Hello and welcome to Tennant Company's Investor Day 2024. Thank you to those of you attending in person here in Siebert Hall at the New York Stock Exchange and to everyone attending virtually. As you can tell from the video that we just played, we're very passionate about Tennant, we're passionate about our products, and we're very excited to have you here today and have the opportunity to share Tennant's unique value proposition as well as share more details on our new enterprise strategy that will help us elevate our leadership position through three key pillars: growth, performance, and people. Now, before we get started, I would like you to make note of our safe harbor statement. It's up here on the slide. It's also going to be in the presentation that we will post after our morning together.
I'm not going to go through every single line of this or paragraph, but just let me at least talk about two concepts. First, our remarks this morning and our answers to questions may contain forward-looking statements regarding the company's expectation of future performance. Such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ from those contained in those statements. Additionally, as we'll go through the presentation, you'll see facts and figures and charts, and you might see we will discuss non-GAAP measures that include or exclude certain items. The appendix of the presentation includes a reconciliation of those non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures. That's for the safe harbor statement. Now, we have a full agenda today with five different speakers, each focusing on a key component of our value proposition and strategy.
Dave Huml, our President and CEO, will start the morning with a description of our company's investment thesis, and also we'll talk about our unique proposition and how it's designed to create significant shareholder value. After Dave, we will have Rusty Zay, our Chief Commercial Officer. Rusty runs our global business units and our operations. Rusty will come on stage, and he will focus specifically on our organic growth initiatives and key growth areas that we're investing in and what that means in terms of our long-term growth potential. After Rusty, we'll take a short break, about 10 minutes. Once we resume, Pat Schottler, Chief Marketing and Technology Officer, will provide you a glimpse into innovation at Tennant. Innovation is really at the core of what we do here at Tennant.
Pat will come on stage, and he will talk about how our innovation initiatives are supporting our differentiated growth drivers. Pat will introduce Riley Goodwin. Riley is our Senior Director of Sustainability. Riley will come on stage, and she will discuss the importance of sustainability at Tennant. She will really illustrate our new sustainability framework, Thriving People. Healthy Planet. You'll be able to tell from the way Riley talks about sustainability how passionate we are at Tennant about sustainability and how truly embedded it is in the way we do business every day. Lastly, Fay West, our Chief Financial Officer, will tie it all together and really discuss how our organic and inorganic initiatives are going to unlock value for long-term growth and, of course, shareholder value creation.
After Fay's presentation, there will be a short break just to give us the chance to set up Q&A. So the speakers will come up on stage so that we can go into Q&A. Now, in terms of Q&A, logistically, how it's going to work, if you're here in person, you should have a paper on your desk with a QR code that you can use with your device to submit questions. And then if you're online, you will use the presentation system to submit those questions as well. Now, so let me just say this without further ado. First of all, I've already said a couple of times I used a couple of times the word excited, but I'll use it again if you allow me.
We're really excited about the future here at Tennant, and no one is more excited about it than our Chief Executive Officer, Dave Huml.
Thank you, Lorenzo. I am excited. A lot of reasons to be excited. Good morning and welcome to Tennant's inaugural Investor Day. It's great to have you here in the room with us this morning. We have a lot of exciting things to share with you. Thank you also to those of you that are joining virtually online through the live stream. Looking forward to the conversation. I want to ground us first in who this company is, who we are, and why we exist. This company was founded in 1870. What's interesting about that fact is not that we're 150 years old. What's interesting about that fact is that we have a spirit of being able to reinvent ourselves, to stay relevant, and to grow in the market as we find it over our last 150-year period. Our vision today is to create a cleaner, safer, healthier world.
This is authentic, it's actionable, and it's aspirational. I mean, we make equipment that keeps floors clean. It directly relates to who we are as a business, and we're aligned in our commitment to achieving this vision over the long term. Our mission is to leverage innovation to reinvent how the world cleans. We've done this throughout our history, and you'll see specific examples of how we're doing that today, especially in the area of robotics and small space, which are the products we featured at the entryway as you came in. Let me begin with the investment thesis around Tennant Company.
Just to give context to my remarks, I'm going to kick things off, and I'm going to give you an overview and background of the company as I see it, which will tee up the conversations for the rest of the group, Rusty and Riley and Pat, and then wrapping up with Fay to give context to where we're going to double-click and deep dive into aspects of the company. From an enterprise level, let me just walk through what I believe the investment thesis to be for Tennant Company. We are a global leader in an expanding and growing market. We have a differentiated product set. We're advantaged from a product perspective. We have a unique and compelling service capability. And I'll give you details on that, Rusty. You'll follow up as well. World-class service model I talked about.
This is not just a profitable and growing business for us at Tennant Company, but it's also a unique competitive advantage and creates a bit of a competitive moat as well. We have compelling growth opportunities, and we're going to provide more specificity today than we ever have in the past about where we'll go to grow and how we will drive growth in the business, underpinned by global megatrends. So we'll talk a bit about the way we view the broader market and certainly its impact on the cleaning market and how we're positioning the company to win given those tailwinds. We have a history of innovation at this company. We're viewed as the innovation leader in our marketplace. We are investing heavily in innovation to drive the future of mechanized cleaning.
I would argue we are on the cusp of another chapter of reinvention of this company by disrupting our core market and driving robotics adoption. Our growth strategy is underpinned by a strong financial position. We're very disciplined in how we deploy capital. Fay will talk later about our capital allocation priorities. We're very rigorous in how we manage the deployment of OpEx and CapEx in the business to make sure we're getting a fantastic return. We demonstrate a level of agility so that we can respond to opportunities and also weather risks that we may encounter. We're entirely focused on maximizing shareholder value, and so we'll talk about our initiatives to do that both from an organic and an inorganic perspective as well. When I think about our financial position, I think what's unique and compelling is we can fund our own journey.
We don't have to borrow money or do a raise to go out and do what we want to deliver on these long-term targets. So let me double-click into four or five areas I think are really unique about Tennant Company. I could talk about all the things we do really well on a global basis, and I stay up here all morning, too. But I'll focus in on the four or five areas I think are really unique to Tennant Company. They're very compelling from a customer perspective and a market perspective, and they should be compelling to you as an investor as well. The first one is our reliable, innovative equipment, our product portfolio. We have a distinct advantage by having a broad product portfolio that serves a wide range of applications across all these vertical markets we serve.
The reason that's important is that our customers rely on us for a one-stop shop. They know that we can be their singular source of equipment, stand behind it with our service model, and serve all their applications so they can focus on what they do best, whatever business they're in, whether it's retail, education, health care, manufacturing. They know that we've got them covered from a cleaning equipment perspective. When you think about that portfolio, we have a wide range of scrubbers and sweepers, both walk-behind and ride-on , to serve the application requirements across our vertical markets. And you can think about scrubbers and sweepers as kind of the bread and butter products of this industry. You've kind of got to have these to be a player in the space. And they're used across virtually all of our vertical market applications.
We've identified two very attractive niche growth segments within our broader market, AMR and small space. We believe we have a significant position in these high-growth markets. They are growing at a faster rate. These product segments are growing at a faster rate than our core market. So we're playing to the market's strengths. We have developed an advantage and an early start in these categories as well. We'll spend time talking about why we think that is and how we're going to leverage that starting position to grow into the future. We round out our product portfolio with pressure washers and vacuums. These are required to complete the offering for a customer so they can have that one-stop shop. So they deliver value to the customer from that regard.
But they also offer us some niche growth opportunities around the world in various geographies by leveraging these products through various channels into those geographies and reaching new customers. Wrapping our entire product portfolio is our aftermarket business. Our service is a unique, compelling advantage for us. I'll double-click into service in a few slides. Our aftermarket is a great business. It's strategically attractive. It's financially attractive. We're doubling down on investments to improve our aftermarket offering. Our customers tell us they prefer Tennant because of our aftermarket capabilities. That's our product portfolio. Let's take a look at the business from a geographic lens. I'll kind of give you our starting position in each of the core geographies we serve. We organize our business around the Americas and within that, North America and Latin America.
Rusty's going to double-click into those geographies when he talks about how we grow North America versus Latin America. But in aggregate, we call it the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. We organize that way because that's how our customers are organized. They buy that way. They buy locally. We have a manufacturing footprint to support them locally. We take our proven channel playbook and implement it differently in each of the regions. But we know how to go to market. And I'll cover on the channel piece in a bit. We have a 14% share of an $8.6 billion global market. It grows at about GDP-type rates in aggregate. Obviously, there are some segments and geographies and channels that are growing at a higher rate. And we want to make sure we're capturing those as we identify them and position ourselves to win.
We've got about a 25% share of the Americas. This has been our legacy strength given our legacy and history in this geography. That's about a $3.4 billion market. We have significant brand strength, channels, and our service capability is most mature in North America as well. It's a significantly strong starting position when we think about continuing to grow and taking new technologies to market in this geography. In EMEA, we have about a 10% share of an equally sized market, about $3.4 billion. Our play there is really to take our product set and expand our coverage, in this case, our direct coverage, to grow in that important geography. We have a strong starting position, and I would say in the countries of consequence in Western Europe. We made a strategic acquisition in buying TCS. We announced it earlier this year.
That gives us a broader distribution footprint in Eastern Europe and Middle East to grow in those higher growth segments of EMEA. In APAC, we have about a 5% share of a $1.8 billion market. Segments of this geography are growing at a higher rate than the global market. And so we've got an attractive foothold not only in the more mature markets like Australia. We also have an attractive foothold to leverage in China and India as well. So we're in the right spots to capture market growth where it's growing differentially to the global market. In APAC, there's a focus on a shift to mechanized cleaning. And we'll talk about a global trend, a megatrend around modernization and how that provides fuel and tailwind to our opportunities around the world, but especially in many of the geographies within the APAC region.
The takeaway should be we have a solid starting position in each of the key global geographies for this marketplace. We have proven playbooks on how to go to market. We have a product portfolio that serves applications well around the world. We've got all the ingredients for success. Let me talk a little bit about our multi-channel strategy because I think it's unique amongst, certainly in our industry, but it's unique amongst industrials that you may be aware of or follow. So I'm going to spend a little bit of time on this. Think about the products we sell. We're about 60/40 between equipment and aftermarket, 60% equipment, 40% in aftermarket. They work in concert to each other.
We run them as one cohesive business surrounding the customer with an ecosystem of support so that we can capture both the original equipment sale but also the tail of aftermarket after the fact. We sell through five primary channels to market: direct, distributor, rental, service, and e-commerce. Let me comment on those a bit. From a direct selling perspective, we have over 350 direct sellers on our team around the world. So these are Tennant employees outcalling on specific target customers within specified target markets, uncovering opportunity, demonstrating product, deploying the product, and then staying with that relationship over the lifetime of the product, the product's life in use. Direct is a distinct competitive advantage. You can think about direct selling where we sell really large equipment, which is high-ticket, or really large customers that require a lot of hand-holding.
It's a long sales cycle where we have to partner with them and get very involved in the presale and post-sale process. Many companies are beholden to their distribution channel. Tennant has a legacy of selling direct, and so we don't have to cross that chasm. We do value our distributor partners, however, and we have a different distribution footprint in each of our geographies. Distributors really excel in this marketplace for selling kind of smaller equipment to smaller customers. Distributors have direct relationships locally. They sell complementary products that the customer buys on a more regular basis, and they see the customer more regularly. And so we augment our direct presence by building fantastic relationships with the leading distributor partners in each geography to target specific vertical markets.
In each case, we target a customer in a vertical market so that the running rules are clear up front: who is going to sell where and what product. So it's very clear and up front, so there's no debate later. We leverage the rental channel and rental partners. You can think about this as people whose business it is to rent equipment on a short-term basis. It could be for a one-time use, an intermittent use, to augment their existing fleet because they need some capability or a one-time clean from some event. It's a fantastic channel not only in its own right, but it also allows us to expose new customers to our products that could eventually become full-time owners of our product.
And so we view it as a fantastic relationship we have with rental accounts and partners to reach customers we could not otherwise reach and give them the Tennant experience that will help us long term. I mentioned our service capability earlier. We have a distinct competitive advantage here because our service technicians are all company employees. So they are aligned and motivated with our mission. They want to see the customer happy. They're not worried about just selling more repair service. They're worried about keeping somebody, a Tennant customer, for their lifecycle and for the lifecycle of equipment and beyond. And I'll double-click into service. But it's a unique and compelling advantage we have in the industry. And customers tell us that. This is not just me up here tooting our own horn.
E-commerce is an important component, not only us transacting via e-commerce channels direct with end customers or distributors. That lowers the cost to serve and makes it much more efficient. Many of our customers work after hours, night cleaning, et cetera. E-commerce gives them the capability to transact with us and buy much-needed, for example, parts and consumables online without having to wait to reach someone via phone. We also leverage our distributor partners that have their own e-commerce visibility to the customer. So if we have a distributor that has a really compelling e-commerce site, we want to make sure our products, especially parts and consumables, are figured prominently so that we're available to the customer where they want to buy. So those are our channels that we leverage.
I think one of the unique and compelling things not only is not just the breadth of our channel partners, but the way we work so they work together. So let me give you a few examples. We focus our channel partners, whether it's direct or distributors or rental. We talk about which vertical market they're best equipped to serve. We match the cost to serve with the product being sold, the margin developed, and the customer's expectation so we're not overcosting the channel and squeezing margins. Then we incentivize channel partners to play well together and focus on growing end-use market share, not focus on channel conflict. So it may sound just logical and intuitive. I'll give you an example. Our direct selling organization is incentivized. One of their key KPIs is to sell equipment with service contracts. So they sell the equipment, sell the service contract.
