Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the 2025 Oppenheimer Virtual Tech conference. I'm Ken Wong, Software Analyst. Very happy to have with us Jason Conley, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Roper, also Zack Moxcey, Vice President of Investor Relations at Roper. Welcome, guys. Thank you for joining.
Thanks, Ken.
Thanks for having us. Great to see you.
Great to see you too. Jason, Zack, maybe first off, while I think some are familiar with Roper, there probably is a fresh set of eyes, especially from our tech software audience. Perhaps just give a quick overview of kind of what Roper does, and then we can move on from there.
Sure. I'll try to make it brief, but you know, Roper is a vertical market software and technology compounder. What I mean by that is we compound cash flow in the mid-teens sustainably over a long period of time. We're kind of an end of one in the software space. We sometimes get compared to Constellation Software, but they have a completely different motion in terms of their decentralized capital deployment and lower organic growth. Speaking of that, we get to growth in two ways. One is through organic growth of our existing portfolio. We own 29 businesses today that are leaders in their niche vertical markets. We choose small TAMs because of their protective nature. With market leadership, that provides multiple paths to grow and a high right to win in terms of new solutions that we can cross-sell to our customers.
Today we're sort of in the 6%- 7% range. We think our normal range, or if you adjust for some of the items this year, we're sort of in the 7% to 7.5% organic growth, and that converts to around high single-digit cash flow. The second part of that is we take all that cash flow and we invest that into acquisitions. Same sort of profile that we just talked about, leaders in their niches. We fund that with our, like I said, with our cash flow and a little bit of investment-grade leverage. We do that to buy the next vertical leader. You get this continuous growth flywheel from there. I think it's just a unique opportunity for investors to own businesses that they couldn't otherwise own in the public markets, right?
These are great businesses that were in private equity, and we create value based on our long-term investment horizon. We have this proven track record of making businesses, buying at a reasonable price and then making them better over a long arc of time. The punchline today that we want to talk about is we think we can do even better. We're in the early innings of improving our organic growth of the portfolio and capturing more value out of M&A.
Got it. Perfect. Jason, I want to maybe touch on two of the things that you called out. Focus on vertical software. I guess one, I don't know why did you choose that particular pocket of software? There's obviously a lot of great opportunities in the software ecosystem, something like 200+ public companies and 1,000 privates. What's Roper's special sauce to managing this portfolio? Why do you feel you guys can extract this excess value that perhaps wasn't being recognized either in a private setting or in PE?
Yeah, yeah, thanks. I mean, the reality is Roper's been focused on niche markets and kind of verticalized specialized solutions way back 20, 25 years ago. You know, we got into vertical market software back in 2004 with our DAT acquisition. I mean, what we love about it is that we're staying close to our customer. You know, we have customer intimacy. We're really sticky, long-term relationships that give you the high gross retention. Obviously, just really great business fundamentals that you can, you know, the go-to-market's a little bit lower because you're sort of, a lot of it's cross-sell. You know, you can continue to invest in product innovation. Today, like our application software businesses are in the sort of, you know, mid-teens as a percent of revenue. You're still investing back in the business. You can still continue to grow. They have wonderful cash flow characteristics.
We love that a lot of our businesses pay annually in advance. That helps perpetuate the growth flywheel. I think it's just that we, and there's a longer reason we got into software that has to do with, you know, just buying businesses that were better than what we own. We sort of got into it that long ago. It's helped us give pattern recognition on what defines a niche market, how it can't be disintermediated and disrupted, and just how protected it is. We love all the things about vertical market software because of that. I think the secret sauce, it's like a little hokey, but I think it's a lot about structure and culture. On structure, we have these decentralized, the decentralized operations we think helps us. Our speed coefficient is very, very, is a competitive advantage. We're typically competing with other small companies.
Being able to be nimble and having that high accountability at the business unit level, we think really is powerful. When you complement that with the resources we bring to bear with the businesses and sort of this, we're here to support you. We pay you based on growth. There's no, like, there's no shenanigans in terms of them doing things that are sort of incentive-based. We have this sort of culture of high trust and mutual respect. I know that sounds hokey, but it really does work. Like I said, we bring a lot of resources to bear. We're continuing to bring new resources around generative AI. We're doing a lot around that to help our businesses win in that area. We help them with strategy, just best practice sharing around pricing or continuous improvement of product velocity.
