Awesome. Let's get started. Thank you everyone for joining us this morning. Kicking off day three of the Morgan Stanley TMT conference for me. Very pleased to be hosting from Roper Technologies, Neil Hunn, President and CEO, and Jason Conley, EVP and CFO. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining. Maybe just as sort of to open up the conversation for maybe some people in the room maybe not as familiar with Roper Technologies, a little bit of a kind of one-on-one. This is a little bit of a different story from a lot-
Sure.
... of the software companies you talk to. What is the Roper story all about?
Yeah. Thanks for, thank you. Thanks for having us. It's always great to be here, Keith. Yeah, those that are newer to our story, Roper is this year roughly $8.5 billion business, 40% EBITDA margins, 30%+ free cash flow margins. We're a durable, steady vertical market software compounder. I think that's what's unique about sort of our model versus others. Really a dual threat offense, sort of steady organic cash flow generation, and then we take all the cash flow generation and deploy it offensively, most of the time historically through M&A, more recently through buyback. When you put it together, sort of we think about how durably and consistently can we compound our free cash flow per share.
That's been in the mid-teens area, and we have the strategies and operational rigor in place to try to push that to be in the high-teens area. In terms of the portfolio construct itself, it's vertical markets, right? It's all of our businesses are leaders in small markets. We're super vertical-oriented, application-specific, high retention, high gross margins, high cash flow dynamics attached. We'll get into all that, but that's a flyby of Roper, durable compounding a vertical market business.
Got it. You guys often talk about edge markets as kind of where you're looking for those either market leaders or emerging market leaders. How do you define edge market?
Yeah.
Within that, what are the key kind of KPIs? What are the key attributes you're looking for in terms of an emerging leader or a leader in that market?
Sure. Just to double-click on the high level. We love owning businesses that are leaders in small markets. Small market, we mean small, like the largest TAM that we have in the portfolio of 29 businesses is about $4 billion ±. Like, a lot of our TAMs are $1 billion ±. That is the first thing, is it's a very small TAM. These are TAM like software for early childhood education centers, software for autism therapy clinics, software for large law firms, software for tax accounting for publicly owned utilities. I mean, these are niches within niches and very, very sort of specialized. We like these small markets for two reasons.
One is they are protective, very rarely do we have a new entrant because the size of the prize is quite small, and they're well-served by us. But also I think more importantly, it means we compete on this notion of customer intimacy. Like, we are just ingrained in the operations of what our customer does. Across the totality of the portfolio, our customers can't do what they do without us, right? We are sort of their... the backbone of their business, system of record or whatever, the network that they operate within. That's what we mean niche and sort of edge markets. That's what it is. Small markets, where we have a clear leadership position.
Got it. I'm gonna skip around.
Sure.
In question list, 'cause I think that brings up a really interesting point. Like, let's just get straight into what has been sort of the major debate point of the TMT conference really within the software industry for the last two years, is the how insulated certain markets are or how well-positioned certain markets are for AI. When you're talking about these smaller markets feels more protected, do you guys see that as a more insulated kind of market from emerging competition from a large language model lab? Yeah, that's faces the question.
Our, our empirical evidence to date is absolutely, right. Again, we have 29 business in the portfolio, 21 are vertical market software businesses. The balance are sort of application-specific product businesses. Relative to the 21, we're not aware of a model company or an AI native startup that's attacking the core of what we do.
Okay.
I think there's logic behind that, by the way, which is if you're an investor, and you're starting a company, do you wanna really sort of attack, if you will, a system of record in a billion-dollar TAM that's well-served, your rate of growth is gonna be sort of rate limited by dislodging a strong incumbent that has all the incumbent advantages. We haven't seen any of that across the portfolio in any capacity. It proves to be quite insular in that regard. I think more importantly, though, and I'm sure in just reading your recap notes for the past couple of days, I don't think what we're about to say is, like, unique from what other companies are seeing.
