack Moxcey, Investor Relations here. Thank you both for joining. Hope you had a pleasant Thanksgiving.
We did. It was nice and warm in Florida, so.
Yeah, yeah.
A little chilly for us, but.
Yeah, it's like 65.
Exactly.
Yeah, so at Roper, obviously, from a software perspective, we've seen elevated interest in vertical software over the past couple of years as macro has influenced enterprise software CIO budgets. For those in the room who are less familiar with Roper, maybe you can level set how the portfolios come together.
OK.
Talk about the mix and the markets you go after.
Sure.
What the checklist is for what you're building towards.
Yeah, love to. Thanks for the opportunity. It's our first time here, so appreciate it. So Roper's a vertical market software and technology compounder. And what I mean by that is we consistently and sustainably compound cash flow in the mid-teens over a long market time. And we do that two ways. One is through organic growth for our existing portfolio. And so we think about that today as around 7%. We've had some noise over the last few years, but 7% is kind of where we think we are today. Do a little bit better on that growth in cash flow just because we have great cash flow characteristics. And then secondly is through M&A, which is a little bit different than a lot of the vertical software names out there, just because we have a wider range of markets that we can participate in.
We're not optimizing for one vertical, and so we just use our free cash flow and investment-grade leverage to deploy that, and so that's how you sort of get within the mid-teens. I would say this is a well-worn path in terms of the business model in the industrial space, but we're kind of bringing that into the software realm. When you think about Roper, it's a unique opportunity to own, to your point, vertical market software businesses, and so otherwise, you probably couldn't own those, right? Because they're sort of not going to go public on their own. They're sort of the meat of the bell curves, like $225 million-$250 million, and so we've been known to buy businesses at reasonable prices and make them better over time.
And we think we're on a journey to do both of those vectors better in the future that we can talk about later. So we think we're kind of in the early innings of both capturing more value out of M&A and then increasing the organic growth rate of the portfolio. But just in terms of the markets we play, and we're kind of like in these really small TAMs, right? Like a large TAM for us is going to be $2 billion. The average is probably, what, $700 million-$2 billion TAM. And so we've got market leadership in these sort of smaller TAMs. We know the competitive landscape. There's very little risk of sort of large players coming into it. We price for value. We have high customer value. We can then translate that into really good margins, which you see across our portfolio.
So just think of us as just sort of a vertical market expert, right? We're in 20 different verticals. And we like businesses that are sort of boring, like EdT ech, InsurTech, GovT ech. These are areas that we understand the personas, we understand sort of the buying motion, and we sort of know where things are going. So we stay close to our customer, and we continue to add value through product expansion and innovation and at the margin new logos. We're more of a sort of a mid-90s gross retention, sort of 105-ish net retention type business. And then we top that off with a little bit of new logos.
OK. Is there a way for us to think about or contextualize just the mix of segments that you participate in? I know if I look at just the reporting, it's segmented by application, network, a few different categories. Is that the best way to think about it? Or maybe there's a different way for you to help frame the different markets that you're focused in?
Yeah. So we have three reporting segments today: application software, network software, and technology-enabled products. Within application software and network, about 80% of that revenue is enterprise software, and about 20% is SMB. So when I talk about the characteristics of enterprise software, that's that sort of mid-90s gross retention, 105-ish net retention metrics. SMB has a little bit higher velocity. So you kind of have, in a case of freight matching, you'll have truckers come in and out of the market. So that's a little bit more of an active user sort of profile. So that's how we think about broadly the characteristics of software. And then technology-enabled products, they also are kind of vertical market leaders. They just happen to provide products to their customers.
And then I guess if you kind of want to overlay the market orientation, which can be helpful, but also not, because I'd say 30% of our revenue is health care, but we play in so many different niches. And there's not a lot of volatility, by the way, in sort of what happens in those businesses. So we're not much of a market thematic in terms of the read across as just, again, just sort of narrow range of outcomes, very good businesses in these sort of protected niches.