This has been a real pivot for us probably three, four, or five years ago. It really started with getting better talent in place in our businesses and then enabling that talent to succeed as Presidents and then as their direct reports. I think the other thing is that it's just all harnessed through our Group Executive roles. These are seasoned operators that, you know, maybe they would go be an Operating Partner in a private equity firm, but they don't want to sit there and just try to optimize for the exit. They don't want to just beat the, you know, put the hammer down on their Presidents on OpEx spend and just grind on them. They really want to think, we're going to own this thing forever. I want to create value.
How can I help my Presidents and their direct reports be the best that they can be? That's sort of the punchline, I think, on our culture and secret sauce.
Got it. It does sound like it's still enabling maybe a startup culture is maybe too, you know, too aggressively worded, but allow them to still be what made them successful, but just with the resources of a large corporation such as Roper.
I think our maturing leader businesses that we've acquired, we bring a ton of sort of maturity and again, doing it not in a sort of standard way, but just like what are the areas where it's gotten to this point, but it can make them successful and going from successful, actually going from, you know, 50- 100 is different than going from 100- 200. Bringing just some disciplines around that where it makes sense, I think is really powerful.
Got it. Earlier you touched on this transition from your current organic growth rate, say mid-singles plus, to something more aspirational. Can you give us a sense of where you hope organic growth can settle? What are some changes both operationally and just how you go about your acquisition strategy that you think will help facilitate this move?
Yeah, so I mean, and just to ground anybody on why we're doing this, I think, you know, historically Roper, you know, was able to basically get 400 or 500 basis points of TSR through multiple re-rate. We're not, we clearly think current environment we're maybe undervalued a bit, but, you know, we're not ever going to bank on as a strategy that we're going to, you know, compound through multiple appreciation. As we looked at how we're going to accomplish just through cash flow growth, sort of mid to high teens free cash flow compounding, we said really we never really even asked our businesses to be ambitious. These are very successful businesses, but we said just don't go backwards, send us your cash and we'll keep the flywheel going. That was really the reason. Like as I mentioned before, it really started with just improving the talent.
So, you know, around selection, engagement, and development, we've been really focused on that for half a decade now. We also aligned compensation. We've always been paid based on growth, but we now have, we now have instruments that allow the business, if they grow up above and beyond their kind of normal run rate. You have to do that over a three-year period to basically have a three-year CAGR of organic EBITDA above and beyond their normal growth rate. They can have significant equity grants. We granted a day one and then they vest in the third year. That gets us like, that can be like private equity type returns for these folks. Now really it's about like, how do we make, so now they've got, you know, we got the right people, we got the right incentives, how do we make them successful?
That's where you'll start to see we have resources at the center now to help with continuous improvement. We have a Roper enablement system that we're building out. One of our leaders at our marathon business is now leading that function. We've hired a couple of people and we're really trying to be like super pragmatic about which businesses, are they ready for it? Do they need it? Are there other competing priorities? We don't want to like get in their way too much. We've got like two or three businesses that are going really deep on everything and continuous improvement. I mentioned before we're doing a lot around pricing. We've got a couple of businesses that are going through an engagement right now on pricing that we ultimately want to harness and expose across the portfolio. Seeing a lot of just really interesting opportunities there.
We just finished one with Deltek and it's super encouraging in terms of what that could mean for their forward growth algorithm. That's kind of where we're at in this. The point is, when we buy a company, we're trying to build sustainable processes and capabilities that compound over time. This isn't like PE where it's just a one-time surge. Having our home, our forever home ownership as a competitive advantage is how we think about that. That ultimately will be going from 7%- 7.5%. We think there's an opportunity to go to high single digits, to hire into high single digits with the portfolio prior to 2023. Of course, we're buying businesses that are growing a bit faster, so that'll just be additive to that.
Got it. Getting to that high single digits, I guess, is there a way to think about how far you can get to that goal with the existing portfolio versus how much will have to be supplemented by things that you guys bring onto the platform?