That gives us access to that aftermarket parts and consumables business. Distributors that find a business that eventually is sold direct can earn a finder's fee on the volume they generated for Tennant Company. Our service technicians are our number one source of sales leads. They see our customers more often. They know what the age of the equipment is. They know when the customer is expanding their site and has, so they align a site to growth opportunities. Service technicians that turn over sales leads can also get paid on a finder's fee commission-type basis for what they turn over. We have an ecosystem of multi-channel playbook that we run very successfully. We can lift and shift that playbook into new geographies as we grow our channel presence. Let's shift gears and talk about our brand portfolio and our channel mix opportunity.
In every one of our geographies, we now have a premium, what we call a mid-tier brand position. What that allows us to do is cover more of the market, reach more customers, sell into more applications at different price points profitably. So take one of the geographies. We'll have a premium position and a mid-tier position. The product has been designed and costed to sell profitably at those price points. It's also been designed to perform to the customer's expectations in those application requirements. So heavy-duty, high-performing, long-lasting for premium customers that their application demands it and they're willing to pay for it. High-quality equipment at a lower performance spec at a value price point for the customers who have applications that don't require the premium.
Another benefit of the mid-tier and premium price positioning, in addition to just being able to profitably sell a wider swath of the marketplace, it allows us to keep our margins up on the premium product. Because if you only have a premium product and you're chasing more and more market share, eventually, you have to discount to reach those value-conscious consumers. In our case, we changed the selling paradigm. It's not us versus competition, Mr. Customer. It's, do you want the premium or the mid-tier offering for your application? And we're rather agnostic about which way they choose from a profitability perspective. And we like the aftermarket business as well. From a channel perspective, you can see we have very different starting positions between direct and distribution throughout our geographies. We know that in the geographies where we have the most diverse set of channel partners, we grow faster.
We have higher share. We have happier customers. So our goal is to maximize our channel presence, to maximize our market share in each of the geographies we serve. Rusty is going to touch a bit under our go-to-market efforts what that looks like in the near term. But you can see with different starting positions, outside of the Americas, we have a unique opportunity to grow our direct presence, again, to sell the largest equipment to the largest customers. Inside the Americas, we have opportunity in our distribution channel to grow through distributor partners that are installed in the marketplace. Talking about service, I've mentioned it a couple of times. I want to give you a few more details about why we're so excited about service and the competitive advantage it gives us in the marketplace. We have over 900 field service technicians around the globe.
These are direct factory employees who spend every day keeping our customers' equipment in good working shape, providing preventative maintenance, and delivering on the Tennant promise across the lifecycle of ownership. This is a very experienced crew with over an average of nine plus years' tenure. So they're very experienced and knowledgeable. They have deep customer relationships. They actually like what they're doing. And they stay with us for a whole host of reasons. It's also a fantastic training mechanism, having that kind of tenure. As we bring new technicians in, we can train ourselves on how to get up to speed very quickly. And we're investing in efficiency. We want to maximize the amount of time our service technicians spend in front of a machine, out with a customer, turning a wrench, and fixing things.
We want to minimize the amount of time our service technicians spend driving back and forth, making multiple calls for a fix, or doing paperwork or administrative tasks. So the investments we've made over the past several years in efficiency, we've enabled our field technicians to be mobile-capable. So now they can transact the whole job from their mobile phone versus having to go back to the truck and fire up the PC and find Wi-Fi or set up a hotspot so they can handle it right in front of the customer. If there's a decision to be made on the extent of repairs, they can handle the ordering while they're talking to the customer. So it improves efficiency. And Rusty is going to talk about an investment in our AI-enabled virtual service.
So we're leveraging AI technology to pull data, our data repository, and data off of machines to drive efficiency in our service offering, which ultimately provides a better end-use customer experience and drives margin expansion for Tennant as well as capacity. As we make our service technicians more efficient, we free up capacity to perform more service. So it's really a fantastic return on the investment to improve the efficiency of our service organization. I mentioned earlier we like the service business because of the competitive advantage it provides, the advantage to the customer. This is a strategically attractive and a financially attractive business for Tennant Company. Aftermarket is not an afterthought. It's an attractive recurring revenue stream. For every $1,000 we sell of equipment, we get about an $800 aftermarket revenue stream from that piece of equipment.
Now, obviously, that varies based on use and equipment and application and the customer. But roughly speaking, it's about an 80% aftermarket tail that's created. In our most mature markets, where we're the most advanced in capturing every bit of our aftermarket share, we can approach 70% capture of that aftermarket. There's still 30% upside in those geographies. In most, many of our geographies, we are far lower than that, down in the 60%, 50%, and even below 50% capture. So that offers a significant upside for us for growth, just doing more of what we already do in service, capturing more of that aftermarket business. Aftermarket is highly profitable parts and consumables and a critical component of delivering the uptime to our customer so they get a positive ROI, the investment they've already made in Tennant equipment. Last comment on service.
We think it's a competitive moat because we think about what it would take to try to set up a 900-employee global factory direct service organization. We know from experience it takes a long time just to get it set up, the infrastructure, the people hired, et cetera. We've already got the playbook on how to run it. Now we're just expanding coverage. So those are the critical components of our business, I think, are really unique and compelling and provide a durable value creation opportunity for us going forward. I want to take a little pause and just talk about enterprise strategy. I'm going to give you a little glimpse on where we've been, but more importantly, where are we going? Lorenzo alluded to it in his opening comments. Let's just take a look back at the last few years. In 2019, we started an enterprise strategy.
We had three pillars. We were going to win where we have a competitive advantage, reduce complexity, innovate for profitable growth. We contemplated a five-year strategic horizon. And that strategy was really about making structural changes down and in our business to set ourselves up for growth on top of it, to provide scale leverage. So we got to work. Before 2020, we got to work. Pandemic hit. We had to ask ourselves, do we really want to continue to execute this enterprise strategy in the midst of a global pandemic? One of the things I'm very proud of is the team gave a resounding yes. We think it's the perfect time. This is the right thing for the business. What's the saying? Never waste a crisis. Let's just get to work doing the things we know we need to do to tune up this business for the future.
So we did get to work. We 80/20 our product line, our businesses, our channels, our customers. We reduced complexity in how we operate. We cut our SKUs by 20%. We cut our options by 35%, some basic hygiene across the business. And we stood up a robotics program. We had started robotics. We did some deeper analysis, firmed up our partnerships, and really threw the lever forward on making sure that we were driving the right innovation in robotics to drive disruption in this business. And we were positioning ourselves for the long term in robotics. So fast forward four years. And they were certainly not the four years that any of us expected, if you remember those years, a pandemic and some supply chain challenges, et cetera. But we actually achieved our financial results and largely achieved what we wanted to action in the strategy one year early.
We had committed delivering 2%-3% topline net of divestitures. We delivered 3%. EBITDA growth, 6%-10%. We delivered 9%. We wanted to get above 15% EBITDA margin. We delivered on that. So we decided we've kind of reached our targets. I know we contemplated a five-year strategy. Let's end it at four and get on to the growth. So I'm really proud of the fact we finished in four years versus five. Now we're on to our enterprise strategy for growth. Before I get to the growth strategy, I think it's important that strategy be grounded in the reality of the environment as we find it. So let me just give you four highlights, kind of global mega trends we see that have been impacting our industry and our opportunities as a company. We expect to continue well into the future.
So these are those tailwinds I was talking about that provide fuel to the company as we pursue our growth agenda. First and foremost, automation. Labor availability, labor variability, the cost of labor has skyrocketed. And we envision that continuing for a long time into the future. Labor challenges have become our customers' top, if not the top, at least top three concerns in every vertical market in every geography. So this is not a U.S. phenomenon or a Western Europe phenomenon. For different reasons, labor variability, the cost of labor, labor availability is a significant challenge. And they're driving the need and the desire to invest in automation. You think about our products and the service they provide. We're mission-critical in many of our applications for our customer. They have to clean. Not cleaning is not an option.
But driving around on a machine for two or three hours and paying someone to drive around on a machine or push a machine around for two, three, four hours a day is not a really great use of the scarce labor they have. They would rather have that labor redeployed to higher-value cleaning tasks or overperforming some other action in the core of their business. So we expect the drive for automation to continue. Modernization. You think about the developing geographies around the world. There is more square footage being created in shared spaces at an accelerating rate versus the mature markets. In addition to that, since the pandemic, I would argue there's a higher standard for clean. You recognize whether spaces are clean or have been cleaned. You're more aware of it now. I think that's certain for societies in general.
But certainly, if you think about education environments where your kids go to school, our kids go to school, and you think about health care environments, cleaning has always been important. Now it's mission-critical, like I say. So modernizing, growth in cities, more shared spaces, as well as a higher standard of clean, modernization provides a tailwind to us given the business we're in. That will create more need for equipment, more need for cleaning more often, and an ability to demonstrate the space is actually clean. Push for electrification and away from internal combustion engines. And this is a continuing trend that we don't expect to end anytime soon. We're well positioned today from an electrification perspective. But we have work to do. And we're committed to doing that with the small sliver of our products that are still internal combustion driven. And Rusty, Rusty, Riley.
I looked at Riley and said Rusty. Riley will touch on that later in today's conversation. That's a component of our sustainability strategy. We're really excited about our sustainability strategy. Our customers are asking us to help them in their sustainability journey. In addition to our company's aspirations and our desires as a leadership team and board, our customers are pulling us this direction. They're looking to us for solutions to help them operate more sustainably. Four big mega trends. We expect them to continue for years. We think they provide significant tailwinds to us as we move into our next enterprise strategy, our Elevate strategy. This is around growth, performance, and people. Three distinct pillars of activity. You can think about this as our action plan for the next several years.
It is not by accident that there are more actions in the growth pillar than there are in performance and people. They're all important. But we're pivoting to growth as a focus in this next enterprise strategy. The components of growth are very specific. We have distinct action plans about where we're going to grow and how we're going to grow and how we'll deliver on our long-term financial commitments. Rusty is going to cover off on pricing excellence, taking new products to market, new channels and markets, and new business models. Pat's going to deep dive on our innovation agenda and how we're going to fuel reinventing the way the world cleans with our innovative new products and solutions. Fay and I are going to tag team M&A a bit. I'll talk a little bit about the strategy.
Fay is going to talk about the financial rigor and the thresholds and what we expect to accomplish with our acquisition strategy. Fay will also touch on our ERP consolidation. Riley is going to double-click on sustainability, as I mentioned. Our people pillar is all about emboldening our people. People are the backbone of our business. We believe that at Tennant Company. This employee value proposition is about capturing what is unique and compelling about working at Tennant Company, articulating it, and repeating it so that we can make a firm commitment to the talent we'll need to achieve our growth aspirations. We want to attract, retain, and motivate people aligned around our vision to go deliver on the commitments.
And we're going to turn the people pillar into more of a science than an art by getting very specific about what we're going to deliver to you when you come to work for Tennant Company. Let me double-click on AMR. I don't want to steal the group's thunder. But I'm going to give you a little bit of history on AMR, autonomous mobile robots. So these are robotic cleaning machines like our newest one, the X4 ROVR. You saw it at the entryway. I want to give you a little bit of a history lesson on kind of where we've been because I think it helps define our starting position as a company. And I think it gives us considerable permission to go disrupt this industry with our new product offerings. So let's start with the customer.
AMR solves one of our customers, if not the largest, one of the top three largest issues they have, labor challenges. I talked about it earlier. In cleaning, labor has always been a challenge. Cleaning labor has historically been employment of last resort rather than a career choice. And so high turnover and relatively low pay in these roles. So constant turnover and new people all the time, it makes a significant challenge for those companies that need to have their shared spaces clean or companies that are in the cleaning business. When you think about the cleaning operation, labor is still the major component of cost. And Pat will talk about how that's evolving and where we see that going over time. Proof of performance. Customers increasingly want proof that their space has been cleaned. Today, how do you tell if a space has been cleaned?
You walk in, and you look if you can see any dirt. You look to see a reflection of the lights. Customers want to know that what they're paying for is actually being accomplished. Proof that the machine was run around to clean the floors. We think automating, mechanizing, and moving to robotics enhances the experience not only for the end-use customer but also employees, cleaning employees. They can be deployed to do higher-value tasks that are more fulfilling and interesting than simply walking behind a machine for a significant portion of their shift. Our customers are telling us they want to invest in visible automation so they can be viewed as a technology leader. That's whether they're in a factory-type space, kind of an industrial setting, or a commercial setting where the public is walking through.
They think it enhances their image to have been investing in technology. And they're looking for a return on their investment. It's got to make financial sense. And so what we hear from customers is, get me within about a three-year payback window. And that's a reasonable payback for an automation investment. So with that customer problem in mind and their challenges in mind, this is where we've been. We signed our original partnership with Brain Corp back in 2017, really pleased with the relationship to start and pleased now with where we're going with it. We picked Brain Corp because we thought they had the best mousetrap. We thought their software was far better than anything else we saw in the marketplace. It was more advanced. They had internal capabilities to continue to enhance the software as they went forward. And they were well capitalized.
We weren't hitching our wagon to a supplier that was going to run into financial trouble. We quickly launched our T7AMR in 2018. This was our first AMR machine. Almost right before launch, we landed a very large contract with Walmart, which candidly consumed all of our production output for about the first year. Landing a first customer like Walmart is both a blessing and a curse, right? It's a great flagship customer. If you could have one customer if you're only allowed to have one customer, that's the one you'd want. For a company our size with a product like this that's brand new to market, I can tell you there were some nervous moments as we thought about landing this deal. It worked out fantastic. I'm so proud of how the team brought this opportunity to life.