OK. Can you just talk a little bit about how you frame your target list? Are adjacencies at all important in that maybe there's not direct overlap, but they help bring you towards awareness in a certain area like you highlighted with health care? Or is it more?
Yeah. So I mean, the one thing that is unique, I think, about Roper, which I touched on when we first started, is we have always been all of our capital allocation is centralized. And so our operations are very decentralized. We can talk about later. But in terms of we think that's important because it allows us to deploy capital against the best opportunity in the range of outcomes, things that we see, things that we cultivate, things that come to us. And so how we think about that is, again, it's more about the business model first and then the end market second. And so I think if you looked across the businesses we own, they have a lot of the same characteristics. They just might be in different markets, right?
We're still providing world-class workflow solutions to government contractors in terms of them enabling to do projects at our Deltek business. But we're enabling in our Aderant business, we're enabling law firms to be able to bill accurately, to track time accurately, to do. So those consistent things, what we're so mission critical, that's what we look for versus sort of being thematic on an end market. Now, we want to make sure that market has sort of stable characteristics, and there's not a lot of sort of dynamism, if you will, in the market. Like, for example, we've looked at a lot of great software businesses in the automotive sector, and we just couldn't get comfortable with sort of where the puck is going there, right? So we don't want to be in something that just has a big risk of just where the profit pools are going.
Yeah. OK. That makes sense. Maybe zooming in for a moment on just the most recent quarter and tying that back to some of the key metrics that you use to manage the business. An overview for those of us that aren't as close, what would you point to as the highlights of Q3? And if there are key discussion points you're fielding from investors alongside that, what those might be?
Yeah, sure. So just for Q3 alone, the first thing I always look at, of course, is just like what's our total growth, right? Because of this whole nature of there's two ways we grow. There's organic, and there's the consistent, repeatable M&A that we've done for the last 20 years. So by that measure, revenue was up 13%. Free cash flow, most importantly, was up 15%. So sort of I look at the overall health of the engine. That's sort of the first thing that I would look at. Second is, of course, we look at organic growth of the portfolio. It was at 4%, and that was clearly sort of below where we think our current run rate is. And if you look in the last three years, I mean, you can kind of get a sense.
We grew over 8% the last three years on average, went 8.98%. This year, we got it to 6%. We knew coming into the year, the second quarter and the third quarter were going to kind of be the nadirs for us. And so we feel really good. And there's very specific reasons. I'll just illustrate very quickly. Talked about this before, but our freight match businesses that are in our network software segment had absolutely explosive growth in 2021 and 2022. Because what we do is we enable the spot freight market in the U.S. So carriers, truckers, and brokers subscribe to be. It's like an Angie's List for loads, right? And so when you think about what was happening in supply chain mania and sort of existential shocks, rates went through the roof. Carriers came into the market in just record levels.
Throughout 2022 and most of 2023, those carriers were sort of coming out of the market. In 2024, we're actually for the first time since we've owned the business, it's actually down in 2024 just as those carriers sort of have kind of come out, and we're comping that this year. That's like 50-60 basis points right there. We have a business called Northern Digital in our tech segment. Product business has been a consistent high single, low double-digit grower for us every year. They had a massive program with a big OEM last year that we're comping. We had talked about that. It's not like we talked about it in 2023 when it was happening. We're dealing with comps there.
And lastly, the supply chain comps from not only some of our software businesses, but especially our product businesses, they had tremendous growth in 2023 that we're sort of cycling through this year. And we did talk about that in 2023 as well. So I mean, the tech segment alone was up mid-teens last year. That's not normal because, again, supply chain had finally liberated. So we feel like the 2024 year is the best year we've had since 2019 to then sort of have a normalized sort of growth against. And we talked about we're going to sort of we think, again, Q3 is the nadir. We're going to inflect back up to in the mid-single-digit plus area in Q4. And that should provide at least a good starting point for how we think the initial shape of 2025 is going to be.