Incumbency has, like, real tangible advantages as we're trying to develop AI tools at the, at whatever term you wanna use, the agentic layer, the task augmentation layer, right? At the highest level, I've said this for a couple of years, we've said this for a couple of years, it's a combination of two things, and everybody focuses on the first one, which is, like, do you have the data, the knowledge graph, the context to sort of take a, sort of a predictive model, make it deterministic? 'Cause that's what has to happen when you're augmenting or replacing work. I think what also is often forgotten about is you have to know where to point that capability to and what problem to solve. These are, like, very esoteric, quote-unquote, "boring tasks" that are repetitive, but it's truly like magic to our customers.
Like, how do you automate account reconciliations that take 17 minutes into a minute? Or how do you auto-verify order entry for pharmaceutical, which is done by a pharmacist today, a high-dollar pharmacist? Or how do you take 10 phone calls out of matching a freight load in a spot market and do it with no calls? These are like, it's truly magic, but you have the capability, the knowledge, the data, the context, but the problem to point it to. In these little niches that we sort of tend to own, and that we're the number one player again in each of them, that's the magic of what's happening, right? Lots of opportunity there.
Back to deterministic, I mean, there's a regulatory compliance overlay in almost all of our vertical market businesses. That's very hard to replicate. That's decades and decades of getting compliant. Our customers don't wanna violate, you know, sort of violate any sort of regulatory hurdles, and it's harder to get in. It just increases our moat.
Yeah.
That was exactly what kind of triggered me to jump down into AI-
Yeah, sure.
... Is when you're talking about intimately knowing your customers, software's all about solving your customers' problems-
Mm-hmm.
... and solving the sort of the business problems and making those businesses more efficiently. You're right, everybody just focuses on the data. There's a little bit of an inconsistency in that argument because ultimately it's the customer's data, right? You're managing it for them, you have visibility into it, but what you have is that domain expertise. You understand these domains. From my perspective, generative AI, the real opportunity is not to displace existing transactional systems, is to automate workflows around those systems, and you need to know the problems to be automated, and you need to know the business processes to be automated. The question in all of that is, it, I like it that you think about the world in the same way I do.
Yeah.
How do you push that down-
Yep.
... into this distributed portfolio of companies?
Yeah. Very important context setting. Let me just take a minute to sort of talk about our org structure and why we operate the way we do. In this regard, I'll, I'll say it's better to be sort of lucky than good in the context of what we have to do with AI in the org structure. Because of the portfolio we have, like I mentioned, we're the largest player across all 29 of our markets, which means this is over a long arc of time. This has been since... You know, been at the company 15 years, Jason 20. We've been in the modern day Roper for, you know, going on 25 years. All of our competitors, by definition, are smaller, which means probably they're generally a bit more nimble.
Our entire organizational structure from the dawn of the modern day Roper has been Roper, super decentralized.
Right.
Right? To optimize on two things, a speed coefficient and proximity to customer. Right? 20,000 people in the company, 130 in the corporate center. You know, every other resource in the organization is closest to the customer, organized around speed. Like, that's been the design principle for 5 years. That's why I say it's better to be lucky than good. If we happen to have been organized for like, you know, cost of development or more centralized resources and not around customer centricity and speed based on our heritage, I think we'd have a real problem in the AI era, but we're not. Soon as the sort of light bulb goes on inside of our organizations, then the speed coefficient sort of builds on itself.
Going on now two years ago, we said to our organization, all 29 of our leaders, like, "This AI thing's not a trendy paradigm. It's the next tech wave. We have to lean into it." We've had each business now a year and a half ago reunderwrite their entire business model, be AI native to get the thinking going. We've had them sort of change the way they do development, so smaller teams closer to the customer you know, collapsing product and development, sort of minimizing design, making that part of product, all the things that you do across all 21 of the software businesses. We really sort of have this increasing sort of flywheel speed happening at the point of impact.
What we also identified is, this is in the last maybe year, and we've just started hiring the team about six months ago, where we're hiring sort of an AI accelerator tech team at the center.
Okay.