We learned a ton about taking robotics to market. Working with somebody like Walmart, they have a lot of internal capability to gather data and feedback perspectives from store people that can measure the return they're getting and how effective they are or how they had to adapt their cleaning protocols. So we learned a ton about how to successfully deploy robotics by landing Walmart first. What it prevented us from doing was going out and talking to a lot of extra customers because we didn't have any production capacity. So really, until kind of 2019, into the pandemic, we got the T7AMR out more broadly to more customers. We quickly launched a T380AMR behind it, which was sort of similar capability, a bit smaller, which made it more maneuverable, a little different price point, and primarily focused at retail customers. In 2021, we launched the T16AMR.
You think about this as our largest AMR machine focused on industrial applications. Over the long haul, we think the industrial opportunity could be as large or larger than the commercial opportunities in retail, education, and health care. Very different spaces, very different customer dynamics. We're uniquely positioned to win on the industrial side of the house as we are on the commercial side of the house because we already have an installed set of customer relationships. We have an installed base of equipment that we know how to go out and sell to. We know these applications. We have the direct service footprint to keep the machines running and deliver the uptime to the end-use customer. We brought lithium-ion battery technology online in 2022.
In 2024, earlier this year, we announced our exclusivity agreement with Brain Corp on Gen 3 technology, which gives us exclusive access to Gen 3 technology in the floor care space. This is a distinct competitive advantage, sets us apart. And we think it's a real game changer, especially when you couple it with our X4 ROVR, which is a ground-up, purpose-built robot targeting specific vertical market applications at a performance point, maneuverability point, and a price point that's going to be really attractive to those customers. So what did we accomplish for the business over that time frame? We've now got a four-model product portfolio and AMRs. So we can sell and talk to customers about robotics in virtually every vertical market we serve. We don't have to shoehorn them into or only stay focused on a few vertical markets. We've sold over 700 unique customers.
Just to define what a unique customer is, Walmart is one customer. We don't count every store as individual. We generated well over $200 million in revenue over that time frame, deployed 6,800 units, a little bit more than that. The reason that deployed units is particularly exciting is having that installed base of equipment gives us a considerable head start in what it takes to successfully deploy AMR. We're getting the data back off of the machines to inform our approach as we go forward, not only from a software perspective but also from a service efficiency perspective as well. Robotic machines sell at about three times the price of a non-robotic equivalent. As you think about sort of the financials for Tennant Company as we go drive robotics, we're obviously selling we're targeting everyone in the marketplace with robotics.
We're pleased with the cannibalization if we take out one of our own pieces of equipment and replace it with robotics three times the upsell, three times the price at similar margins. So think about passing more dollars through at a similar margin rate. We're delivering on about the three-year payback that our customers are looking for out of an investment in robotics. Really pleased with our starting position, what we've done in AMR. I'm excited for you to hear more about from Rusty and Pat specifically where we're going in robotics, how we see the market evolving for robotics as a backdrop for that opportunity, and specifically the X4 ROVR as our brand new purpose-built platform. Touching briefly on sustainability, really excited about our new sustainability strategy, Thriving People, Healthy Planet. This is a comprehensive strategy for Tennant Company.
At Tennant Company, sustainability is not a sideline activity. It's not a silo sitting in the company somewhere. Kristen and Riley and the team have done a fantastic job building a complete sustainability approach that we can use for years to come to focus our efforts, measure the impact, and motivate employees to become part of the journey. We've got six key impact areas identified. There are targets underneath our commitment. For example, we'll net zero by 2040. Each of those targets has been disseminated to the organization. It's broken down by years so we know if we're on the correct path as we move through the future years. I think we've made sustainability a team sport at Tennant rather than it being an individual effort. Our customers, I said it earlier, our customers are pulling us into the sustainability area.
And we're happy to meet them there and help lead the way in our industry. All of that was talking about earlier was talking about our organic growth plans. Rusty is going to double-click and give you a lot of specificity around our organic growth actions and where we're going to grow and how we're going to grow, where we compete, and win. I want to spend a minute just to walk through our M&A priorities. And then Fay is going to talk about some of the financial rigor and targets underneath our M&A aspirations. We embarked on a journey aligned with our board of directors to define our M&A strategy. That strategy has identified three attractive adjacencies for us to lean into from an acquisition perspective. And I'll walk through each of those briefly and give you a couple of real-world proof points.
Our first priority is to defend and grow our cleaning core. We've got a significant starting point. We've got an advantaged product line. We have service capability. Identifying opportunities to find primarily products or channels to market where we can leverage the other assets we have in our portfolio offers a significant upside growth opportunity for us at lower risk and better return than going too far afield. Having a 14% share of market, there's considerable upside for us. Primarily, we'll be looking at products and solutions in this space to sell into our core market or channels to market. If we can find new distinct channels to market and the right answer is to go acquire to establish a direct footprint, we will do that. We announced our acquisition of TCS earlier this year.
TCS was a longstanding Tennant distributor with direct footprint in Austria and Eastern Europe as well as a distributor network throughout Eastern Europe and Middle East. Really pleased with the business that TCS had built as our master distributor. It worked out now where we can do the acquisition, establish a direct footprint, and build on that foundation that the team's already built. It's really a fantastic acquisition if you think about it. That master distributor only sold Tennant. They have decades-long experience and relationships in the geography. What Tennant can bring to the party is capital, proven playbooks, and people expertise to help leverage what had been kind of smaller businesses in each geography and try to serve customers on a broader basis. Excited about the upside from TCS acquisition, especially in that geography in our M&A business.
The second adjacency is to drive value through connected autonomy. So when you think about robotics, there's a technology stack that enables robotics: LiDAR and cameras and navigation software and telemetry. You need the components and software capability to execute all of that to be successful in robotics. Today, we largely borrow it. We partner with people. We design some of our own. And we source it to our specifications. There may be an opportunity in this space. And we have big aspirations for robotics over the long term. So we're looking at it from a, what capability should we be in long term and establish a footprint in now to leverage the future? And so we've canvassed the space. We've developed a funnel of opportunities. And we're out talking to them to see what makes sense in this adjacency.
It makes sense to put our M&A capital to work in this space because we're so excited about the opportunity to disrupt this industry with robotics. So it makes sense to open the aperture and look at deploying M&A capital to go get something done that can help fuel and continue to fuel that disruption. Further afoot is our third priority, expand our portfolio into other mobile equipment. If you sit back and think about what Tennant does really well, kind of who we are, I walk through some of our unique capabilities. But we make mobile equipment that does work in a whole range of vertical market settings. We're very good manufacturing in a local footprint in a high-mix, relatively low-volume environment. And we wrap our product with an ecosystem of support that is significant from inbound selling to deployment to aftermarket service.
So in this adjacency, we're looking at other mobile equipment that could leverage one of our distinct competitive assets, like our service organization or like our brands or like our channels to market or customer relationships, where we think we could acquire it, take it to market, leverage one of our distinct capabilities and assets, and make a one plus one equals three on the other end type combination. It's our furthest adjacency because our primary focus is on the left-hand side of this chart to start. But you know how M&A is. You've got to cast a wide net because you're not in entire control of who's going to sell, when. So you've got to be out talking to people and understand where you want to go so you're ready to pounce when something becomes available. We've identified over 800 targets in our funnel.
We are actively working that funnel today. I forgot to mention on our Connected Autonomy acquisition, we view the investment, our minority stake in Brain Corp, as a proof point of that number two Connected Autonomy adjacency. And Pat will cover the benefits of that arrangement more fully. When you look at the TAMs of each of these adjacencies, we serve an $8.6 billion market today. The combined effect of entering and examining these two adjacencies, we've grown our TAM we've doubled our TAM by opening our aperture from an acquisition perspective. And so we think that gives us a sufficient amount of space and room to go out and prospect and learn and operate in a much more significant and dramatic level within this industry. Wrapping it all together, over the long term, we're committing to delivering 3%-5% top-line growth.
We're excited about 3%-5% top-line growth. We know we're capable. We know where we're going to go and how we're going to grow. The majority of the rest of the afternoon is really spent on deep-diving our growth plans. Same time, we're going to expand our EBITDA margins by 50-100 basis points a year over the long term. We've demonstrated strong cash conversion. We expect to convert our net income at 100% to free cash flow over that time period, just really leveraging the rigor we've already built into the business and how we deploy capital and how we manage working capital. A new data point for you. We've thought about what does good look like from an M&A perspective. We think we can add $150 million in revenue over the next three years.
We've already started that journey with the equity investment in Brain and the TCS acquisition. We think this is a reasonable target for us. We're not going to do deals just to hit a target. But we want to be able to dimensionalize where our aspirations were for you as we talked about M&A. We are actively working the funnel. We expect to be doing deals over the time horizon. We think we can add $150 million top-line. This package is a significant value creation opportunity for us and for you. We're excited to bring it to life. We're going to give you more specificity around how we will do that. Before I do that, let me just wrap up key takeaways that I hope you heard. I would hope that you carry with you as you leave not only my session but today's entire session.
We are targeting long-term above-market growth. Our core market grows at around GDP-type rates. So you can call that one, one and a half, maybe two in a great environment. We're going to deliver three to five. We are differentiated in terms of our product portfolio and our service capabilities. We're focused on customer ROI. So even as customers' needs evolve, we've demonstrated an ability and agility to go serve those customers and meet their needs. Our multi-channel approach to market is unique and compelling. We have the playbook. We know how to do this. We can lift and shift that playbook and run it in new geographies. We serve a broad set of vertical markets, which is fantastic from a coverage perspective. It also provides growth potential because if a given sector is on fire and hot, we've probably got products for the application.
We can move into that space in a more demonstrative way, especially if that's only in a specific country or region. So we can look at specific vertical markets and flex our exposure in a given period. It also provides insulation from cyclical downturns. And not many industrials can say that they have insulation from cyclical downturns. So covering a broad range of vertical markets allows you to ride the hot hand and weather any specific downturns in a given vertical market. I've talked about our aftermarket service. It's strategically attractive, financially attractive. And we think aftermarket is a key component not only of our growth, but it's a key component of our customer experience. And so we're investing not only to improve the experience but to improve our operator, our technician's efficiency. And Fay is going to touch on our disciplined capital deployment. We have a formula.
We have a rubric. We know how we want to deploy capital. We generate our own cash. We're very disciplined about how we deploy it to make sure that it's intentional and we get the return we expect to get back from it. And so we've got the firepower to drive organic growth as well as fund our own journey from an M&A perspective. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Rusty Zay, our Chief Commercial Officer, to double-click into specifically our growth aspirations and our action plans. Rusty?
Thank you, Dave. Good morning to you all. I really appreciate you setting the stage of how well Tennant Company is positioned to take advantage of our global macro trends and with our unique go-to-market product innovation and financial strength to accelerate growth. Speaking of accelerating growth, I'm going to be talking about the organic growth levers that we're going to activate to reach our long-term growth plans. Before I get into that, how I think about where we're going to focus and where we're going to invest is really in two areas. One is where we have go-to-market leadership, we will invest in enhancing our capabilities to gain more share of wallet from existing customers or reach new customers. And where we don't, we will be investing to gain go-to-market leadership. So why is go-to-market leadership so important?
Because where we have go-to-market leadership, we have share leadership. Where we have share leadership, we deliver maximum value to our customers. We retain maximum value for Tennant and ultimately for our shareholders. Dave highlighted our Elevate Growth strategy. As he said, the key component of this strategy is growth. He highlighted how important strategic acquisitions are going to be in our new growth strategy. I'm really excited about what this can do for adding supplemental value to Tennant Company and certainly within the go-to-market space, of which I will highlight an example later in my presentation where this is already starting to help growth. Where I'm going to spend my time is on the four organic growth levers that underpin the 3%-5% revenue CAGR that we are committed to over the long term.
They're pricing excellence, product innovation, new channels and markets, and new business models. Let's begin with pricing excellence. Simply put, this is capturing the value we deliver to our customers. So it starts with a market-driven approach. We look at things both globally and within each geography. We gain deeper insights across our business into inflation factors that we see that will impact us going forward. And then we optimize where we can price for value to our customers and ultimately retain for Tennant. And there's three areas within that process that we also look at. And Dave touched on a couple of these earlier. One is discount discipline. And it really revolves around using the 80/20 framework to align our customer and channel value to our cost-to-serve models that best deliver on that value to our customers. Second is new product development.
You'll hear more about this from Pat Schottler later today. This is where we target margin accretion. The products that we talk about today, we expect to have strong value capture over the long term. Lastly is proprietary value. What does this look like? Where we offer unique features, exclusive features, unique value in our products, services, and solutions, we want to price to capture that value in the marketplace. For example, over the last three years, we've applied this to our parts and consumables category business. We've experienced over 300 basis points of margin accretion. That's how we capture value. Our second organic growth lever is driving product innovation in three high-growth product segments. As a matter of fact, these segments grow up to eight times faster than the industry average. I repeat. These grow eight times faster than the industry average.
That's why we're focused on these product segments. Pat Schottler, later in the presentation, will go much deeper to give you insights into both the growth and the benefits of these product categories. Where I want to spend my time is talking a little bit around what we're going to do to take these to market. Starting with AMR, we will lead the adoption of robotic cleaning. And as critically important as it is to have a great cleaning product, to have excellent navigation and autonomy, we believe it is equally important to have a trusted ecosystem of sales, service, and aftermarket support to generate the customer return on investment and the experience they expect when investing, as Dave mentioned, up to three times the investment to automate their cleaning processes with our equipment. And you'll hear more about what we're doing within the regions to invest in this space.
Second, we will lead the mechanization of our small cleaning space. We have a strong portfolio of small cleaning products. We are excited about the headline product, which is the Tennant i-mop line. To give you some perspective, we launched the new Tennant i-mop line of products last year. It became a substantial driver of growth and a substantial revenue contributor in our small space product portfolio. Then lastly, on this slide, we're going to talk about product line extensions. This is where we are leveraging our global platforms to fill in product gaps and to extend value points to our customers within our branded product portfolio. As a matter of fact, depending on the product segment, we see we can expand value points by up to 20%-40% to offer our customers better product for their application and provide more value.