Yeah, I mean, I think that's what we really are aspiring to have, the sort of pre-2023, you know, 2023 and before portfolio get to that high single digits. The Procare, the Subsplash, Transact, CentralReach, those would all be additive to that number.
Got it. Okay. That's very impressive. You touched on CentralReach, Subsplash. We'd just love some kind of initial feedback. What drew you to those businesses? What have you seen so far in the early days of having those under your wing?
Yeah, and just, I mean, I think our observation over the last 10 years is, you know, we got the question from investors, and I think it was a very astute question: why aren't you buying some of these businesses that are private equity firms? I think we just, we had this sort of, we were in this period of buying stable businesses, but, you know, the math doesn't pencil out that you're not buying as much cash flow if you don't take a little bit of the sort of measured risk. These businesses all have great gross retention, just like the other businesses we own. They're just a little early in their life cycle. It's like, you know, first turn PE, it's not fully optimized from a variety of aspects.
We just think it's an opportunity for investors to realize more organic growth and really outstanding conversion to cash as we drive that higher margin and higher EBITDA. We think it's going to be 30% or more versus like the 2018- 2022 era. That's what we've underwritten, and that's how we're sort of tracking. Just like on CentralReach, it kind of clicks all those, checks all those things off. In addition to being a great vertical market software business that we, you know, we have pattern recognition around that. It's just a little bit earlier, but we understood the competitive landscape and sort of how it's being formed and how their position was in that. It's just a great business that has a lot of market tailwinds.
Just to ground level set, it's a leader in the autism services space, and it enables workflow and administration of what they call ABA therapy. We got 200,000 professionals already using the solution, and it provides the care to individuals with, on the spectrum or related disabilities. Just from a market perspective, there's a lot of tailwinds there. There's a persistent gap in care between the demand and the supply side. We see that being playing out for at least the next five to 10 years. The ABA is a standard of care across the autism space. That's super helpful. There's reimbursement coverage, has been established reimbursement coverage across states and on the commercial side for some period of time. Not a lot, by the way, not a lot of impact on the OBBB in terms of what that does.
Medicaid addresses more adults than children, and obviously children are the biggest learner population as that's where you can have the most impact on individuals. Lastly, what we've seen, and it's been phenomenal, is as the clinics get bigger and get more successful, they end up coming onto our solutions. That's one way. Also, if our customers are buying others, then we're tending to win with the winners. Just a great business, and I can continue to go on about that. Subsplash too, it's just, I think it's another example of buying first-term private equity. We've had a relationship with K1 now for probably two years, and they're definitely mid-market, and they go and they buy from founders.
We were able to buy this business that's an emerging leader, but certainly a proven leader within the church management software space, sort of leading with digital and giving, and then pulling the church management software through with that. Today they're serving 20,000 faith-based organizations. There's a ton of tailwinds in terms of how engagement and giving are more value drivers within that space, higher growing than other parts of the space. This is again another example where we've established good relationships with K1, but more importantly, really won the heart over of Tim Turner, who's the founder there. He's staying on with the business. That was certainly helpful to get that process through. We did that on a proprietary basis, feel really good about what they're doing there. They have an AI, and it's kind of first strategy that will permeate through all of their solutions too.
They bought a company called Pulpit AI about a year ago, and they're using that to then cascade to the rest of their portfolio.
Perfect. Maybe circling back on the organic growth, the acceleration. I think one of the biggest questions we get would be with this change in strategy, what are the downside risks? I think recently you guys called out maybe some early execution dynamics with Procare , which you have quickly course-corrected, but would love to hear from you guys, maybe what are some of the potential hiccups. What are you guys maybe changing or adapting to make sure that you guys minimize those risks?
Yeah, yeah, thanks for the question. I'll kind of start with what we're doing, and then we can touch on Procare . I think, as I mentioned a little earlier, what the diligence around the market, how the market behaves, I think is largely the same. We have pattern recognition around the niche and the vertical and the size of the market, whether it's going to be interesting enough for a major player to come in and spend the capital to get in there to build a product and get distribution. I think that's pretty much all the same. The only thing I would say is we're a lot better on market diligence now because we have these investment partners we brought in who came from the buy side, and they really just help challenge our outside advisors.