We're small to start, 20 or so people. We're fortunate enough to have two exceptional leaders come from another large application software business to sort of lead the team for us. What we found is, as our businesses were experimenting and learning how to develop an AI, it's very different development pathway than traditional development, Traditionally, you can have a sort of an architecture and sort of deterministically work your way through. There's a little bit of art in AI development. So we very much wanted to sort of have a team that is sort of, you know, grew up in machine learning, trained in machine learning, trained in AI, had done this at scale in the application layer.
Their mandate in the organization is to accelerate the technical teachings to speed things along even further, but also have a build team. Like, they're gonna be a small sort of, if you will, quote unquote, "10x build team" that partners with our companies. Finally, there's gonna be a shared Roper repo. You know, when you have common functions, like whether it is document retrieval or document sort of parsing, that's a common AI sort of a runtime routine. There'll be a central repo of that, so we don't have to multiply that times 21 times across the organization. Sort of this sort of perfect storm of our legacy, close to customer, have speed built into the organization, and accelerating it with a center team.
Right. It almost reminds me of, a lot of companies that we're talking to have, really brought forward the concept of forward- deployed engineers.
Mm-hmm.
Right? You need people who are really skilled in the AI to be able to help the businesses, right, and usually it's in a customer concept to understand how to utilize these technologies-
Mm-hmm.
... that really don't work very much in the same way-
That's right.
... the traditional technologies work. You guys do it within your portfolio companies. You guys have talked about approximately 25 gen AI initiatives underway within the broader organization. Any like early wins, any-
Mm-hmm.
... initiatives that are seeing significant or early traction?
Sure.
On the other side of the equation, where do you guys see the white space? Like, what looks most interesting in terms of new areas to go out and automate?
Yeah, sure. When I talked about that or we talked about those 25, that was probably six months ago. It was the culmination of the early product development work we've done in the organization. This is product-oriented, playing offense, sort of monetizing in the tech stack. That number's, you know, basically not discernible now. It explodes, we're not gonna talk. Is it 25, and then 40 to 50 to 100? It's much more than that now. Going back to a couple years ago, we made the early decision that between using AI to drive, play offense and put it into product stack and grow and expand versus use AI for productivity, we're tilting demonstrably more towards playing offense. Everything that we've talked about today has been about that.
That's where the principal amount of our focus is. Obviously, we're working like every company on coding sort of efficiency and customer service and sales. We have 40% margins. Like, we're not about we will improve margins over time, take that productivity, put it into the product roadmap, but the principal focus is playing offense. A couple examples where we've seen real success there, I'll give you maybe two or three, if it's okay, to make it sort of tangible. I'd start with the best story, which is our autism therapy business. It's called CentralReach. This is the backbone that autism therapists sort of run their practice on.
To set the context here, there's something like 800 million therapy hours demanded a year in the U.S. and 300 million therapy hours supplied. A huge supply-demand imbalance, wait lists, sort of people, these families waiting for access to care. Also inside of the care, the people that deliver the care, they turn over 85% a year. It's a very difficult problem.
Yes.
The tools, the AI tools that CentralReach has developed and deployed into the market is a scheduling tool. It's a very complicated schedule. When you have a demand and your people are turning over all the time, you can't have a blank end schedule. That's very. These learners are in between two and eight hours a day for six months. If you have one person leaving, a huge, huge block in the schedule, and it's a problem. All the note-taking and sort of medical records, and then all the revenue cycle back in, the billing and collections. The punchline of this is the business has increased its growth rate from the low 20s to the high 20s. Its win rate in the second half of last year from the primary competitor went from 75% to 100%.
Fortunately for our customers, the attrition rate for the therapist has gone from 85% down to 40 because it takes a lot of the bad part of the job out. It's like this win-win-win sort of in terms of customer, the market, the learners, the families, and sort of our business. Another example I would share is earlier days, but we're very excited about it. We have a business that it is the technology that and the network that organizes a spot freight market in the U.S. If you're a broker or a trucker, you subscribe to our network to find out where your load is.
Okay.