So we're excited about what we can deliver with these high-growth segments. Third is capitalizing on our channel and market strengths. When you think about what I said earlier, this is really about where we have go-to-market leadership. We will invest in enhanced capabilities to serve our existing customers better and extend our reach to new customers. And again, elsewhere, it's about investing to build go-to-market leadership. We have a tailored approach to each region. From an overview perspective, starting with North America, we're going to leverage our go-to-market leadership. In EMEA, we have broad coverage today. And we're going to be continuing to invest to gain go-to-market leadership in key markets. Latin America, we're going to leverage our go-to-market leadership in Brazil and Mexico, which are the largest markets within the region and provide high growth.
Then in APAC, we're going to leverage go-to-market leadership in Australia and build go-to-market leadership in China and India, which are high-growth markets. I'm going to double-click now into each region to get more specific on where our investments and resources are going to be where we're going to flow to drive the growth. Starting with North America, we have go-to-market leadership. It is our largest region by both revenue and share. We will drive AMR adoption by investing in dedicated vertical sales leaders, key tools and capabilities for our service organization, and aftermarket support teams that ensure, again, that we drive customer ROI and the customer experience needed to successfully automate their cleaning processes. Second, we will maximize distribution. We have a great distribution network in North America.
But we have two great brands, both Tennant and IPC, that we want to create the broadest possible coverage across our core verticals to drive share. Third, we will enhance our capabilities to support the rental channel. Dave did a great job of talking about how important the rental channel is to us. Well, that channel has very unique opportunities for us to serve them. So we're going to be investing in things like fleet planning, specialized service offerings, as well as remanufacturing capabilities to support that channel's growth. Fourth, we're going to expand e-commerce. Really, that's about developing tools and capabilities to support the shift that we see in the marketplace. And it's as much as helping our customers who are already in the space as it is supporting our own internal B2B e-commerce engine.
And fifth, and I'm going to spend a little more time here, is on connected services. Dave touched on this earlier. But we're going to invest in this space to increase our capacity and capability to drive value for our customers through virtual service, remote diagnostics, and predictive AI services. So you've heard a lot about AI in the marketplace. And you may be wondering, "OK, what does predictive AI services mean for Tennant?" So walk with me here a little bit this morning. Imagine that you have a connected machine providing data to a central repository. Imagine in that repository, we also have field technician service data. And imagine within that same repository, we have engineering data. And then you wrap a predictive AI model around that to provide two things. One is customer action and insights. And two is predictive failure maintenance. So what does that look like?
Maybe you're an operator. Maybe you're a manager of a facility. You get a notification on your cell phone that tells you that it is time to maintain or change your parts or consumables because of the usage patterns of your specific machine. We've seen places where we can demonstrate a 50% reduction in cost on battery life, as an example, with this solution. Second, we get a notification that says, "There is an impending failure on your machine." That notification is sent to one of our service technicians. The service technician can remotely diagnose the impending failure. They can either, one, potentially virtually service by contacting the customer and giving them an issue resolution. Or they can obtain parts, schedule service, go on site, solve the problem before it ever happens. Before it ever happens. That's what predictive AI services can do. I said imagine.
But let me be clear. At Tennant, we don't imagine. We do. And today in North America, we have a fleet of over 2,000 machines that are currently on the connected services where we can provide these benefits. So we will continue to invest in this capability going forward. Next, as EMEA is our second largest revenue region, we have go-to-market leadership in spaces like Spain and Portugal. And we have strong go-to-market footprint across the rest of the geographies. We will drive AMR adoption, just like North America, with dedicated sales, with key service tools and capabilities, and a dedicated aftermarket support system. Again, leveraging what we believe is an industry-leading portfolio of products, industry-leading navigation, and industry-leading customer support. That's how we win in AMR. We're expanding our IPC-branded go-to-market coverage across the key geographies in Europe. This looks like dedicated channel leaders in each country.
This has dedicated sales support, marketing, and product resources to ensure that we can optimize and maximize channel reach through key geographies throughout the region. Industrial market coverage, we're investing in sales and service capacity across key markets in Western Europe. And look, this is really just matching what we believe is an industry-leading industrial product portfolio with expanded channel reach to convert and drive customer value. And then last is expanding geographic coverage. We do have geographies where we are still building and looking to drive direct go-to-market footprint. Dave highlighted earlier, and I mentioned with strategic acquisitions, what we announced in Q1 with the acquisition of TCS, our longtime Tennant distributor. What this gave us was critical sales and service direct footprint in Central Eastern Europe and a strong customer portfolio in the Middle East and Africa.
Just recently, so this is, what, 60 + 90 days since we announced the acquisition, we won a large AMR fleet order from a Pan-EMEA retailer in the Central Eastern Europe region by leveraging the direct sales and service infrastructure that we acquired and combining it with the dedicated after-sales support system that we already had in the EMEA region. That's how strategic acquisitions with our current capabilities can drive enhanced growth. Latin America, as I mentioned earlier, we have go-to-market leadership in both Brazil and Mexico. These are the two largest, highest growth, and most significant geographies for us in the region. In the region, we are going to be driving mechanization and expanding our IPC go-to-market coverage. Again, the IPC go-to-market coverage is how do we broaden the vertical coverage we have both directly and with our channel partners.
The key here is driving mechanization because there's two key barriers that we face in an emerging market geography in a region like Latin America. One is low labor costs. Two is the risk of purchasing and using an asset that's much more complicated and expensive than what they're used to when they're using just manual cleaning equipment. I want to give you an example in Brazil where our team put together what we call an Equipment as a Service offering that bundles equipment, service, parts, and consumables over a multi-year agreement with a specified uptime. This offering addresses the low labor costs by lowering the entry into mechanization, by spreading that cost over time. It reduces the risk of having this asset that you have to manage because responsibility of uptime is on Tennant, not on the customer.
We've been so successful with this offering in Brazil that it's now 40% of the revenue in that geography. We've won some of the top building service contractors in that market in terms of adopting this offering and managing their whole fleet. By the way, this is all at strong margins. It's a recurring revenue stream. We will continue to invest in this capability to support growth in Brazil. We will also be extending this capability investing to bring it to Mexico to drive mechanization, drive value to our customers, and drive value to Tennant. In our APAC region, we have three distinct geographies we're focused on. First is Australia, where we have go-to-market leadership. We will drive our high product or our high-growth product segments that I spoke about earlier. We're going to extend our reach with the product extensions.
In China, look, this could be still, and we believe this to be true, could be one of the largest cleaning markets in the world one day. We want to make sure we're positioned for when that happens to take advantage of that, both the emerging market growth, but too is the growth within the cleaning market. We will leverage the local strength of our GAOMEI brand to drive the mid-tier product segment and value offering to our customers. We will leverage our global product platforms to extend the value with the Tennant brand in that geography for growth. Then lastly is India, where the IPC brand is our primary brand that we take to market in that geography.
We are continuing to invest in both sales and service capacity across the country, where I think now we cover about 80%-90% of where the GDP is within that geography. We're establishing dedicated Tennant-branded channel development resources in that market to take advantage of what we believe is the industrialization growth that we're going to see in that geography and match it with the strong Tennant industrial product portfolio. The last organic growth lever that I want to speak to this morning is new business models. What's important about these new business models is that we believe we can create more value for our customers. That's what I want to make sure you understand. This isn't about, "Hey, let's have an offering." We feel good about it.
It's really around, "How do we create value for our customers?" And we believe these can do it. And not only creating value for our customers, but it provides Tennant with value both in strong margins and recurring revenue streams. So I spoke about Equipment as a Service in Brazil and the success we had in an emerging market by lowering the entry into mechanization. Well, we believe, beyond emerging markets, that we can take an Equipment as a Service offering into our mature markets where we can provide a fleet management option and drive more efficiency for our customers by having us being able to manage their fleet versus them. And we think this could be a big growth lever for us going forward. The other one is Robotics as a Service. So you're going to hear much more about how great the product technology we have.
But think about robotics as a service where, again, you can lower the upfront cost of getting into automation but also feel really good that you're going to have the uptime that you need to get that return because of the Tennant ecosystem support after sale to ensure that you get the ROI. As a matter of fact, in Europe today, we're seeing about 70% of our new sales of AMR equipment go on to this type of an offering. So we think, again, there's a lot of upside here driving adoption for AMR. And lastly, connected services. I spoke to what we're doing in North America on a current 2,000 machine fleet. We will continue to invest in expanding those capabilities for a broader part of our product portfolio. And it's also going to be a standard offering that we include on the X4 ROVR.
So again, while we've started, we're going to continue to expand that capability to drive value. And I think it's important to comment, none of these things can happen unless we offer go-to-market leadership through the sales, service footprint, and the aftermarket support that only we can provide in some of these key geographies. You can't do these without those things in place. And that's what Dave talked about, is the strength and some of the uniqueness we can bring in some of these key geographies. So in summary, growth is the key component of our enterprise strategy. And by leveraging our go-to-market leadership, we're going to drive pricing excellence. We're going to focus on these high-growth product segments and the innovation. We're going to flow those through our key channels.
We're going to leverage our go-to-market leadership and capitalize on all of the high-growth opportunities both from a market and a channel and a product perspective. These new business opportunities, like I stated, provide us upside to bring new value, new solutions to our customers that drive strong margins and recurring revenue streams that are kind of a new growth engine that we see going forward in our business. All of these things underpin why we believe we can drive to the 3%, 3%-5% revenue CAGR in our long-term model and ultimately drive more value to our customers, more value to Tennant, and certainly more value to our shareholders. Thank you for your time today.
Next up on our agenda, we have a 10-minute break followed by Pat Schottler, our Chief Marketing and Technology Officer, who will enlighten you more about our product innovation process and the high-growth segments that I spoke to today.
All right. Good morning and welcome back. My name is Pat Schottler. I'm the Chief Marketing and Technology Officer for Tennant Company, and I am absolutely thrilled to be here today in general. My first time to New York Stock Exchange, but I'm most thrilled to be here talking to you about innovation and how we're using innovation at Tennant Company to fuel our growth ambitions. I'm going to cover a little bit of a range today. I'm going to start at a high level. I'm going to talk about our vision for the future state of our industry and how that creates an opportunity for Tennant Company. I'm going to get a little more tactical, and we're going to talk about the initiatives that we're investing in here in the near term to drive growth for Tennant Company, those that Rusty and Dave have already alluded to.
I'm then going to talk a little bit about the innovation process at Tennant Company. Largely, what I want you to take from that is we have a consistent and repeatable process for translating customer insights into unique and proprietary solutions that only Tennant can deliver to the market. Then I'm going to finish with a quick discussion on results, the things that you can expect Tennant Company to deliver from new product innovation and how that's going to drive increases in total shareholder return for all of us in this room. I want to start with a discussion of our vision for the future of the cleaning industry. We're in the midst. This industry is in the midst of a transformation. It's our intention to lead the transformation.
To ensure that we do it and we do it the way that we want it to go, we've set a vision for how we want the cleaning industry to look in the long term. We use that vision for the cleaning industry to guide our innovation efforts, to guide our innovation agenda. So I want to share that vision with you, if you'll allow me, because it's good context for how and why we do innovation at Tennant Company. Our long-term vision for the future of cleaning is that all cleaning is done 100% autonomously and with machines. Our vision for the long-term future of the cleaning industry is that all of those machines are powered by carbon-free electricity.
It's our vision for the long-term future of the cleaning industry that all of these machines are equipped with sensors, collecting data, connected to the internet, and using AI to optimize the cleaning process. It's with all of this capability that we see in the future Tennant Company not just selling equipment, but Tennant Company selling cleaning as a service. So our customers don't have to buy equipment from us and pay for labor separately. Ultimately, someday, we'll just sell them a verified clean space. And we see in this future state vision the criticality of our direct service infrastructure becoming ever more important. The complexity of the machines is going to increase. The customer expectations from a service level are going to increase. That's going to make our direct service infrastructure even more critical to our future.
This is our vision for how we want to evolve the cleaning industry and what we want it to look like as context for some of the innovation efforts that you're going to see here today. A key element of making our vision a reality is automation. So automation is at the center of our innovation agenda. The application of automation in cleaning creates significant customer value by reducing customer costs. That gives us the opportunity to grow our business. I want to talk to you a little bit, explain to you a little bit about how we think about the application of automation in cleaning. The reality is that most of the world is still cleaned manually with a mop and bucket. With mop and bucket cleaning, you've got a really valuable human resource using a very inexpensive tool.
It does an ineffective job at cleaning the floor, and it's inefficient. This process, this is where we're applying the i-mop portfolio of solutions to drive the conversion from manual cleaning, this expensive and inefficient way to clean, to mechanized cleaning. When we do that, when we drive the transformation from manual cleaning to mechanized cleaning, we deliver an order of magnitude sorry, we double the labor productivity of that operator effectively. We use less of that valuable human resource and more of a valuable machine. Our customer costs go down, our revenue goes up, our market gets bigger. And best of all, my favorite part, the customer gets a better clean floor, does a better job. This is where we're focused on driving manual to mechanized cleaning and leveraging our small space solutions. Once we get our customers to mechanized cleaning, that's a good thing. It's more effective.
It's more efficient than manual cleaning, that's for sure. But the reality is, with a mechanized piece of cleaning equipment, you still need an operator with that machine the whole time. That valuable operator is still attending that machine the whole time. This transition from mechanized to robotic cleaning is where we're focused on AMR, on applying AMR. Because when we do that, we can break this paradigm. No longer do you need a person with the machine full time. The person can initiate the cleaning process, and they can go do other work. And when we do that, we create an order of magnitude of improvement in labor productivity, an order of magnitude less labor required to clean that floor. This is where we're applying AMR today. This is where we've applied those 6,800 robots that Dave mentioned.