They're very highly complimentary, and I would just say have made us a lot smarter on thinking about markets. I'd say also what we've dialed in more is the forecasting, just much more sophisticated around tying our forecast to a value creation thesis that's going to have multiple levers to realize the growth potential. We're not like single threaded on one thing. We do a lot of stress testing of these levers, and we bounce it against what we'd have to believe to, if one of these doesn't work, what else has to index to offset that to mitigate that risk. It's not complete risk mitigation, but it certainly limits the range of outcomes a lot more. I would just say lastly, we're much more aggressive now on people and process.
Sometimes it's hard in diligence to get in there, but we're really making a point to get in and have, we have some diagnostics. Again, we have pattern recognition around just how management's responding to certain questions or how we perceive some of their systems and processes, how quickly they can get information back to us to know that, hey, when we kind of risk score that and we have countermeasures like on day one so that we can help supplement those resources where there may be some gaps. That's it on diligence. I think on execution, we built up functional expertise over the last year across PMO. I talked about that Roper enablement system. There's PMO capabilities in there. We've added some really strong folks on finance and accounting and cyber.
Really, the goal is to do a full core price in the first hundred days to assure that teams are focused on the most important value drivers and we provide the resources where needed. I'd say just on Procare , we did not get into the people and process fast enough. You have to remember this was our first maturing leader. I think we got the strategy, really, we got it right 100%. I feel better about that business today than I did a year ago in terms of their right to win in that market is really strong. There's one competitor that's, it's okay, but they've actually had a third of their workforce laid off. They tried to do this just crazy go-to-market motion, but they've had a lot of folks churn out because the product just isn't as good.
I think in that time too, we were straddling the old and new way of governance around being deferential to our company CEO, and she was a little unwilling to help. That put us behind a little bit. The good news is we've applied those processes now that we have for Transact Campus and CentralReach and now Subsplash. They're all tracking Transact Campus and CentralReach. Obviously, CentralReach is early, but they're off to a great start. We're feeling good about their performance and trajectory.
Got it. Okay, perfect. It probably took me longer to get here than expected, but one common question across every company that's presented today is obviously macro. You guys are both extremely diverse, so arguably, you know, more resilient, but then also, you know, all sorts of potential macro risks that could surface across 29 businesses. I would love to just hear what you're seeing macro-wise in terms of the impacts on your businesses, things that maybe are a little more urgent that you're focusing on, and maybe where maybe things are overblown.
Yeah, I mean, I think we've tried to highlight in our calls, like the big sort of lagging from an end market perspective has been our Deltek government contracting space. Having said that, in the last call, I think we're really excited about what the OBBB can do for the business because, first of all, we've had two years of somewhat malaise. We know there's some pent-up demand. The second, the mix, both the volume that OBBB provides and then the mix of where it's going to go, plays right into the strengths of Deltek GovCon because it's more cost-plus contracts. It's going to defense where tracking project accounting is super important. It gets audited. It's not just for profitability tracking, it's for actual compliance reasons. I just feel good about that.
The question is kind of when that's going to free up, but we know it's there and we know it's going to happen. DAT, the freight market has been a very, very long freight recession. We're obviously not one-to-one with that business, but we're tracking sort of mid-singles right now, but that business is a double-digit grower. We're waiting, we've been bouncing on the bottom from a carrier perspective. Brokers have been fine too. We've been kind of realizing more on price to get us to that mid-singles. We think that we'll exit the year a little bit higher than that. If we get any cooperation from that market in terms of freight, that'll do better. Our foundry business is starting to rebound from an exceptional situation with the writers and actors strike. That's been just challenged, but certainly trending in the right direction.
We think it's going to have positive growth in the second half. That'll be good. I think just like healthcare generally has been strong. Our solutions are kind of on the right side of the equation, especially when you think about Strata, managing costs in the hospital, super important. Insurance has been great. That's a very fairly insensitive business to the macro overall, both at vertical Fortnite pipeline. I'd say education's been pretty, it's been very good on the higher ed side. I think K through 12 has been a little softer with some of the noise going on where the money's going to actually ultimately transfer from the DOE to other avenues. Those are probably the two areas: Deltek GovCon, a little bit at K through 12, and nothing worse at DAT, just nothing, nothing great right now.