Today, traditionally, it takes about 10 phone calls for a load to be brokered. Are you available? Can you pick it up at three? Will you do it this rate? Oh, I need you there at four. Can you deliver it by Tuesday at three? They take those phone calls, and on average, that's about $100 or $200 of labor to broker a load at the broker level. We now have in place the technology to do that without a human in the loop. We charge a fraction of that cost and of the labor cost, and that's happening in the real world.
It's a magic button that sort of takes the, that inefficient sort of human connectivity out of the loop to sort of accelerate the brokerage, the brokering of loads, which we think, by the way, it's great for a broker, it's great for a trucker, but actually makes the whole spot market a more fluid market. We actually think there could be more volume that actually comes into the spot market. The spot market won't be the market of last resort. It could be the market of sort of middle resort because it's a more fluid transactionally sort of dynamic market. This, by the way, is very expensive technology. It's a lot of machine learning. It has to be absolutely deterministic. You have to have the volume of rate data because part of this is how do you price a lane.
We have happened to have in our network because of the scale of it, like seven extra market share to our largest competitor. We know what the rates are per lane, per day by truck type, and if you don't have that, you can't do the match, right? It's this combination of technology and data. I can give you other examples, but those are two that we're quite excited about.
I think what's exciting is the companies that are farthest along in AI are growing the fastest in our portfolio.
Yeah.
Just to give you a sense of like, we have this incumbency right to win, and so it gets our other businesses really excited when they see that-
Mm-hmm.
... it's fostered a lot of learning across the portfolio.
Got it.
Yeah.
Have you guys had to adjust the pricing models? That's another big debate in software-
Mm-hmm.
... is kind of what happens with pricing models. Have you guys come up with new pricing models, more outcome-based, more consumptive-based to align to the newer technologies?
I mean, we're certainly doing a lot of voice of the customer work on this right now-
Yeah.
... on some of our businesses, just looking at where the puck is going and how we should be thinking, especially in the businesses where we have the highest right to sort of win that game and increase the productivity of our customers, where you could see some degradation over time. I think what we're seeing is that, you know, there's just pointing it at another direction. Like, maybe it's number of customers, maybe it's number of whatever the driver is of that business, maybe number of policies, that sort of thing. Our voice of the customer work so far has said that as long as we are, you know, capturing value for them, we get our fair share of that value.
Our position on this, by the way, is to get the customers you know, really excited about the product and really using the product before we sort of capture our share of value. Again, just to continue to protect our mode and then play the long game in terms of AI monetization.
The only thing I'd add on top of that, certainly on the system of work or agentic layer, our clients are telling us very clearly, like, "Yes, we'll pay you for the value, but we're not that particularly excited about an open-ended, you know, pay-as-you-go." It's probably gonna be some sort of subscription with overage or something.
Yeah. Right.
They have some certainty of what they're gonna spend.
Tiers.
Some tiers, exactly.
I think it's a part of the equation a lot of investors have over-rotated on, the idea that everything needs to move to a consumption model. When you talk to customers don't love-
They don't wanna-
Because they look at it as a variable-
They don't wanna-
Like a variable cost model. They'd much rather have certainty in terms of-
That's right.
... how their budgets work.
That's right.
Also enables them to get leverage on the technology.
Our current cost as a percent of their revenue is on average for enterprise software businesses is about 50 to 100 basis points. You know, we're not a huge part of their cost part today, so we have-
We have latitude if we're demonstrating value to capture that value over time.
Okay.
In a fixed way if it turns out that way.
Just to double-click or just to round out the answer on the subscription plus, we are fully confident we'll be able to capture, like, the power users that are just driving token consumption. We're very comfortable with the margin profile of the subscription, and then sort of have like an old school cell phone plan. You get this many units of work, and if you go over, then you're gonna pay. There's some-
Yeah
predictability for the customer.
Got it. Got it. I wanna switch gears and talk about sort of recent results and how the company's been operating. We've been having this conversation for a couple years running now, and I know the center of the Roper story is consistency in results, consistency in-
Mm-hmm.