This is where we're launching the X4 ROVR that Rusty mentioned is in that conversion process. Because when we do that, we significantly reduce our customers' costs. So think order of magnitude less labor costs. We significantly increase our revenue. As Dave mentioned, the typical robot sells for three times what a typical mechanical piece of equipment sells to. Our revenue goes up. All of that expands our market. And here again, my favorite part, we deliver a better, more verified clean space for our customers. This is why we're focused on AMR. The sheer amount of value creation opportunity for our customers is enormous in this conversion. We do envision long-term an industry, as I mentioned, that is cleaned 100% autonomously, that doesn't require operator engagement. The reality is that no one is delivering that yet today. All cleaning robots require some level of human interaction and human engagement.
Our technology, like most in the market, requires teach and repeat. So an operator has to teach the machine the route that it's going to take before it can autonomously clean. Most solutions require the battery to be charged by the operator, the tanks to be dumped and filled by the operator, the cleaning process to be initiated by the operator. We are investing in automating every component of that process. We're investing in automatic mapping so that the operator doesn't have to teach the route. We're investing in automatic charging so that the operator doesn't have to charge the battery. Ultimately, we will lead the industry to fully autonomously clean, and we are investing in it. But I'll reiterate, our focus is on this mechanized to robotic cleaning transition because that is where the most value creation opportunity is for our customers.
That presents us the opportunity to grow our business. So I've talked a bit about the high level, the long-term vision for cleaning. Now I'm going to shift gears, and I'm going to talk more about the near term, the initiatives that we're investing in today to drive results here in the near term. But hopefully, you can see that how these initiatives, even though they're near-term focused, they advance us towards that long-term vision that we've got for the cleaning industry. So Dave and Rusty both mentioned this. The three areas that we're focused on within these initiatives we call AMR, small space, and product line extensions. The reason that we've chosen to focus on these three areas specifically is they hold many things in common. One, they play to our strengths. As Rusty mentioned, we have an industry-leading multi-channel go-to-market.
Each of these initiatives allows us to put that in play. Two, they play to our strengths from a product perspective. If there's one thing that Tennant Company knows how to do, it's how to make high-quality, high-reliability, high-performing cleaning equipment. It puts those strengths into play for us. Each of these markets, each of these segments, as Rusty pointed out many times, they're the most rapidly growing segments in the cleaning equipment industry. Each of them represents a multiple of what the typical industry growth rate is effectively. And those growth rates are supported by macro trends. And so we know those growth rates are not transitional. They're going to continue well into the future. And in each of these three areas, we are not starting from scratch. We have made investments in the past. We've demonstrated a track record of turning those investments into revenue growth.
So this is an area where we know when we make the investment, we have confidence we're going to deliver the return. Now in each of these areas, I am going to dive a little bit deeper, a little more on why we're investing here, what we're doing, and then the outcomes that you can expect from those investments. Excuse me. So I'm going to start with AMR. You've heard Dave talk about it. You've heard Rusty talk about it. You're going to hear more from me about it. You see a robot in the back. That's intentional. This is a core focus of our growth agenda at Tennant Company. And this is supported not just by our internal desire to use cool technology. It's supported by macro trends in the industry that are impacting our customer.
Dave touched on it, that one of the most significant macro trends that this addresses is labor. Our customers' cost is very typical. More than 70% of their costs is in labor, not in equipment. That's not where they spend most of their money. They spend most of their money with labor, applying labor to the machines effectively. Labor is generally getting harder to get everywhere in the world, everywhere in every industry. In cleaning, it's worse. Very few people want to do manual cleaning tasks effectively. AMR goes to the heart of solving our customers' biggest challenge. Another macro trend that supports our focus on AMR is automation. The reality is automation is increasing in capability rapidly across multiple industries. Sensing capability has advanced. Processing capability has advanced.
The reality is that autonomous navigation is getting so good now that it's highly effective in the indoor, complex, dynamic environments that we clean in. That's leading to a significant benefit to us in terms of automation capability. With enhanced automation capability, we are seeing volume growth across the industry as well. So if you think about high-volume industries like automotive that are adopting automation, that level of volume is driving the cost of automation down now. Sensing is getting less expensive. Processing is getting less expensive. And so we're at this juncture where the capability of automation has increased significantly. The cost has decreased significantly. Now the ROI makes a ton of sense for our customers. This is why we're focused on it. The ROI is starting to come into shape. Now, where we're focused on AMR, we are being pretty precise in how we're targeting.
It has wide applicability, but we want to be precise in how we target it. We're focusing on the largest opportunities. And for us, some of that is informed by the sheer cost of labor. And so where we're focused on is largely mature markets, markets where labor is the most expensive. So think about North America. Think about Europe. Those are where some of the biggest opportunities are. And then when we think about it from a vertical market perspective, we're focused on applying AMR where our customers put the most number of hours into cleaning their floor effectively. And so if you think about retail applications, a lot of time spent cleaning the floor. If you think about logistics applications, think about UPS, FedEx, DHL warehouses, gigantic spaces that take a ton of labor to clean the floor. We're focused in those areas.
And then, like, manufacturing spaces, large spaces, a lot of time spent cleaning dirty floors effectively. Those are where some of the biggest opportunities are for us to apply AMR to create value for our customers. We believe that we need to win in AMR. It's foundational to us disrupting our industry, and it's foundational for us achieving our vision. Our competitive strategy is really simple. Dave and Rusty have both touched on it. It centers around go-to-market, product, and technology. From a go-to-market perspective, we're applying our Rusty's multi-channel go-to-market. Our direct sales organization, our customer support ecosystem is uniquely positioned to help our customers on this journey from mechanized to robotic cleaning. We can help train our customers how to use a robot. They're no longer manual cleaners. They're robot operators. Rusty's team is prepared to help them on that transition.
We can help them select the right robot. These are expensive investments. You want to make sure you get the right one in your facility. We can help them do that. We can help them embed robotic cleaning in their cleaning processes. It's very different than regular mechanized or manual cleaning. Combine that, we've got our direct service support. And so these assets are expensive that our customers are investing in. Our direct service network ensures that those assets remain available to use. The customers are making an expensive investment. It needs to be up for them. If you combine all of those elements of our multi-channel go-to-market, we believe we're uniquely positioned to help our customers make this transition. That's our first element of our competitive strategy. The second element is product.
As I mentioned before, if there's one thing that Tennant Company knows how to do and how to do well, it's design, manufacture, and sell high-performance, high-quality, durable floor cleaning equipment. That's critical in a space like this where a customer makes this level of investment. The product has to do well in cleaning the floor. So that's our second element of our competitive strategy. And the third one is we're deploying around technology. We're deploying industry-leading autonomous navigation technology. So we're putting these three elements of our competitive strategy together, product, channel, technology. We're ramping up investment, as you'll see later, in AMR. And we're using that to accelerate the growth of robotic cleaning in our industry to grow our business. I mentioned that a key element of our competitive strategy is deploying industry-leading AMR technology, autonomous navigation technology.
We're doing that through our partnership with Brain Corp. We've partnered with Brain Corp, as Dave pointed out, for about seven years. In that seven years, we've learned a lot. We've deployed 6,800 robots, which has made us and our automation capabilities smarter. We've built confidence in the solution that we've put in the marketplace to the extent that we know we have the most proven and capable AMR solution in the cleaning space today. It's for this reason, this level of confidence, that we decided to make the investment into Brain Corp, where we invested $32 million to acquire a minority interest in their business. A big investment for us. In addition to the investment, we also have transformed the nature of our commercial relationship with Brain Corp as well. This has us uniquely positioned to accelerate the growth in our business.
I want to touch on a few things that we've changed in our relationship that really put us in a good position moving forward to accelerate our growth. The first is that now all new AMR floor care technology from Brain Corp is available exclusively from Tennant Company. This is huge for us. We are now the only ones in the industry that can offer this industry-leading autonomous navigation technology. We are now exclusively differentiated on the technology side in a way that we've never been before. In the new relationship, we're now able to sell an all-in-one AMR solution. We sell an all-in-one AMR solution at a price that we set. We own the relationship with the customer. We are the one supplier to the customer. This reduces friction in the buying process for a customer. We're easier to work with now.
It allows us to leverage the full scale of Rusty's global sales organization to go unleash them, to do what they do best, and that's sell floor care solutions. Also, there's a benefit here where now we can participate in the recurring revenue stream that comes with autonomy fees. That changes with the relationship. The other element of the new relationship that I want to highlight is we've created and resourced a full pipeline of new product development efforts. We're currently running multiple concurrent new product efforts around AMR. You will see from Tennant Company a steady cadence of new launches moving forward. Our desire, our commitment, is to get to more applications, so apply AMR to more applications, and to drive significant enhancements in ROI so that we can drive an increase in customer adoption of robotic cleaning.
We think one of the best illustrations of the power of this relationship and what we're doing on AMR is the X4 ROVR. And so the X4 ROVR, as Dave mentioned, it's our first-ever purpose-built cleaning robot. It brings an optimized form factor that I'll talk a little bit more about. It offers the next generation, Gen 3 autonomous navigation technology available exclusively from Tennant Company. It's going to be sold through our new go-to-market, our all-in-one solution with Tennant as a single supplier. We are incredibly excited about the opportunity that X4 ROVR presents for our customers. I would like to share a quick video with you introducing to you the X4 ROVR. I got to tell you, as a product guy, I really like that video, but I'm not impartial.
We are super excited about X4 ROVR, but I want to reiterate a couple of points that you could kind of glean on in the video and that we've talked a little bit on. First is the form factor. This is Tennant Company's smallest AMR yet. The significance of that is many things, but a couple of things that are in particular, it gets us into more applications. Retail maybe is the best example. As Dave mentioned, we were wildly successful with large format stores like Walmart with our initial fleet, deployed thousands of machines across those fleets. They do a wonderful job cleaning those stores. The X4 gets us into much smaller retail formats. Instead of Walmart, think of it like your local grocery store. That's the type of scale that we can now get into. When you do that, store counts go up significantly.
In the U.S. alone, we're talking about tens of thousands of additional applications that we can now sell the X4 ROVR in that we couldn't in the past effectively. So the small form factor really gets us into more applications. In addition to getting into more applications, more formats, we can clean more of the store now. My favorite example is checkout aisles. Our historical machines were too big to navigate through a checkout aisle. That leaves a pretty significant amount of the store uncleaned in a retail store. The X4 ROVR seamlessly and effortlessly navigates between checkout aisles. Now we can clean more of the store effectively. So form factor is a big deal with this machine. The other thing that I'll reiterate is the fact that we've got next generation, Gen 3 autonomous navigation technology from Brain Corp available exclusively from Tennant Company in this machine.
This technology offers enhanced sensing. This machine is the first machine that we've deployed with 3D LiDAR. It offers enhanced processing. It's got the next-gen NVIDIA chip. Then this machine, this next-gen technology, is new software that benefits from those 6,800 machines that we have fielded. We can apply all of our learning from that. But then we benefit from this new capability that the hardware brings, so new sensing, new processing. We bring all of that together, and we have significantly enhanced the maneuverability of the machine. Now we can seamlessly reroute inside a retail facility. All of that means that we are cleaning more space, using less labor, driving a significant improvement in customer ROI. We are launching this product this quarter. It starts shipping this quarter.
In our initial communications with customers, we're getting a very positive response on this product. We are ramping up production to what we think is pretty what we see as pretty robust demand. We're very excited about the X4 ROVR. All right, so I've talked a lot about AMR. I'm going to shift gears a little bit and now talk a little bit more about small space. Both Rusty and Dave touched on this. I'll go a little bit deeper effectively. Our small space strategy is simple. This is very much focused on driving the conversion from manual cleaning to mechanized cleaning. As I opened up, that more than doubles labor productivity. It does a better job of cleaning. It's a more efficient and effective cleaning process. As I mentioned earlier on too, most of the world is still cleaned manually.
And to make it real for you, think about some of the stores that you've walked past already today: fast food restaurants, quick serve restaurants, convenience stores. Those are almost all still largely manually cleaned. There's someone with a mop and bucket cleaning those floors. That's our opportunity. Beyond that, think about large facilities, manufacturing facilities, logistics facilities. We're in those locations already cleaning the large wide open spaces. But the small spaces within those large buildings, think restrooms, think lobbies, think cafeterias, those are largely still manually cleaned as well with a mop and bucket. This is our opportunity to drive the conversion from manual to mechanized cleaning. Our strategy is pretty straightforward here. We are launching an expanded product portfolio that does a better job of cleaning these small occupied spaces to drive this conversion.
We're leveraging our global sales footprint to drive that and help our customers again on this journey from manual to mechanized cleaning. As Rusty mentioned, we launched the i-mop portfolio of products, of which there is one sample up here. If you haven't seen it, please take a look at it. I would really like you to use it too because that's how it really strikes its or sets itself apart. And so if you're ever in the Minneapolis area, please come see us. I'd be happy to do a demo with you on the i-mop. It's a remarkably maneuverable product. It's a patented product, and it's very easy to use. And so it is the most compelling alternative to a mop and bucket product that we have in our portfolio. We launched the first one a few years ago in North America. We've since grown the portfolio.
Now we have more i-mop products in our portfolio. We've expanded our channel reach through Rusty's organization so we can reach more customers now. We've grown this business significantly in North America from almost nothing just a few years ago. Just last year, we launched our latest i-mop solution called the i-mop Lite, smallest, most maneuverable, most affordable i-mop solution yet. The nice thing about this is it really reduces those barriers to entry from manual cleaning to mechanized cleaning. The results that we've seen so far in i-mop Lite are exceeding our expectations here in North America. We're excited about our opportunity to continue to grow this component of the business here in North America.