OK. Appreciating that you're a portfolio of many different businesses. You've touched on a couple of things. You mentioned government contract-related workflows and freight matchings. I'm wondering if there's anything tied to a new administration in the U.S. or things embedded in what could potentially become swing factors for 2025 within some of your segments, even if it evens out across the entire portfolio.
Yeah. We wrestle with this question as many companies do. I think we just had our annual operating plan reviews with our businesses. Not a lot is coming down the pike. We're sort of wrestling with what the tariffs could mean. Of course, we want to just kind of get ahead of that and make sure that we're operating from a position of strength with our customers. If we have to take on those tariffs, we're not going to plan to absorb any of that. But I would say I'll give you just a data point. Our CEO from our Deltek business, again, large government contractors, they also have that's 60% of the business, 40% private sector, a bunch of other industries.
But they just had their user conference, and they had a lot of executives there from some of the big government contractors that you would think would be impacted. He was listening. He was listening for, are you hearing any issues related to DOGE or the like? And they're not concerned at all. They've lived through many cycles of this. And again, we know that this is very unique. So we'll see how it plays out. But we're keeping an eye on it. But so far, we're not thinking. Again, our businesses are very specific niches. We buy businesses that have a narrow range of outcomes that are typically not susceptible to changes in legislation, right?
Yeah. I mean, it's something we've been noodling on in software because election cycles rarely insert meaningful change. But there is a question on if this focus on efficiency could be something software-enabled in some way?
Yeah, and we were actually talking about that an hour ago. I think we're on the right side of that equation in terms of, and we're working on this today. Deltek has a solution called Della that is now creating. It's a GenAI LLM within the system that's actually automating the workflows for their customers. So again, just trying to, I think we're on the right side of that equation, and we're working on making our customers more efficient every day. So we feel good about that.
OK. Maybe we can touch on just the Transact Campus acquisition, relatively recent, closed in late August. If there is a way for you to use that as a case study to kind of speak to what led you into that specific market and then what you're expecting on a go-forward basis from the company as well.
Sure. Yeah. So Transact, and I'll touch on we've had two archetypes that are a little bit different for us in the last, whatever it's been, a year, a little over a year now. We've done two very large bolt-ons for reasons that I'll talk about, but we've followed Transact for many years. They actually came from Blackboard. They were spun out of Blackboard into private equity, and so we followed them for a long time, and we found that there is a better together story there, so we've kept really close relationships with the sponsor. We followed management. We've developed relationships with management, and it was a proprietary deal for us, and what we've done is we've actually combined it with our CBORD business, so both our CBORD business today, about 60% of it plays in higher ed. About 40% of it plays in the health care space.
But the higher ed matches perfectly with Transact. And the value creation there is that we can cross-sell products across different colleges and university campuses, right? So Transact today, they have a campus ID solution and a commerce solution. So it allows the student to get anywhere with their mobile device. They can pay for anything on campus, off campus. They also have, though, a payments solution. So it allows parents to fund tuition, fund all the ancillary stuff. So that goes straight through processing to somebody's phone. And they're a little bit more advanced than CBORD. So we have the ability to cross-sell the new solution into CBORD. And CBORD has a which sort of the heritage came from health care, but they actually have a pretty good beachhead in college and university, which is back-of-the-house food management systems for large campuses.
So we'll be able to cross-sell that over to the Transact base. And then there's just a natural one thing Transact we were really attracted to is they've developed a very slick cloud-native solution for their campus ID product. And so we'll have a lift on both sides for that. But not only can we cross-sell, but we can also lift everybody into the cloud. So we like the business because college and universities, obviously, isn't like a high-growth market. But we're in the right swim lane here in terms of creating a digital experience. It's an expectation for students now that they're not going to scan cards. They're not going to, so there's a digitization wave that we really like, that that's how universities differentiate today. It's campus experiences. At the margin, that's what they're looking for. So there's still great demand in a sort of flat-ish market.
Significant tuition increases.
That helps too, especially when you're doing payments, right? So that's helpful.