... sort of the yields that you guys are able to bring to the marketplace. Let's talk about 2025. Revenue growth came in at 12%, $7.9 billion in revenues. Adjusted EBITDA grew 11% to $3.14 billion. Can you talk us through what worked well in 2025, and maybe what are some of the areas for improvement into 2026?
Sure. Yeah, I can cover that. You know, I think as we, you know, obviously had some great business building in the year, but our growth wasn't really where we thought it was gonna be at the beginning of the year, and there's a few reasons behind that. One is Deltek. It's our biggest business. It's exposed to government contractors.
Mm-hmm.
That, as you know, when DOGE hit, and then there was nobody to deal with at the agencies, with our customers not being able to talk to anybody at the agencies, and then the shutdown. That business was severely impacted in 2025. You know, you look at a business that has been a steady mid-single digit plus grower, and it was in the low single digits in 2025. Big... a big part of our business in a big segment. Then, you know, if you look at our application software segment, it actually, organic revenue improved 70 basis points year-over-year if you sort of exclude that. Of course, you gotta own all of Roper, but just to give you some context of the impact of that.
Okay.
Procare was a little off to a lower start. We'll talk about that a little bit later. I think Dan will touch on that. That's a business we acquired a couple years ago, but we feel confident in the ability to inflect the growth rate there. Neptune, which is in our TEP segment, our product segment, second half just impacted by tariffs and just skyrocketing input costs, and so we had to sort of process that with our customers-
Mm-hmm.
... in the second half of last year. Again, we own it. We, you know, we know we're gonna do better going forward, but just a lot of things happened last year. As we look forward to 2026, we're guiding organic growth 5%-6%, taking a view that, you know, at least coming out of the gate, things aren't gonna get demonstrably better. We will have, like, an application software. We've got a mid-single digit plus. We're gonna have a better comp just on Neptune alone, or not on Neptune, on Deltek alone.
Hmm.
We're not expecting a lot of improvement, just a little bit better comp there. Importantly, our CentralReach business becomes organic in the second half, so that'll add 80 basis points or so to that segment. Network software will be mid-single digit plus. Feel very good about that. That's just our Foundry business, which was dealing with writers and actors strikes to media and entertainment. That'll get better this year. Then we'll have our Subsplash business will also become organic in the fourth quarter. Then our TEP segment, that's sort of a, you know, a little bit more wide range of outcomes as we sit today. We have guided low to mid-single digits, with the first half being a little bit lower. We have Neptune down for the year, but we'll see how that plays out.
Neptune, they're a water meter business, and we're waiting to see when the COVID super cycle sort of normalizes out-
Sure.
... that's sort of the one watch-out that could provide some upside. As we sit today, That's the approach we're taking.
Got it. That's the same conservative. Double-clicking on the Deltek side of the equation, a lot of executives that I've talked to on about sort of the federal disruptions in 2025 see an opposite side of the coin of that. On the other side of the disruptions of DOGE is also the idea that we got to run the government more efficiently, and software's gonna be a big part of the solution. Do you see a upside scenario in Deltek of that you guys become a bigger part of the solution in terms of how to garner efficiencies in the government?
I mean, I think it's the value prop for Deltek has been compliance, right? If you're doing highly regulated projects, but also efficiency. How do you run a really tight project-
Mm-hmm.
... and increase margins? I think we're always on the side of the angels, no matter which way you look at that. For us, though, I think, and this is the big sort of what's gonna happen, is the OBB B spending and when that ultimately cascades down to the contractors.
Yeah.
We're starting to see some maybe signs of life, not at Deltek, but just in the marketplace in general.
Yeah.
That should accrue, you know, very nicely to that business over time.
Just so we're all clear, like, our Deltek customers are the contractors who serve the federal government.
Yeah.
Not the government itself.
Yeah.
OBBB is an unmitigated tailwind for the industry. It's just when is the government gonna be functional enough to basically award the budgeted dollars or allocated dollars, and then that'll trickle into our customers, which will sort of benefit us. The timing is what the question ark is there.