One of the key elements of this strategy is taking that i-mop portfolio of products and expanding it to our international go-to-market, and so leveraging our direct sales and our customer support ecosystem in other markets to get to more customers. We just announced last month our first wave of this expansion. We're now live in France, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil with the i-mop. Our customer response has been, not surprisingly, very robust. We're leveraging our customer support ecosystem to drive it. Because we've run this play before, we ran it in North America, we're really confident that we're going to see the growth coming outside of North America and these other really important markets for us. You will continue to see Tennant Company building out our product portfolio, expanding our channels to lead the mechanization of manual cleaning globally.
The last growth strategy that I'm going to touch on from a new product innovation perspective is something that we call product line extensions. I've spent a lot of time today talking about the transition to robotic cleaning using AMR. I've talked about time converting manual cleaning to mechanized cleaning. The reality is, the middle of that slide back in the automation slide, where mechanized cleaning is, that's where the majority of the market is today. That's where our customers spend the most money when it comes to equipment. This strategy is about taking more than our fair share of that component of the market effectively. I'll explain kind of why we have this opportunity and what we're going to do about it. Historically, Tennant has been a premium brand. It is a premium brand.
Our customers particularly know us for high performance, high durability, cleaning capability, specifically around heavy-duty soils. So there's a hard-to-remove soil or a high-frequency cleaning process. That's where the Tennant brand, our customers are comfortable paying a premium for it and gaining access to our customer support ecosystem. As it turns out, there's a significant component of the market that is lighter-duty cleaning, easier-to-remove soils, lower-frequency cleaning. And while a customer might want to buy from Tennant, the premium product, the heavy-duty product, gain access to the customer support ecosystem, they may not need that heavy-duty capability. And there are alternatives out there that are a better fit for these lighter-duty applications. And so this presents our opportunity. And we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on the opportunity.
Through the acquisition of IPC in Italy and GAOMEI in China, we acquired our way into product platforms that were designed from the ground up for these light-duty applications. In many cases, we've been selling these light-duty products into applications. They're proven. They're reliable. They're simple. We've been selling them for decades in some cases effectively into these light-duty applications. So our play is pretty simple here. We're going to leverage those acquired platforms. We are leveraging those acquired platforms. We're creating Tennant-branded variants, and we're leveraging our global Tennant sales channel reach to go access new value points in the market. It allows us to go get new customers, so customers that couldn't justify the Tennant premium in the past. Now we've got the right product for them. It allows us to go deeper with existing customers.
There are instances where a customer in the same facility will buy a Tennant-branded product for the hard-to-clean areas, and then they'll buy some other brand for these light-duty applications. Now we can solve all of their needs effectively. We can go deeper. We can gain a higher share of wallet leveraging this strategy. This is not new. We've been at this for a couple of years. We've demonstrated the track record here. So we've launched more than 10 new products using this product line extension strategy, and it is having the intended results. Most importantly, it's meeting customer expectations. It's meeting the expectations of the applications. It's allowing us to grow revenue and add an accretive margin rate. So the cost structure of these products is such that we can price it and still have it be accretive to our margins.
As Dave mentioned, we're not particularly averse to cannibalization here. The play is to go get new customers, but if there is cannibalization, it's at accretive margins. The part that I love the best about this initiative is we're taking share from the competition. You'll see us continue to run the product line extension play to grow our business and take market share. All right, I've talked about our high-level vision for the industry. I've talked about the specific initiative that we're executing. Now I'm going to talk very briefly about innovation process at Tennant Company. Really, the key takeaway that I want you all to have here is that we've got a systematic and consistent process for garnering customer insights and turning those insights into unique and proprietary solutions that create value for our customers. That's the basis of it.
We have a process. All innovation at Tennant Company starts with the customer. We have a process called Cultivate and Curate that is all about going to understand our customers. We do standard voice of the customer work. We do ethnographic research that allows us to understand our customers' cleaning needs and even beyond in a lot of cases. We take those insights, and we feed them through our product and technology roadmap process. At Tennant Company, every product line has an assigned product manager. Every product manager has an expectation that for every product line, we have a five-year roadmap for how we're going to grow their business. We take and we bring these roadmaps to life via a global engineering footprint. So we've got engineering resources in China, Brazil, the U.S., in Europe.
That diverse mix of engineering resources allows us to efficiently allocate capital in a way that we can stay ahead of the pace of the market and create engineering leverage with the right cost structure effectively. All of this is a systematic process for us to get these customer insights and translate them into real customer value and then turn that into revenue growth for Tennant Company. All right, this is my last slide, and then I'm going to talk about results. So if you can't tell already, my team, our team at Tennant Company is focused on using innovation to drive revenue growth. And not surprisingly, that's how we measure. That's our primary metric of how we measure ourselves. And so we are targeting. We are committed to delivering 1.5%-2% of top-line growth for Tennant Company, leveraging new product innovation.
Within that top-line growth number, we're also focusing on creating and scaling these recurring revenue streams that Rusty touched on, AMR, connected services. They're included in a focus area within this 1.5%-2%. At Tennant Company, our total investment within R&D is between 3% and 4%. That covers our entire base, so maintaining the existing base of business as well as driving this 1.5%-2% of growth. We talked a lot about AMR today and the sheer value creation opportunity that it is for our customers. Because of that opportunity and our demonstrated track record, we significantly have increased our allocation to AMR in terms of our R&D investment. What you'll see as a result of that investment is a steady cadence of AMR new product launches from Tennant Company moving forward, starting today with the X4 ROVR.
My team, our team at Tennant Company, is very focused on driving revenue growth with the innovation pipeline. But we also are very disciplined and structured in making sure that that revenue growth is profitable and accretive to our profitability objectives. And so inside new product development at Tennant Company, we've set an IRR hurdle rate of 20%. And as I reflect on the portfolio of new products that we have in the pipeline today, it's very common that we run well north of that number. And one of the reasons that we're able to do that is because we use partnerships pretty significantly. So if you think about the partnership that we have with Brain Corp, if you think about the partnership that we have with i-team, our partners are investing in this business with us.
We gain significant leverage from that, and we can amplify that leveraging Rusty's go-to-market strengths. And because of that, we can deliver pretty competitive or pretty compelling returns on our investment. So we're very much focused on driving incremental revenue growth, leveraging new product innovation, but we're also disciplined to ensure that it's accretive to our profitability. All right, in closing, I hope you can see that our innovation efforts at Tennant Company are focused on solving real customer problems and creating real customer value. I think we've demonstrated that with AMR, with the enormous value creation opportunity there is. We're translating that to revenue growth. And hopefully, you can see, and we're committed to ensuring that new product innovation will continue to fuel growth at Tennant Company for the foreseeable future. It's now my privilege to introduce to you Riley Goodwin, Senior Director of Global Sustainability for Tennant Company.
Thanks for your time.
Thanks, Pat. Hi, everyone. Good morning. It's great to see you all here in person and those joining us online. Thank you for joining us. I'm really excited to be here today to share Tennant's approach to embedding sustainability across our business and how we are actioning and delivering against our customers' needs and expectations in this space. You heard from Dave how customers are asking and seeking partners who build this and truly integrate sustainability into their business. That's an incredible tailwind that we have as we deploy this work. The other context that I just like to share and touch on is, as a global community, we are truly at a critical juncture, one that requires leadership and action from governments, from civil society, from business, and from communities at large to drive the systemic change we need to address our collective global challenges.
So at Tennant, that leadership is not new. You also heard from Dave about our 150-year history, our history of reinventing ourselves over that time. Within that, we have a really strong culture of stewardship. So we've been at this work for a while, and that's evidenced by our products and services that feature sustainable innovations and in the benefits delivered to our collective and shared spaces when a Tennant machine delivers a differentiated kind of clean. Today at Tennant Company, sustainability is inspired by our vision to create a cleaner, safer, healthier world. We recognize our unique opportunity and our responsibility to drive that kind of positive change, to deliver for our customers in ways that create sustainable value, both for them but for our business and for society at large. In doing so, we are able to enable the performance of our business.
We're setting goals that drive efficiency and innovations, and we're delivering solutions that help our customers and that help inform and solve the challenges that we know they are having, no matter wherever they are on their sustainability journey. All of that work allows us to have a broader impact and effect on the global challenges that we, as Tennant, are uniquely positioned to drive impact on. Our approach is anchored by our Thriving People, Healthy Planet framework. This framework was developed in partnership with our customers, our employees, partners across our value chain, suppliers, and investors. In fact, some of you in this room may have been interviewed as a part of that process. And if you were, I thank you. Within the framework, we have two pillars, Thriving People and Healthy Planet, and six impact areas.
This helps set the lens for where we define programs, where we set goals, and how we truly integrate sustainability across our business. Our first pillar is Thriving People because our success as a business relies on people, our employees, our customers, our partners. Fundamentally, we believe that when the people and the communities in and around Tennant thrive, so will our business. The impact areas within Thriving People include employee success and social impact and span our work around employee development, health and safety, our Tennant Foundation and our corporate philanthropy work, as well as our work around diversity, equity, and inclusion. It also includes our shared spaces impact area, which comprises our purpose as a business, how we are reinventing how the world cleans, delivering clean, safe, and healthy environments in the collective and shared spaces that we all rely upon in our day-to-day lives.
The second pillar of our framework is Healthy Planet, and it includes our impact areas of climate and energy, water and chemical use, and circular products and waste. Our work here includes how we are contributing to global decarbonization by reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from our operations as well as from the use of our products. It also includes our work around water stewardship, again, how we are driving down water within our manufacturing operations and through the use of our machines and our customers' footprint. And finally, it includes our work around how we are enabling a global circular economy by reducing waste, designing for repair and material recovery, and helping close the loop on the life cycle of our machines. Our Healthy Planet pillar is anchored by our work to adapt to and mitigate climate change. It's the most pressing challenge facing the global community today.
I'm really proud to say that Tennant is leading the way in the mechanized cleaning industry with our commitment to become net zero by 2040. Achieving net zero means significantly reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from across our operations and from the use of our products. So our path includes sourcing 100% of our electricity from renewable sources, working to reduce the emissions from our global vehicle fleet. And it also includes working with our customers as we increase the energy efficiency of our machines and eliminate the use phase emissions, offering electrified solutions that will help our customers reach their sustainability goals, reach their climate goals, maybe even their net zero goals as well. We know this is a journey, as you can tell by the timeline here, and one that's going to take time and commitment and partnership.
But we are really proud of our leadership role here and for the fact that the Science Based Targets initiative, which is the global standard-setting organization for corporate climate goals, has approved and validated our net zero plan. Being a leader in sustainability today isn't just about setting goals or defining your ambitions. It's about how you deliver against those in the context of your business and the value you unlock, the resiliency you get, the efficiencies that are on the other side when you create solutions for your customers that help them on their goals as well. At Tennant, we are unlocking that value by activating sustainability across how we think, how we plan, and how we operate our business. That's different than how we used to do this work. You heard Dave talking about how we are no longer a siloed team.
In many ways or many cases today, you'll see sustainability functions more around reporting or focused on data collection, which is important work. The true value comes when you're able to actually integrate it across the operations of the business. We've shifted that traditional operating model, moving from a siloed team to working across the business and transferring the leadership and accountability of delivering against sustainability strategies and goals to the functions and teams that own that functional area. That means the teams that own supply chain management or global vehicle fleet or product design or facilities oversee the execution of the sustainability goals and strategies pertaining to their functional area. We have truly operationalized sustainability, enabling differentiated results, enabling stronger business performance.
At the end of the day, it helps us be the kind of partner that our customers are telling us they want to see to do business with. It's from direct dialogue with our customers that we know the kinds of challenges that they have, the kinds of strategies that they are setting, the types of sustainability goals that they also have across their business. We also know that they're facing the same mega trends that we are as a business. We know things like energy use, emissions, water consumption, waste are important to our business or to our customers.
So today, we offer solutions that help with those challenges, things like electrified or battery-powered equipment that reduce the greenhouse gas emissions compared to a traditional internal combustion engine, or water management solutions that reduce the water needed to deliver a clean environment, or technologies that limit the need of chemicals when delivering the same level of clean. But we know we can go further down that path. And so you heard from Pat as he defined our curate and cultivate process. And we've established sustainability as one of our five innovation vectors. And within that, we've further identified core dimensions of sustainability that will help drive sustainability-inspired innovation across the business, so focusing on things like circularity, like climate change, social impact.
We're really excited about the opportunities to design products with enhanced focus on repair, on serviceability, on the user experience, and end-of-life care because we know that we can drive that value for our business and society when our products can help our customers reach their sustainability goals. I want to double-click for a minute on electrification. Reducing the emissions from our product portfolio is a critical element of our net zero journey, but it's also a core driver when we look to meeting our customers' expectations and helping them with their goals. When we reduce the use phase emissions from running a Tennant machine, we are reducing our customers' fuel and energy demand. We have the added benefit of improving indoor air quality when you're switching from an internal combustion engine to an electrified option.
So today, we offer a number of electrified products across our portfolio, but our net zero journey requires an examination of some of the larger internal combustion engines in our offerings. Since announcing our commitment to net zero, we have worked across our portfolio to embed emissions reduction strategies, including prioritizing electrification of those largest emitters in the portfolio, upgrading battery technology, moving from lead acid to more efficient lithium-ion, and driving other efficiencies within the engineering of our machines. All while doing this, we're listening closely to the feedback from our customers. We do this work in partnership with them, and we're watching the trends in other industries such as heavy machinery or the automotive industry or material handling to assess market dynamics and understand how they might transfer to our industry. This work is a journey, and we are super excited by the progress we've made.