Maybe zooming back out a bit, I think an important piece of your just philosophical underpinning is this view on decentralized versus centralized in terms of how you bring the acquisitions together. So maybe you can level set your view and why that's been as advantageous, proven as advantageous for Roper over time as it has.
It's super important. It's part of our ethos, right? It's where when I joined the company in 2006, it was super attractive to me coming from a bigger conglomerate where the center sort of thought that they had better answers just to put those, and we had a CEO that was super passionate about how local decision-making is really powerful, so if you think about Roper, we operate in these small markets, and a lot of times, our competitors are small too, so we have to really be super nimble, and so we think that speed really matters, and that's sort of the first aspect. The second is you get super high levels of accountability. These general managers, these presidents, they feel very accountable for their financial results, and so they have most that come here, they really like working here.
We're kind of like the sweet spot between being in private equity and having that sort of a little bit more autonomy and being in a big company where you have the resources of a big company. It's kind of that Goldilocks feel. So it's a great place to work. There's certainly very high expectations to be a leader in Roper. So we are able to attract really good talent because of that sort of environment. So that's just another component of it. And I think what's underpinned the ability for us to scale from a decentralized perspective is that our incentive system is, I think, very differentiated from most companies. We pay based on growth, year-over-year growth. We don't pay based on a budget. And so when you have that dynamic, there's just a tremendous amount of just natural trust that you can build.
Obviously, you have to develop relationships with people. That's super important. There's no sort of underpinning of, are you calling me because you need a favor on your budget or whatever. I think we get all of the noise out of the system when we do that. I would just also say that as we've evolved and we've improved the quality of our leadership over the last four or five years.
This is Roper.
Roper. We've defined what's new.
Reverend Hugh?
Yeah. No, no. Not the corporate.
Transact.
Yeah. Me aside, of course. No, I mean, at the field level, we took a hard look at what's defined a really great leader at Roper and then sort of gone through the portfolio and said, how do we sort of improve the characteristics? And when we hire against these characteristics, we go take them through a test and everything. So it's pretty scientific. So we feel good about that. We've placed 14 or 15 leaders over the last four years. But we really like the early returns. Again, all in the pursuit of higher organic growth. You get great leaders. You put a great incentive system in place, you're going to like at least you've got the good roots of what could happen there. So anyway, that's my rant on decentralization.
No, that's good.
One quick thing I was going to add was I know that was more of an operations question. But if you think about it, the fact that we're decentralized expands our opportunity set in terms of what we can acquire. And so we have this structure set up. We have this governance set up. As long as it's a high-quality business model and it's an attractive end market, it doesn't have to have anything to do with the 28 niche markets that we're in today. So I think there's an aspect of expanding the ways in which we can deploy capital and acquire businesses is helpful too.
OK. That's super helpful. I guess I'm just, how do you evaluate in that conversation culture the leadership traits within the company? Are you looking for opportunities for improvement, or are you looking for kind of an already tight-knit culture where you can find it?
That's a great question. I would say if you asked me that question four or five years ago, having management convey what the deal was like number one or number two in terms of this thing working or not. Back to what I've said just previously is that we've gotten much better at recruiting and identifying what a great leader looks like through innate leadership characteristics that we test against. So we sort of take now, it's not perfect, but at least you're increasing your odds of success with doing that in addition to eight of us interviewing a leader. So we kind of, it's not as important anymore, but we're going to hire if that leader is not going to work within our environment, and they typically have to be super competitive.
They're going to need to be, but also continuous learners, which is kind of like a powerful combination because that means they want to win, but they also want to learn. And they want to learn from not only us, but also their counterparts in the business. And so we do a lot of best practice sharing. We've been doing a lot of that in the last few years. But also like a builder, right? That's really important because we don't want people that are here to transact. Again, we recruit good leaders from private equity. But they're at a point where they've been on that hamster wheel. They're not building a business. They're sort of renting a business, if you will. And they want to be here for the long term. So that's super helpful.