Got it. Got it. On the capital deployment side of the equation, $3.3 billion in M&A in 2025. Can we start to get into the high-level conversation about how you guys are deploying that capital-
Mm-hmm.
... the shifting mix of acquired assets. You guys have been talking about acquiring assets a little earlier in the life cycle. Why the shift? Why-
Yep.
... the shift towards earlier stage? Should investors be concerned about having to pay a higher multiple for earlier stage companies, for that slightly higher growth?
Hold Jason and I accountable to all parts of that question. We're not avoiding if we forget to round it out. To focus everybody, I started by saying our casual compounding algorithm is sort of mid-teens, and we aspire to be high teens. That's our, that's our mantra. That's our rally cry. That's where we're focused on building a sustainable business. There's two levers to make that happen. The first is to improve the organic growth rate of the business by a little, 100-150 basis points, which we go to work every day to do on a sustainable basis. The second is to, if you'll recapture more value or higher returns from the capital we have to deploy. We do those two things, we can get to a high teen. On...
When we look at how to capture more value, have higher returns on the amount of capital we have to deploy, it comes in two flavors. One is more tuck-ins
That is a, you know, historically, tuck-in was kind of like a four-letter word inside of Roper, going back to my predecessor. They're actually the best deals we've been able to do, as you can imagine. We get back in sort of back-office G&A synergies, and our adjudicating factor for a bolt-on is we only want to do a bolt-on if it's gonna improve the organic growth rate of the company we're tucking it into. They become growthy, and they're highly valued because of the generally just the G&A synergies that happen. That's gonna be... We think when we do the time and motion study, the size of the portfolio, the digestibility of our companies, we think that could be about a third of our capital deployed over a long arc of time.
Yeah.
The balance of the two-thirds will be platforms. As we look at the array of platform opportunities, whether it's, call it a business as usual, pre 2022 Roper style deal, call it 5%-7% organic growth business, optimized margins that you pay a certain price for, or you buy that same business just one owner earlier, where you have or you're catching it with a higher growth rate and you still have margin opportunity. Yes, on T zero, it's a higher multiple, but on T five, it's substantially lower, like 30%-50% lower because you have the value creation of both the growth and the margin improvement that happens. That's how we get the compounding flywheel to happen and sort of accelerate the compounding on the capital deployment front.
Got it. Got it. Not necessarily, I mean, a little bit of near-term pain, but long-term gain because you guys get to apply more of your expertise.
That's right.
In terms of improving these businesses. As long as you have patience in that capital deployment, the yield should be higher. Maybe let's apply that framework to some of the recent M&A.
Mm-hmm.
Start with CentralReach. You talked about that as one of the kind of AI use cases of where you guys could add a lot of value by optimizing what is a really tough supply and demand imbalance. Can you talk to us about those two vectors in terms of?
Mm-hmm
How do you guys improve kind of the revenue growth profile there and sort of what are the main levers-
Yeah.
... For margin improvement?
This is a business that was, is a mid 20% growth business for us. Its margins are, will be optimized, but this is more about how they scale their margins versus they're being inefficiently run sort of out of the gate. For us, it's about when you own a business forever, right? Every business we bought has come from private equity, and they own a business for, you know, three to five years, and they have to invest in a sine wave, invest for two or three years, harvest, invest two or three years, or harvest. CentralReach and the others are no different. In our case, we get to have sort of horizon one, two, and three sort of investments.
In this particular case, we have great near term, like next five-to-seven-year dynamics in supply and demand of the learners and the, and the, and the caregivers of the market position that we talked about before. The next, you know, intermediate period of time feels pretty solid. As the market dynamics in this business shift and supply and demand become more imbalanced, then all of a sudden, what'll happen, like it happens in every class of trade in healthcare, is people will start discerning on quality of care, not just can you get access to care.
Mm-hmm.
In the first year of ownership, we bought two assets, two small little assets that are leading the industry in how you discern quality of care. The vision there is that CentralReach customers won't just be sort of access to care, but they'll be the highest quality sort of caregivers, and that'll sort of drive sort of the extended revenue growth there, for instance, is a way to do that. Again, that's a horizon three investment.