Our approach includes leadership-level goals across our framework, and then we are activating this and integrating the performance of those goals delivering against our customers' expectations. So that includes our commitment to be net zero by 2040, as I mentioned. And it also includes our work to embed sustainability-inspired innovation across our portfolio. We also have set meaningful DEI ambitions because we know that when our business is inclusive and reflects the communities in which we operate and the customers we serve, everyone has better outcomes. So last year, we announced our ambition to increase the women in leadership 50% by the end of 2030. Currently, one in five leaders in the business are women, and this ambition will increase that to one in three. And this year, we announced our ambition to increase our BIPOC employees in the U.S. 30% by the end of 2030.
When it comes to corporate philanthropy, we set our sights to donate 2% of our pretax earnings back into the communities in which we operate through volunteerism, through product donation, through grants from the Tennant Foundation. We are really excited about the work we're doing to invest back in our communities. Finally, we're setting goals to capture how we deliver on our purpose as a business. We believe that people benefit when the shared spaces that they exist in and rely upon in their day-to-day lives support their well-being, their productivity, and their safety, whether it's a school or a hospital, a warehouse, or an airport. Our equipment is revolutionizing cleaning, delivering more sustainable, innovative, and effective solutions.
To help more people benefit from shared spaces that are cleaned in better ways, we have set an ambition to help our customers clean 63.5 trillion sq ft of shared spaces by 2030. To give a sense of scale, each year, that's the equivalent of our machines enabling the cleaning of the state of California twice. To wrap up, I think a key takeaway for this group is that we have integrated this work across our business. We are cementing our leadership, and we are helping solve our customers' challenges through sustainable cleaning innovations. Part of that leadership is continuing our commitment to transparency, compliance, and strong corporate governance. We first issued a sustainability report in 2010, long before it was common practice and certainly before it was required. That supports our readiness for the mandated disclosures that are happening in geographies around the world.
At Tennant, sustainability and ESG, the definition of or the building of a sustainability strategy and the work to provide that governance are united to ensure there's robust cross-functional engagement and oversight of the work. Finally, part of that leadership and something that we've always done is tracking emergent issues, looking at things like today, it's biodiversity and the nature agenda, waste and plastic recycling, battery recycling, and the end-of-life care of our machines. We're going to continue to do that work to understand the future of sustainability, the future of sustainable cleaning, to identify where we can innovate and how we can be the leading provider of sustainable solutions for our customers in the future. With that, I have the privilege of turning it over to Fay West, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Fay?
Thank you, Riley, and good morning, everyone.
Welcome to the last section of today's presentation, Unlocking Value. Today, I will walk through Tennant's history of strong financial performance, highlight our plans to unlock value through sales growth and margin expansion, and share our disciplined capital allocation approach, including growth through strategic acquisitions. As we reflect on our past achievements, the successful execution of our prior enterprise strategy has really fueled our performance. Looking toward the future, we are committed to building on this strong foundation to unlock new opportunities and drive growth. In the coming years, we will focus on driving sales growth and expanding margins through a combination of strategic initiatives and operational excellence. Leveraging on market insights and our customer-centric approach, we are poised to capitalize on emerging trends, penetrate new markets, and diversify our revenue streams.
Additionally, our pursuit of continuous improvement and cost optimization will enable us to enhance margins and deliver value to our shareholders. By prioritizing a disciplined capital allocation framework and prudent financial management, we can ensure that we have the resources and flexibility to capitalize on growth opportunities while also mitigating risks and safeguarding long-term success. Additionally, we recognize that growth through acquisitions presents a compelling opportunity to augment Tennant's organic growth initiatives, expand our market presence, and deliver long-term value to our shareholders. Tennant has a history of strong financial performance and over the past few years has demonstrated its ability to thrive in a dynamic and challenging environment. Sales have grown approximately 3% annually from 2019 to 2023. Going forward, as we execute on our sales growth initiatives, we are well-positioned to produce sales growth above historical performance.
Looking at adjusted EBITDA and EBITDA margins, since 2019, adjusted EBITDA has grown 8.5%. EBITDA margins have expanded from 12% in 2019 to 15.5% in 2023, a 350 basis point improvement. Top-line performance coupled with improved gross margins and efficient SG&A spending drove this expansion. We believe our enterprise strategy, including cost optimization efforts, will allow us to drive adjusted EBITDA expansion going forward. Tennant's ability to generate strong free cash flow underscores our financial strength and resilience, resilience that was required as we navigated through the recent supply chain challenges and made the necessary investments into working capital during that period. And while that impacted our free cash flow conversion in 2022, we bounced back in 2023 through strong operating performance and effective management of working capital.
Strong free cash flow generation remains a top priority for Tennant, and we believe that our operating performance, coupled with active management of working capital and CapEx, will position us to achieve our free cash flow conversion goals. Lastly, since 2019, adjusted EPS has grown impressively at nearly 17%. We are targeting a compound annual growth rate in revenue of 3%-5% over the next few years. In addition to growth in the overall market, growing our revenue will require a multifaceted approach. Rusty and Pat highlighted earlier that this will include optimizing pricing strategies, new product development, differentiated go-to-market strategies, and new business models. Pricing optimization and realization will be key to our revenue growth. By understanding market dynamics and analyzing customer preferences, we can identify opportunities to adjust our pricing to better reflect the value we offer while remaining competitive in the market.
We believe pricing will add approximately 100 basis points of growth over the next few years. Additionally, we recognize the importance of differentiated go-to-market strategies in maximizing our revenue potential. This involves tailoring our efforts to target specific customer segments, verticals, and geographies where we see the greatest opportunity to drive channel penetration and grow market share. It also means activating new business models like equipment as a service, robotics as a service, and remote service diagnostics. Additionally, strategic partnerships like the one we have with Brain Corp will play a crucial role in amplifying our go-to-market efforts and expanding our reach in AMR. We believe that our go-to-market strategies and our new business models will add approximately 100 basis points of growth over the next few years.
Through innovation and new product development, we aim to bring to market new products that address customer demands, capitalize on emerging trends, and differentiate us from our competitors. Whether it's launching new product lines, expanding existing ones, or diversifying into adjacent markets, our goal is to create value-added solutions that drive incremental revenue. We believe our new product development will add approximately 150-200 basis points of growth over the next few years. By optimizing pricing, introducing innovative products, tailoring our go-to-market approach, and forging strategic partnerships, we can unlock new revenue opportunities, strengthen our competitive position, and drive sustained growth for our company. Increasing operating margins through cost reduction strategies and operating leverage is a fundamental objective for Tennant. By fostering a culture of cost consciousness throughout the organization, we are enhancing profit margins and driving bottom-line growth.
To that end, we have deployed a zero-based budgeting process across our organization that has allowed us to effectively manage our costs and direct funding towards growth-oriented objectives. Further, we developed cost-out processes and initiatives in our global operations that have helped offset inflationary pressures and further manage costs. We are resourcing accordingly to build on the success of these actions and to continue to drive bottom-line growth. We are in the process of implementing a new ERP system. We are in year two of a three-year journey, and this year, we are in the design and build phase. Go-live will be staggered throughout 2025. Once implemented, we believe the ERP system will be key to streamlining operations, enhancing visibility, and optimizing processes across the entire organization.
By consolidating disparate systems and data sources into a single integrated platform, we will be able to eliminate redundancy, improve data accuracy, and automate routine tasks. This not only reduces administrative overhead but will also empower decision-making with real-time insights and will allow us to make informed strategic decisions. From finance and procurement to inventory management and production planning, the ERP system will enable us to standardize workflows, drive operational efficiency, and ultimately lower costs and boost operating margins. We are targeting a run-rate savings post-implementation of $10 million-$15 million annually. As we have navigated through the supply chain issues over the last few years, our global teams work to stabilize our supply chains and address order backlog. Strengthening our supply chain will continue to be essential for reducing costs and improving operational resilience.
By forging strategic partnerships with key suppliers, optimizing inventory levels, and continuing to move away from custom parts, we can minimize carrying costs, reduce stockouts, and mitigate supply chain disruptions. Continued partnership between procurement, engineering, and operations on the platforming of product lines and the standardization of parts will improve design and manufacturability. By optimizing our supply chain operations, we can lower procurement costs and enhance overall operational efficiency, leading to higher operating margins. At the heart of operating and manufacturing excellence is a commitment to continuous improvement and innovation. We are embedding continuous improvement and operational excellence into our culture to help us identify inefficiencies and streamline processes. We are implementing lean manufacturing principles, optimizing production schedules, and investing in labor-saving equipment. These actions will enable more efficient operations, enhance productivity, and are critical to driving cost savings.
We believe these actions and initiatives in the aggregate will yield 50-100 basis points of annual margin improvement over the long term. Through strong financial performance and active management of working capital, we have demonstrated the ability to deliver strong free cash flow. We believe the revenue and margin actions that we have outlined today will drive improved operating performance and future cash flow generation. This strong free cash flow provides a solid foundation for our capital allocation priorities and allows for flexibility as we pursue growth opportunities. First and foremost, our priority is to identify and invest in opportunities that fuel the company's growth. This entails allocating funds towards strategic initiatives like R&D as well as investments to optimize and streamline our operations. We target investments that will enhance our competitive edge and generate long-term returns.
On average, we invest approximately 3% of sales into R&D and spend between $20 million and $25 million annually in CapEx. We believe investments in R&D and CapEx will continue at these levels in the near future. At the same time, we are tasked with prudently managing liquidity and debt levels to ensure that we have the necessary resources to navigate market conditions and capitalize on opportunities. Over the past few years, we have allocated resources towards debt repayment and are currently at the lower end of our leverage target of one to two times adjusted EBITDA. But we would feel comfortable exceeding that leverage level temporarily to fund acquisitions. M&A is a key part of our enterprise strategy, and we will carefully evaluate opportunities to ensure alignment with our long-term objectives and growth strategy.
Whether it's acquiring complementary businesses or forging strategic partnerships, these investments are scrutinized for their potential to create synergies, expand market reach, and drive value creation for our shareholders. Based on our cash flow generation and existing liquidity, we believe we have sufficient runway to execute against this strategic priority. Returning value to our shareholders is another key aspect of our capital allocation strategy. Through dividends and share buybacks, we aim to reward investors for their trust and confidence in our company's performance while also signaling our commitment to delivering sustainable returns over time. We have a strong history of increasing dividends, and we intend to continue to increase dividends in the future, targeting an annual increase of approximately 5%. Additionally, we plan to deploy capital opportunistically to repurchase shares and are primarily targeting to offset dilution from share-based compensation.
Our role in capital allocation is to strike a balance between investing in growth opportunities, maintaining financial stability, pursuing strategic initiatives that position the company for future success, and returning capital to shareholders. We successfully executed our previous strategic initiatives, which streamlined our business and strengthened our foundation. This better positioned Tennant to pursue M&A and helped us earn the right to grow through M&A. Our financial strength, compelling value proposition, and winning business model are factors that we can leverage to create value for our company and for our shareholders. As I just outlined, our financial position is strong. We have a healthy balance sheet with low leverage and generate significant cash flow, cash that can be deployed to be reinvested in the business, be returned to shareholders, or used for creating acquisitions. We are well-positioned and have the financial wherewithal to execute against M&A initiatives.
Additionally, we believe we can leverage our compelling value proposition and winning business model and that we will be able to capitalize on Tennant's unique strengths and attributes to attract and pursue targets that would align with our M&A strategy. Dave spent some time on our strategy and highlighted our three areas of focus: define and grow Cleaning Core, drive value through connected autonomy, and expand portfolio into mobile equipment adjacencies. Growth through acquisitions presents an exciting opportunity to capitalize on megatrends, expand our total addressable market, and drive growth. While by its very nature, M&A is opportunistic and episodic, we are targeting to add approximately $150 million of revenue from acquisitions over the next three years. This is an ambitious goal, but we are excited about the opportunity to grow our business and increase shareholder value.
Through our strategy work, we have identified a very robust funnel of potentially actionable targets. But we also understand the importance of exercising discipline throughout the M&A process to ensure that acquisitions are aligned with our objectives and remain profitable. As we evaluate potential transactions for fit and attractiveness, we will focus on three areas of discipline: strategic, financial, and integration. From a strategic perspective, we want to ensure that the potential acquisitions align with the priorities as outlined on the previous slide. As we consider potential targets, we will assess our ability to leverage Tennant's unique assets and competencies, including our strong customer intimacy, a global service footprint, and our AMR equipment portfolio, just to name a few. We will balance risk with opportunity and evaluate the attractiveness of targets based on fit, competitive advantage, growth rates, size, and market position.
Maintaining discipline in the investment thesis will be key to successfully executing M&A. Second, maintaining financial discipline is critical to ensuring that M&A transactions are accretive to earnings and cash flow. We have set clear internal investment criteria, including minimum return thresholds and risk-adjusted return expectations. Targets will be evaluated based on their revenue growth profile, ability to generate consistent and growing profitability, and overall accretion to our P&L. By adhering to strict financial benchmarks and avoiding overpaying for acquisitions, we can mitigate the risk of value destruction and preserve capital for future growth initiatives. Lastly, effective integration planning and execution are critical for capturing synergies and maximizing the value of M&A transactions. By developing detailed integration plans, establishing cross-functional integration teams, and closely monitoring progress against key milestones, we will minimize disruptions, realize cost savings, and accelerate revenue growth.
Growth through M&A offers significant potential for driving expansion and creating value. However, we recognize the importance of maintaining discipline throughout the M&A process to ensure that growth initiatives are profitable and aligned with our objectives. We are really very excited about the potential and the opportunities here at Tennant and the future and what it holds for us. Our enterprise strategy that focuses on growth, performance, and people will enable us to deliver on value creation for our shareholders. As Dave highlighted previously, we have set the following long-term targets: achieving compound annual growth rate of 3%-5% in sales, expanding EBITDA margins annually by 50-100 basis points, generating a 100% free cash flow conversion rate, and growing top-line revenue by $150 million over the next three years through acquisitions.