Got it. I guess on the freight market, it looks like you guys, at least there, are somewhat validating comfort there. I saw a recent acquisition of Convoy. Not sure to what extent you can comment on that, but would love any early feedback in terms of maybe the intent, what you guys see as synergistic there.
Yeah, I mean, we're really excited about DAT. We talked about this a couple of years ago in terms of, like, that's a great platform for us to do more value-added acquisitions. We hadn't done, we'd only done one in the first 20 years of ownership. We bought Trucker Tools about, you know, whatever it is, nine months ago. We acquired Alko last quarter, first quarter, and now Convoy. It's basically taking DAT that used to be a hitching post, a Craigslist, literally like no transactions. It's just a way for parties to get together and figure out what they're going to do off the load board, right? It's just a way for them to, it's information sharing. They pay a subscription. It's super, you know, it's a super great business, but how do we essentially turn this into a marketplace where transactions can happen?
You know, a carrier can get its financing that it needs for a load through Alko. Brokers can now track carriers in the marketplace via the Trucker Tools solution. Now brokers, because, I mean, this is like a really good time for us to do this Convoy acquisition because the brokers are really trying to figure out how to save, you know, cut costs. You can do that through certain loads or they can automatically match them for more simplistic loads. Convoy brings that capability to a broker that they didn't have before. Just for background, Convoy was owned, it was its own brokerage. That failed because you need neutrality in that. If they're, how could they sell brokerage solutions to another broker? That doesn't work. DAT is the ultimate Switzerland. We're really excited about what this is going to mean for the business long term.
There's obviously quite a bit of integration work that's going to go on, but this just leaps us forward a lot. It doesn't come at the expense of the load board. There's always going to be a need for both of those solutions within the spot marketplace.
Got it. Okay, perfect. Sounds super exciting. More to look forward to there. On the topic of M&A, you guys have consistently called out the $5 billion of capacity. Maybe just refresh us on kind of how ambitious you guys are looking to approach the market, kind of why you feel comfortable with the pipeline. Obviously, lots of puts and takes in the markets right now, but would love your view on how attractive the environment is.
Yeah, I mean, it's been just a kind of a weird environment for the last couple of years, as you know. I think it's been interesting for us because we've had the opportunity to have proprietary looks in portfolios that other PE sponsors wouldn't have. The reason for that is that we're not really, like if we end up taking a peek at a deal and doing a few weeks of work and then saying no, it's not looked at as a failed process. Whereas if another sponsor does that, it kind of gets out into the market and then that can kind of make it sour, it makes the asset sour in the minds of, so then it's like they can never sell it. For us, it's like there's quite a bit of abundance. There's been a logjam for three years.
We think it's going to emerge at the end of this year and maybe early next year, but right now it's really interesting for us because we're getting some unique looks. We have a couple of big ones right now that could, you know, it might happen or might not, but it comes down to price too, of course, just being super disciplined around valuation and paying relative on a sliding scale of growth. It's always an important part of this. We also think that some interesting deals where a great business, but the AI opportunity is actually not as interesting. It's not necessarily they're going to go out of, there's one business we look at is just super, super sticky.
I don't see them getting displaced by AI, but we also know that they don't have rights to any rights at all to even use the customer's data, even improve the product because the nature of the end market is so risk-averse. We said, well, that's not interesting at all. That's not going to be a growth catalyst. We walked away from it. It's just an interesting time as we look at deals where certainly our AI lens on both the opportunity and the risk is much higher than it used to be.
Got it. Would you say that that AI lens has intensified over the last year, year and a half, or that that could arguably be a deal breaker in some of these transactions now?
Yeah, I mean, it's intensified, right. I think we've always been looking for ways that a business can be disintermediated. I think we've been obviously in the AI, GenAI flow of knowledge flow and where it's going to be going for the last year and a half. I wouldn't say it's intensified. Candidly, as you know, there just hasn't been many assets that have been transacted. We quickly can understand that maybe something's not going to be as attractive, because everybody puts GenAI in their sales slides now. You have to click down, you have to pierce through what the real substance of that is. I'd say it's been on our radar for a year and a half to two years. I wouldn't say it's intensified, but we're probably getting smarter if anything. Yeah.