Right.
That's where you have a long-term ownership will pay dividends over time.
Got it. The next big deal with Subsplash.
Mm-hmm.
It sounds like that's more in the vein of the maturing leaders.
Yeah.
That's just the traditional Roper strategy.
No, this is the new strategy.
Okay.
We consider, CentralReach and Subsplash very much the sort of one owner earlier.
Okay.
Subsplash is the software that churches run on. It's the church management system, it's the engagement, both online and offline. It's the, it's the giving platform. It's all that integrated. It's beautifully designed software across all of this. This is a business that is, you know, has 20,000 or 25,000 churches as customers. There's several million churches in the world, it's a widely under-penetrated category from a technology point of view. The top-line growth is all about the go-to-market motion and dialing in the unit economics of that, then pouring gas on it. This is also one where we underwrote pretty substantial improvement in margins. This was run by the prior owner, to not optimize margins or even sort of, I say, modestly optimize margins. It was like a high 20% margin business.
We think in the duration of this business, it can be high thirties to low forties, and some of the very first value creation levers we pulled were to move margins higher, especially in the payments apparatus.
Mm-hmm.
We've had to great success in that regard.
Outstanding. All right. Jason, you previewed this before, Procare. Sounds like that got off to a little bit of a slower start. What are some of the lessons learned there, and what's the plan for turning that one around?
Yeah. Well, Procare was our first maturing leader, and, I think what we've learned, and we've taken that to the next two businesses, is really just around like, you know, if a, you know, if a team sort of got you from A to B, can they get you from B to C? We, you know, we didn't move fast enough, I think. We've made those changes when we need to. That just comes from our history, where we were a little bit more deferential to management. Kind of turning that crank a little bit more. Our governance and our telemetry and our, just cadence around the value creation plan, is much tighter now.
We just learned lessons on how to stand that up and how to operationalize that. Those are the probably two biggest lessons. Then I think the other part is just working with management on the value creation thesis to the value creation plan and having that be really tight. I think we did a really good job with that at CentralReach and Subsplash, such that, you know, in the second week of ownership, we know exactly where we need to go, and we know exactly if things are off the track, how do we do countermeasures, and how do we partner together to work on those solutions rapidly.
Okay. Outstanding. If we look into 2026, how does the M&A pipeline look?
Yep.
What's going on with multiples? I mean, we definitely see what's going on in the public market with multiples. Is that getting reflected at all into the private markets?
Yeah. What a, what a change since the since how long ago we did our earnings call? five to six weeks ago, it was. On the call, we're like, "Hey, this is as busy as we've been in a long time," in terms of just there's not a whole lot that happened in the last four months of last year, but there's a lot of organizing and a lot of pipeline building and a lot of meetings and a lot of processes that we're launching. We did earnings call. That was absolutely the case. What's happened to public markets, just the private sellers have just tapped the brakes on that, as you expect. I mean, right now, there's not a lot of activity, and everybody's just trying to understand where valuations are.
If you're a private equity seller in the types of assets that we're, that we're owners of, you're under no stress, right? You're not a venture. You're not running out of money. There is some option value to wait to sort of see where the world sort of settles. That said, there is we're now in the solidly into the third year of very serious LP pressure on the asset class.
Yeah.
This will settle itself. It's hard to predict what timing. I don't know if it's second half of this year, second quarter of this year, or the next year. Which is okay. We're patient. You know, we've always been patient. We've never viewed our capital allocation capacity as a budget because we're owned businesses forever. You have to sort of be patient, find the right asset, the right quality asset at the right price. In the meantime, the market's presented an opportunity for us and a lot of other software companies to be pretty aggressive in the buyback, which we've been.
Yeah.
I think, between Q4 and what was that we put in our K, it's been $1.8 billion-ish-
Billion.
... of buyback, is what we've done, in the last, you know, 5 months or so. That's what? 5-ish % of our-
Five, sure.