Then back to your question, how do we inspect if a leader is leading the right way? They're all doing engagement surveys. And most of them are doing under with one provider. And so we have the ability to look at that and understand, are they leading development, developing, and engaging their employees? And so we're pretty rigorous about that. It's super important for us. It's one of our if there's three things that we're focused on with our businesses is do they have a data-driven strategy? And do they know what choices they're going to make? Which I know that sounds like super like, duh, they've got to have a good strategy. But think about, as I said before, the meat of the bell curve for us is like a $225 million-$250 million business. They've never actually done strategy at a higher level. They were product-market fit.
They went into private equity. There was that sort of season, and now they're really doing strategy, so it's strategy, it's strategy execution, which is we're kind of evolving that. Sort of how do we actually translate that strategy into sustainable continuous improvement at the detail level? And again, that's through tools and techniques, and then people that I just talked about, team and talent, super important.
How do you manage all of this kind of rolling up from the CFO perspective? How involved are you in each individual P&L? And then what enables the margin structure given this decentralized approach? Those are traits that you're going after? Or are there ways you're able to kind of help express better expense control within the businesses?
From my vantage point, the good news is because I'm part of the M&A team that we develop a pretty deep knowledge of each business that we acquire over time. You have a really good start because you're looking at the market. You're looking at the margins. You're looking at everything. That's always helpful to kind of have that base. From there, it's kind of a portfolio approach. I mean, everything sort of everybody's on different systems. We use FCC or Hyperion to sort of get all of our information and cut the data a million different ways. We've been really pushing sort of best-in-class software metrics. That's been really important for me as I've come into the role. We're on that maturity curve to have our businesses be able to report better.
And so I look at it more from a portfolio versus we'll do the deep dives, of course. Every quarter, we have an operating review with each of our businesses. They all have a 15-page package they go through. So a lot of it's auto-populated. But then they have to do the analysis. So I look at every single one of those packages. We have annual operating plans with every business. Each year, we just finished ours for two weeks, the two-week sprint for our 28 businesses. We did all 28. So we'll get deep in those businesses. And then we'll do strategic plans with each business every three years. And that's a deeper dive where we're doing a market study. And we're sitting together for six hours or so to kind of go through, again, strategic choices and how they're going to resource that and the like.
So that's sort of how I think about managing that.
Super interesting.
Yeah.
I'm going to peek over Zack for a minute. We have 11 minutes. I do want to leave room for the audience to ask questions. So I'll pause for a moment. If anyone has something they'd like to insert into the conversation, feel free to raise your hand. I'll look through the extremely bright light.
If you could see anything.
If I could see any hints. And if not, we can keep going. There's one here. I don't know if we have a mic. Or if you want to just recite the question, I can repeat it into the mic. Oh, sorry, Zack.
Zack's getting in. Put him in that action here.
Didn't mean to put you in that spot, Zack.
Thank you. With respect to M&A, could you just talk about desirability of deploying capital within more software-focused end markets versus more of the product businesses? And then obviously appreciate all the detail on the software strategy and so forth. But if you could talk a little bit more about Neptune as maybe one example and provide a little bit more of like a growth, how does that factor into the growth algo you provided, high single digits on the software side?
Sure.
Thank you.
In terms of capital deployment, if you look at the last 20 years, 95% of our capital deployed has actually been into software. I think you'll probably see that continuing. If we're going to do M&A for our product businesses, it'll be bolt-ons. Most of those businesses are turned on for M&A. That's where you could see us deploy capital to product businesses, mainly through bolt-ons. The second question was about Neptune. Neptune's been a fantastic grower for us. They operate in a pretty established market. Again, a lot of the same characteristics as software, a lot of recurring revenue from that business because they provide. So Neptune provides water meter and technology and meter collection data. There is a software element to the business today as well. There's just a high replacement market there.
So 80%+ of their revenue is recurring in nature. So it's just a wonderful business from that perspective. And then what's been exciting for them is that we're moving from a mechanical meter to an ultrasonic meter. And so you have sort of improved characteristics of a meter over its life. And so better measurement of the water coming through the meter. And so that's better for municipalities. They can obviously bill for the accurate. It doesn't degrade over time like a mechanical meter does. And so its growth profile, there's been some noise with COVID and some of the catch-up and the like. But with that move to ultrasonic, with some of the tailwinds from some of their technology, their software technology, and meter data management, it's been a high single-digit grower for us. And so we expect that to continue in time.