Got it. Understood. Another question that comes up a lot on this particular topic, and it's obviously a very fluid market, is an open IPO window, closed IPO window? I mean, should we view that as good, bad for Roper?
I'd say just sort of indifferent because most of what we're acquiring probably is too small to go public. I mean, especially if it's owned by PE, we've seen how that doesn't really work out too well. They have that overhang and it's kind of dead money. IronLink finally got bought today. That was a Thoma Bravo business that had been out sort of languishing for a couple of years in the public market. I just don't think, especially in the sponsor world, doing an IPO is very attractive, especially for the types of things that we would be interested in.
Got it. Okay, perfect. This is kind of building on that prior topic, but I guess what is your, you know, kind of the Roper view on AI? How are you guys rolling that out across your various business units? Obviously from your seat, any thoughts on internal use cases? How does that potentially translate to leverage for some of these businesses that you guys are looking at?
Yeah, I mean, I know it's like every company says this. You have to take everybody because, yeah, sure, you know, I don't believe you, but we're all the admirers and we're all going to be winners, right? Certainly, obviously across our portfolio, there's some that are more at risk. We've talked about Foundry than others that have a tremendous opportunity like Deltek. Luckily, Foundry is, you know, orders of magnitude smaller than Deltek. We feel good about that. We do think we have all of our businesses right now going and looking through their value chain and how the value chain is going to change over time. It just points to this massive TAM expander for us if we can replace or augment labor with agents. I think we're excited about the pace of innovation picking up. The pace of learning is picking up across the organization.
The AI mindset shift is happening. We're quite decentralized in our operations and we provide, I talked about all these resources, but on this one, you know, Neil is definitely leaning in much more. I don't think the presidents are getting annoyed with it. He's sending stuff every Monday on like, here's some thought leadership, here's how you have to think about things. We're not being prescriptive, but we're certainly providing a wealth of information that we get the benefit of sitting in our seat. We're spending a lot of time with venture capital. We went out to meet with Andreessen Horowitz, I don't know, a few weeks ago. We have a constant dialogue with them. We've had an MIT Learning Day for all of our presidents who went out to MIT and did a whole day through that.
We see a lot of opportunity of selling products separately, be it like a, you know, CentralReach does that today. Aderant has their own solutions that are separate. ConstructConnect has its own takeoff solution that is separate. Or like this halo effect monetization in other places, like, you know, now we'll put all the only AI features in the Deltek cloud. These stubborn government contractors are going to have to finally get off, you know, off the on-prem solution and get to the cloud. We'll have sort of like an accelerant of lift there or, you know, even Aderant, you know, being able to cross-sell things that aren't AI today, but are going to be AI faster. They are sort of tracking that.
Internally, I think when we are doing more of these learning seminars, the Chief Technology Officer of Deltek did one a few weeks ago on productivity and some specific use cases using Cloud Code. They are going to have a product they were going to release in a year and a half that now looks like it is going to be first half next year, just because they have been able to get the MVP out, iterate on it, and continue to use the modern kind of code development. I think the one area that we are still really trying to figure out is how to refactor code and rewrite it. We have been experimenting with quite a few solutions out there. I think we are positive that it is going to happen, but that is taking more time than we would like.
That is a really important part, getting everything into a modern code base and refactored. We think, the way we are thinking about it right now, it is probably going to be a little bit half and half how this plays out. Neil's instruction to the business is to take those productivity gains and devour it right back into the roadmap or wherever you think the investment needs to be to help accelerate growth. Realistically, we will probably see a little bit of margin expansion as well, because it will be hard to do that all at once. That is certainly what we are telling our businesses: to the extent you are seeing productivity, get after that roadmap faster than you normally would be able to.