... shares outstanding. It's a sort of a once in a generation opportunity for us.
Got it. I have a couple more questions. I wanna take the opportunity to see if anyone in the audience has questions.
Yeah, I have one. Thank you. You guys talked, I don't know if it's...
We'll reframe it.
Talked about buying, earlier.
Mm-hmm.
A lot of those businesses you buy are high margin. What have you guys learned over time about how to make sure?
You wanna take that or you want me to take it?
You can start. I've got it up.
Yeah. I think it's... The process is, I think the fit starts, a lot of that starts with really talking to the customers, right? You, you look at sort of the competitive positioning. You look at the Net Promoter Score. You understand sort of the key purchasing criteria and how each competitor sort of ranks on that. Generally, we're buying in the largest player that wins on the key purchasing criteria, whether it's your features or integration, whatever it is. I think that gives you a sense they're making the right investments into the tech stack or into whatever it is. If customer support and Net Promoter Score is horrible, then they may not have enough in customer support. Be sort of one.
Number two, when you run a portfolio of very like-oriented businesses, we have internal benchmarks about kind of what good generally looks like from a cost structure in a business. If you're running a $300 million vertical market business, there's 3x market share of the next closest competitor, and you have 40%, you know, selling and sales and marketing percent of revenue, something is not right about that business. Conversely, if you're like 5% of revenue is R&D, something's not right about that business. We've got the internal benchmarks that we throw things against. Those are two things that come to mind.
Yeah. I mean, the other thing is it's really about the focus of the organization. It's rather about reallocating resources where the best returns are. What we found-
Very good point.
... pattern after pattern, is that typically private equity they do a lot of bolt-ons. Sometimes they don't have... Like, we wouldn't do that bolt-on because we've got to own the business forever sort of thing.
They don't have a high right to win. Yeah.
It's like a new TAM, so it distracts, I think, the organization around some of these edge businesses. Our pattern is to focus and then get the resources focused on the core. Typically, you don't have to do a lot of, you don't have to sort of surge invest for that because it's just getting focused on the things that are gonna drive the most growth.
Yeah.
Any additional questions?
I just have a follow-up to that question, which is I get a bit nervous that we're gonna jam. The concern is that we've been too over monetize. Little bit of comfort there that acquired business, we're gonna be able to grow.
Yeah, fair question. just for those that might not have heard it, like, are we over monetizing and sacrificing growth, essentially? Is that fair representation of the question? The examples we gave on CentralReach and Subsplash. First of all, let me back up. At the enterprise layer, when you look at R&D as a percent of revenue over the last five years, it's gone up like two or 250 basis points across the entire organization. We're almost like 11% of revenue today, and that includes the product businesses that are like sub five. From an R&D perspective, that's been going up over time steadily.
The two businesses we just described, in the case of Subsplash, this is like just wildly under monetized on how they deal with the payments infrastructure. This is just literally like how they have the relationship with the processors and how do you monetize with the processor. It's not taking away from R&D. It's, it's just an under sub-optimized sort of part of that business model that we had a pattern recognition with two or three of our other businesses that we monetize through payments. We're not sort of taking dollars, if you will, out of the company. We're sort of monetizing the environmental sort of factor a little bit better. You know, CentralReach, like I said, that's gone to margin, is gonna scale over time.
There's not like a cost action that's happening inside of that business.
We did some tuck-ins for CentralReach, so I mean, if you wanted to penalize the P&L for that, but that just got us to market probably three or four years ahead of time with a solution that's all about outcomes-based care. Sometimes we will do the tuck-ins to sort of get us where we need to get to with that platform. So you could, you could argue that's part of the investment of the business. These businesses just typically run on... If you think about the go-to-market, a lot of what we're doing is cross-sell, or we got expansions, and there's just not a lot of go-to-market costs around that because you already have the relationship with the customer.
Outstanding. Unfortunately, that takes us to the end of our time.
Great.
Jason, thank you so much for joining.
Thank you. Appreciate it.