I think the other thing is just looking at other technologies that they could do that would be exciting. So they're another one that's turned on for M&A where historically they have not been.
Can you just speak to your view on the M&A environment, maybe both now and how that's looked over the past one to two years?
Yeah.
Because we're in the point in the software cycle where we would have generally seen more consolidation. But rate environment has changed. And I think other elements have changed as well. So maybe your perspective on that would just be informative.
Sure.
For those of us kind of looking more broadly.
It's been weird. I think for us, in private because we mostly deal with sponsors, and so there's always a continuous flow of buying and selling, and what you saw over the last 18 months, as rates went up, there was this bid-ask spread that just continued to live through. And so definitely throughout 2023 and then to a lesser extent in 2024, processes would start and stop. This year, they're like not even starting because a sponsor might be worried about some of the trailing EBITDA, and so they're kind of waiting to get the thing ready to go to market, and so we actually thought 2024 was going to be a lot busier, but I think because of that dynamic, they're waiting, kind of kicking it for 2025. But we do really believe 2025 is going to be very, very active in terms of private equity needing.
But the whole reason I think that they need to sell is they need to get money back to their LPs. And that drumbeat is getting louder and louder. So they know it's going to happen. And so we feel good about that, obviously, just in the position that we're in. I'm trying to think of anything else. That's really the.
No, that's helpful. Does that increase the cadence of what you're evaluating? Or have you been kind of at a similar cadence just waiting?
It's been, yeah, it's been more kind of earlier stage access to and maybe more access to certain parts of businesses than we would have before. So that's sort of one that's one vector, which is lots of conversation with sponsors, lots of early access, and again, increased amounts of information, not just access. And then we're hearing just from the banker community as well, like, this process is fully up. So you get sort of that intel as well.
OK. I mean, another major topic of conversation for the past two years, I think two years ago, ChatGPT just rolled out, and generative AI took the world by storm, literally, at the same time this event was going on. Vertical software has, in many cases, become more favorably viewed within the investor landscape because of less existential fears of AI-related risk, but you did mention AI as part of one evolution of the product story within one business within your portfolio, so I'm wondering how you're evaluating the potential shift towards generative or more AI-based applications, if there's any kind of prior mapping of the move to cloud that you would look at as reflective of Roper's approach, or just anything that you would highlight in that general theme or trend?
Yeah. Yeah, thanks for the question. I think, first of all, the move to cloud, I do think for us, it's been at the pace of our customers. So we haven't done this sort of because we don't want to intend to jump all. There's a lot of disruption that can happen as a result of that. But I think the momentum to the cloud is picking up. And so I do see that as being helpful for us. We've got $900 million of maintenance revenue today that'll go to the cloud eventually. So that'll be a tailwind over the next decade or so. And then in terms of AI, I think we were very. We talked about decentralization.
But in terms of thinking about how do we educate our businesses and really get some leadership and get teams to start working together across Roper to come up with best practices and learning, we did that. So we're sort of 18-24 months into that. So it's been really helpful on the usual suspects from a cost perspective in terms of customer support and development. And so you're seeing back to Deltek, they're using Copilot and Tabnine to do a lot of their developing. And they're seeing that now all of their developers are using it. So we were kind of in a test case six to nine months ago. Now all of them have access to that. And so they're measuring productivity. Haven't yet seen that in the P&L, by the way.
But our whole thing is the more efficiency that we have, the more we would put that back into our roadmap to continue to innovate. And then I think on the revenue side, the revenue generating side, it's back to your point. It's the data access that we have that's tremendous across our businesses and then the knowledge of the workflow. It's the specific question that needs to be asked. I think that's super important. And so because all the technology has been democratized for the most part, our businesses have access to it just like any other player would, any other startup would.