Got it. I realize I'm negligent on seeing if there are questions from the audience. If anyone has a question, feel free to send it through the portal or shoot me an email, Ken.Wong@opco.com. I'm not sure if there is a raise hand function, but if there is, feel free to go about that route as well. While that gets sorted, I guess one more thing I'll ask you guys more on a near-term basis. As you kind of forge your path towards accelerating organic growth, you talked about seeing and projecting an uptick in the second half. What are some of the factors that are going into that math? How much of that is mechanical? How much of that is execution on your end?
Yeah, I'd say most of it is mechanical. We have a little bit set up, a better setup for a comp in both our TEP segment, to a lesser extent in our network segment. The network's more for the second half, Q3 more for TEP. I'd say it's mostly mechanical. We had good second quarter bookings that help support, I'd say, our second half versus anything else. When you take the first half in general and our first half bookings that support the second half, it's mostly mechanical. I think DAT and Foundry will continue to get better. Some of that's mechanical, some of it's just getting like better growth too.
Got it. Perfect. Just to have one quick question that popped in as a clarification, I guess as you think about growth coming in, to the extent that you end up on kind of above expectations, is there a situation where that upside trickles down to margins, or is that something better suited for reinvestment?
If we end up having higher growth, you know, our standard sort of framework on incrementals is 45%. It's probably going to be more like 40- 45%. I say that sort of in a pre-AI lens. With AI, it could be back to 45%. You know, I'm not a perfect forecaster for 29 businesses, but that's sort of, I think that's how we thematically think about it.
Got it. One other question here. You guys typically kind of, again, you talk about it in forever home terms, but again, lots of unknowns with AI. To the extent you guys determine something might be a little more at risk than maybe initially anticipated, any thoughts on, is there going to be a quicker hook for, you know, do you guys approach it with divestitures in mind? How do you think you go about troubleshooting one of those types of scenarios?
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I think we, because then you get to this, is there even a market for kind of a dilemma? The only thing I could say is that our businesses in these niches can be really creative on ways to continue to capture value and not have like something go out overnight. I'll give you just a, this is like a prior portfolio example, but we used to own a business called TransCore in the toll and traffic space. The cost of an RFID tag was going down with the ASICs, like, you know, Moore's Law was definitely taking over that space. We were able to sort of manage that cost decrease in a way that we still were able to eke out sort of low to mid-single organic just on pricing, packaging, optimization, contract negotiation.
I, and then that we did that for 12 years. I think, you know, it's like you can be industrious around this. You can continue to innovate in other ways. I think like a Foundry's got multiple products, like a Foundry just comes to mind, but we're still going to be indispensable for a long period of time. My preference would probably be, and again, it's so small, would be to ride that out and optimize value versus trying to do some sort of exit. Obviously it's decreative growth, but it's the right sort of, I think about it just from a pure MVP standpoint at that point.
Got it. Perfect. Last question for me. I think maybe the biggest concern for constant kind of free cash flow compounders is maybe you kind of run out of runway in terms of stuff to buy. I guess what's your view on that opportunity set? I think one of your, you mentioned Constellation earlier. Granted, they were talking about it from a longer term timeframe, but maybe that they were kind of exhausting some of the opportunity on the software side out there. I would love just your quick view on how that could play out.
Yeah. The one thing that's true is that the market of opportunities is never constant. There's always new things coming in. There was a business that just got acquired a couple of weeks ago that we looked at. A public company acquired it. We never, I mean, this thing got to $100 million of EBITDA, and we didn't even know about it until about six months ago. It was a founder-run business and everything. I always see this thing as being, as long as there's entrepreneurs out there and then there's capitalism, that we will continue to see new deals. I just don't think it's ever, that has never been, I've never lost a minute of sleep over that in the last, say, the last 10 years.
There was a point in time where I was a little concerned about it because some of this was like our filter was so narrow, like management had to convey and all these other things. We've opened the TAM up, but also opened the opportunity up. I just see we just have more opportunities than we can ever execute on.
Got it. Perfect. With that, I think we're right up on time, Jason. Again, thank you for participating. Zack, really appreciate you taking the time out of your day as well. Hopefully you guys have another kind of set of meetings that'll keep you busy. Best of luck to you and appreciate the audience for dialing in.
Yes, thanks everyone. Thank you.
Bye, guys.
Bye-bye.