So as long as we continue to be innovative and continue to keep an open mind and, by the way, try different LLMs because some of them are better for different applications and our businesses are experimenting with that, then I think it's going to be super helpful for us, a tailwind for us eventually.
You mentioned Copilot developer-related use case. Did I catch? Is there a customer service or support element to what you're starting to see with?
Some of them are using the off-the-shelf and then customizing it. Some are using their own. And so it's been a bit of a mix. And we've actually.
That automation?
Yeah. We've actually had that. So we've had different tracks of leaders go and have these meetings. And they've kind of done readouts like, well, this is why I decided to go in-house. This is why I decided to go off the shelf. And then they have this little debate. So we've had a little TED Talks on those.
Yeah. It sounds like there's an opportunity to bring thought leaders together.
Definitely. The collective learning of Roper is something that we really have been harnessing the last four years, and it's been great.
Just a couple of minutes left. You sort of started to build towards this and characterizing 2024 and the initial shape of what 2025 could look like. But just with the closing couple of minutes, I would love to hear you sort of talk about what your priorities are for 2025 and what the big kind of three-year milestones Roper is working towards are. And Zack, you're welcome to chime in and help put this out there too.
Yeah. I mean, we're kind of boring. So we just want to kind of continue to.
Boring is good.
Yeah, boring is good. But you know what? We're going to just do more faster for less, right? I mean, we really want to continue. I think if an investor looks at us over a longer period of time, I think we provide a good home because back to what I said, can't own these businesses. And we're going to make them better over a long arc of time. So we're going to continue to pursue excellence in these businesses. And again, I know that sounds trite a little bit. But if you think about our strategy five years before that, we didn't even ask our businesses to go forward. So we're just like in the early innings of this journey. And we still think there's room to grow there. And then capturing more value out of M&A. We have just started that.
We've hired some really great folks. And we're developing world-class processes. We've learned from some of the best sponsors that we work with. So how do we get that better? So again, it's all in pursuit of that sort of mid-teens free cash flow compounding consistently over a longer time. But I think places in somebody's portfolio, that's a good thing to have in all times. And so that's what I think you'll see out of Roper. And in terms of 2025, we just try to get better every year. And so I talked about the three things that we were focused on: team and talent, strategy, and strategy execution. I think we got the first two were kind of well on their way. Strategy execution is an area we're thinking about.
How do we have some exemplar businesses that are really good with their management operating system, even deployments of Lean and Kaizen? How do we share that learning across the portfolio in a Roper way? We don't want to push it from the top. But how do we have a pull system? So I'll give you an example. Our Verathon business, medical device business up in Seattle, world-class Lean Kaizen business. By the way, they happen to be our fastest grower, I mean, consistently because they've been able to create processes around ideating and then developing products. And now they're releasing multitudes of products more today than they did 10 years ago. And so we've got our DAT business in Portland going up to meet with Verathon to say, how do you guys run your business? What's your management operating system? How do you go through the innovation funnel?
How do you go through? So they're starting to learn that. They've taken it back to Portland, which is really cool. And so that's what we're focused on in 2025 is how do we promulgate that out such that everybody's like, I want some of that. Because again, they're all trying to get their bar on higher organic growth. So if we can have that pull system, that's super powerful.
That's great.
No, I think that's it. The only thing I'd add is I know that, like Jason said, I mean, we want to be boring. We want to try and distill it down, and it really is a focus of, in the end, it's about compounding cash flow. And if we're able to continue to improve our organic growth and we're able to continue to capture more value out of the M&A, I mean, I know that sounds oversimplified, but that's the formula to do it, and then the other thing, it's always been a core tenet for us is just keeping things simple. And so I know this will sound like a bumper sticker, simple ideas, powerful results, but that is core.
So as we're doing all of this stuff, maintaining those core tenets in our culture and our engagement with our businesses is key, not the complexity and creep in.
That's great. Simple is good. Jason and Zack, very much appreciate you joining.
All right.
That was great.
Thank you, Michael.