Through the initiatives identified today, we believe we are well-positioned to deliver these long-term goals. In closing, our commitment to driving revenue growth, expanding margins, generating strong free cash flow, and pursuing strategic acquisitions highlights our dedication to delivering value and positioning Tennant for continued success in the years ahead. We are excited about the journey ahead of us and look forward to sharing our progress as we navigate the path to achieving our goals. We are now going to take a quick break as we set up for Q&A. As a reminder, you can access the Q&A portal through your QR code located in front of you. For those of you who are attending virtually, you can access the Q&A through the online presentation screen. Thank you, and talk to you soon.
Welcome back, everyone. First, let me remind you that the presentation that you just saw, as well as the webcast, will be posted after our morning together. So you'll be able to access it after today. And then we're now set to begin the Q&A portion of the program. As a reminder, please submit your questions using the QR code in front of you if you're in the room or through the virtual webcast if you're not in the room. And then just also, if we run out of time, we will make sure to get back to you. We'll collect the question and answer the question that we're not going to be able to answer today at a later stage. Okay? All right. Looks like we have a first question.
Our first question is for Dave. Dave, you have a strong long-term growth goal and are targeting organic net sales growth of 3%-5%. What are the key factors that will drive the 3% vs. the 5% growth? In other words, what would have to happen to reach the 3% and what needs to happen to meet the 5% target?
Yeah, thanks for the question. We provide a range because there's variability in the business, in our operating environment, and in how we action the business. Hopefully, you saw from the presentation today, we have a very distinct idea of the growth levers we're going to pull, and we're investing in, and where we're going to go for the growth. We've got a broad range of levers we can pull, which insulates us a bit from challenges in any given period.
The more you close your aperture, the more you're able to see some variability, the more you open the aperture. We think the 3%-5% range is well within our grasp. We are largely in control of our own destiny here, and so we're excited about that. Answering the question specifically, on the 3% side, I view that as our minimum expectation, to be honest with you. When I look at what we're capable of, what we've invested in, what we're actioning, that is well within our grasp, even if we face some challenges from a macroeconomic headwind perspective. Having said that, we're launching big initiatives. None of these products or initiatives in go-to-market are kind of short putts. And so predicting the adoption and take rate over a narrow window of time is rather challenging.
So we believe in the long-term viability and the strength of our growth initiatives over the longer term. In the shorter term, we're obviously going to manage for some puts and takes as we go through. I think you can use the midterm of the range as you model out our business. I would comment, and maybe you picked it up from Fay's presentation, we've historically grown at the mid-2% range. We're now signing on to 3%-5%. That is a drastic change. We're pivoting, and we're going to deliver a higher growth rate here over the longer term. So thanks for the question.
All right. Next question, also for Dave. Coming out of the supply chain crisis, your backlog levels increased, but you have been able to capture the value from backlog in 2023 and 2024.
Doesn't that backlog create a hurdle headwind for you in the following years? How should we think about that dynamic as it relates to your long-term growth targets?
I'm glad someone asked about backlog and allowed me to get a little bit academic in my response because I think it's an important short-term dynamic to understand as you think about our company and our growth and the optics of 2022, 2023, 2024 performance. Hopefully, it's intuitive to you when you generate large backlog and then you benefit from draining that backlog in a given period. It's great in the given period. So in 2023, we benefited from a $140 million worth of backlog reduction, which meant a lot of equipment getting out in the marketplace that many customers have been waiting on for quite a long time.
So we're really pleased to take that to please those customers, ship the product, and get the benefit. You ship $140 million in 2023, then you enter 2024. That $140 million creates a year-over-year gap that needs to be filled. And you think, "Well, how are you going to fill $140 million at a company your size?" Well, the answer is we still have $180-$100 million of backlog. So we filled the $140 million backlog gap with $80-$100 of additional backlog reduction. We've set up growth strategies at the $50-$60 million rate. So now we show year-over-year growth. And so managing that short-term sort of mathematical headwind created by backlog reduction is a very real part of our short-term dynamic we have to manage within the business. But it really is just math. Our backlog is known. Our output is accelerating and increasing.
And so we know what we're going to be able to deliver here in the short term. Our action plan is around growing the base business, getting the orders in the door, and growing our base core demand. Backlog reduction is about satisfying customers and capturing the benefit at price that we get from the considerable backlog we generated. But the predominant focus of this organization, the leadership team you see ahead of you, and what you saw today in the presentation is about cranking up the underlying order demand in the core business so that as we emerge from this period of extreme backlog generation and backlog benefit, that the underlying core business is growing at that 3%-5% rate.
All right. The next question, let's say for Dave again, on AMR. What drives the 3x price delta with robotics vs. standard?
Can you walk us through cost bar and long-term premium multiple?
Yeah, I'll start, then maybe Pat wants to chime in. We mentioned in the presentation that a robot costs about 3 times its non-robotic equivalent. I think the question is getting at, "Well, why is that?" I think there's a couple facets to it. When you think about a robotic cleaning machine, there is inherently more cost in that piece of equipment. We've got high-end LiDAR sensors. We've got high-end cameras. You've got NVIDIA chips and computing power. You've got a user interface screen. So just from a pure component perspective, we're putting more cost on the machine. But really, the driver of the price is the value creation with our end customer. Pat walked through the enormous amount of value creation we're creating for the customer. We want to capture the maximum amount of that.
And so we are pricing to the value we're delivering to the customer, making sure that they get a fantastic return on their investment. But we're getting paid back for all the value we're delivering, not only in the robot itself and the productivity the customer can get, but also the ecosystem of support we provide to make sure that the customer is successful with robotics. Anything to add?
Very well said. I'll say that we use the 3x. That's not how we set pricing. That's a convenient way for us to summarize kind of the multiple. But as Dave said, we start with the value that we're delivering to our customers. And of course, we have to be market competitive as well. And we work our way back into what the cost of the product needs to be to deliver on that value.
All right.
Our next question, it's for Rusty. Sounds like some variance in growth rates in EMEA. Can you talk about which areas are growing faster and which ones are slower growing?
Yeah, without getting into too many specifics, I think what we've seen is where we're putting investment into some of the geographies. You've certainly seen our expectations with the acquisition of TCS that we would generate higher growth within the Central Eastern European region as we go forward. But also, I saw on the screen or you saw on the screen from me earlier, places like Italy or some other geographies where we're going to be expanding our direct go-to-market footprint. In Southern Europe, that's where we would expect to see some higher growth rates, as well as where we have go-to-market leadership, which I just touched on from Spain and Portugal perspective.
So again, that's maybe where we've seen them. Where we're going is where we're investing. And again, I touched on those in my EMEA slides, which is some of the key coverage areas within Western Europe as well. So it varies, obviously, by country. But again, pointing you back to what I stated earlier, it's where we're flowing investments in, both IPC go-to-market, industrial go-to-market, and/or expanding our direct geographic reach.
We have one more question about AMR. Not surprisingly, a lot of interest in AMR business. So for Dave and Pat, can you give us a sense of the 700 AMR customers, how many were existing Tennant customers vs. new customers that didn't purchase from Tennant previously? You want to lead with that, or you want me to take it?
This is a fun one. I'll let you take it.
Okay.
So I don't have a specific count for you on the 700 individual customers, existing versus new customers. What I can tell you is it's logical to assume that we're talking to our existing customers first. We have an installed base. We know what their cycle for buying is. We can introduce the product well ahead of the need, make sure we're well positioned with the account. So that's a logical approach for us. Having said that, I'm aware of some large accounts we've won that were previously not Tennant customers. And so the fact that we've gone out and pioneered new customers, robotics is a great door opener. When we show up and say, "Listen, we've got a robot that's proven with some of your peers in the same industry that can deliver this kind of an ROI for your business.
By the way, we can back it up with our aftermarket support," that's a great opening sales call for anyone to make on a competitive customer. So we think the robotic opportunity may be a bit more weighted towards existing customers in the early days. But we see a tremendous opportunity for robotics for us to go out and attract and gain new customers that have not traditionally been maybe Tennant strongholds. Or maybe we enjoy part of their fleets or some of their stores. We think robotics is a great lift for us in that capacity as well.
Yeah, I would build on that, that the X4 ROVR, some of the greatest interest that we've received so far is from customers that we have very little penetration with. Getting into new penetration with today, getting into new applications, new spaces is opening up new customers for us.
Okay.
Our next question is for Fay. Do the anticipated savings from the ERP implementation factor into your 50-100 basis points of annual margin expansion?
So we anticipate between $10 and $15 million of cost savings from the ERP implementation. That's full run rate post-implementation. That occurs in 2026. There's likely to be a little bit of savings coming through in 2025, but we have a staggered goal live throughout 2025. So run rate is $10-$15 million starting in 2026. And that's built into kind of our long term. But we don't anticipate seeing anything in 2024, nor do we think we'll see much in 2025.
All right. Our next question is for Rusty. Maybe Pat. Who are the key competitors across each geography and their respective market shares? Any history of market share fluctuations?
Thanks, Lorenzo. That's a fairly broad question.
So let me answer it this way. I'm going to start with what Dave said earlier. In our business, you win locally. Albeit we're a global company, you win locally. We don't have enough time here today for me to go into each region and each geography to answer that question. But we win locally. I think I highlighted in my presentation where we have go-to-market leadership, where we're going to leverage that leadership going forward from a share perspective. Then I think it's important to look at where we're investing in those geographies to gain go-to-market leadership. That's where, again, you'll see we have a few global competitors that are in our space. But again, there are very many local competitors that have different share positions as well.
So my goal and our goal is to invest where we said we were going to invest to gain market leadership. Because if you recall what I said, go-to-market leadership equals share leadership equals maximum value for our customers and for Tennant Company. That's where we're focused. Again, it's very different across each region and each geography based upon those dynamics.
Our next question is on sustainability. Riley, how much are you spending on your sustainability program, and what are the components of it?
Yeah, that's a great question. Because of how we are approaching sustainability and integrating into our business, working with functional teams across the enterprise, the cost is really captured in our SG&A. Primarily, the sustainability team headcount and maybe some software tools are what would comprise of any additional cost.
But we are approaching it in a leadership way in terms of integrating this cost across the business. And it helps us prioritize against our other business expenses and where we're making investments and really, truly inform how we plan and operate across the business.
Thank you. We have the next two questions, both related to M&A, so to our inorganic strategy. I think the first one may be more for you, Dave. How does the existing funnel of 800 or so M&A targets roughly split between the three strategic areas of focus? Where are you finding more opportunities in the existing environment?
Yeah, the existing funnel is rather evenly spread across the three adjacencies we've identified, which means we've got literally hundreds of potential targets within each adjacency. It's fertile ground. And I think the question is, where are we finding more? We're still early days.
We're out making contact, introducing ourselves to people that would be of interest, making sure that they know we're in the market and that we could be interested, and importantly, developing our own strategic thesis for these companies as we meet them and get to know more about their business and where they're winning and losing or where we think the opportunities are to drive value creation. We're working our way through the funnel. But I think there's fertile ground across all three of the adjacencies. And we've got hard targets for us to go out and gather more information to inform our go-forward action plan.
Thank you. Next M&A-related question for Fay. How does the margin profile of your M&A pipeline compare to Tennant margins?
So we've got a number of targets that we're in different areas that we're looking at.
What I would say is, as we're making that evaluation, we will look at, what are the revenue growth opportunities for that specific target? What are their existing margins? What are potential synergies? What are the growth opportunities for that particular target? And so we will evaluate that through kind of the Tennant lens as far as, what's our compound annual growth rate and top line, and how does the target compare? Are their margins comparable to what we have? And is there opportunity to grow those margins? So that's one of the those are the filters that, as we looked at kind of financial filters, those are part of what we'll be looking for.
Next question for Dave. Have you reconsidered a combination with Nilfisk, your largest public competitor? There was a public proposal filed in 2017 that had some compelling arguments.
Since then, you have outperformed Nilfisk over the last couple of years. Are you reconsidering a combination now that the value differential has increased?
I'm glad I got this question. And so let me answer it this way. As a normal course of business, we don't comment on specific deals and their status. But I want to give some context to so I want to give some baseline. And then let me tell you how we think about that particular combination. This is not a new idea. This has been contemplated either formally or informally by various audiences, including rumors out in the market for as long as I've been at this company. The question referenced the 2017 13D filing and a public business case around the value of the combination.
I will tell you that myself, the senior leadership team, and our board of directors seriously evaluate all potential value creation opportunities, our internal strategic growth opportunities and plans, as well as M&A opportunities that exist out there. I can assure you that we thoughtfully vetted it in 2017 when it was proposed and subsequently as well. Let me open the aperture a little bit and give you a sense of when I say we evaluated, let me give you some of the criteria we look at when we look at potential deals, acquisitions, or combinations. We look at it through a strategic, financial, and operational lenses.
A strategic lens is, is there a hard strategic thesis that is well vetted through diligence, that holds water, and has enough degrees of freedom and enough variability in the sensitivity that we believe that we're the rightful owner of this enterprise, and that we have a really good chance of creating the incremental value that we expect to with this combination? It's got to fit strategy. We now have an M&A strategy. So we anchor back to that M&A strategy that we just articulated to you this morning. Financially, we look at, what is the opportunity worth? Revenue, margins, incremental opportunity to leverage our channels to grow share and grow margins on the way through. We have hurdle rates that we expect to achieve from an acquisition. We want to buy things that can be accretive to the enterprise over the mid to long term.
So if it's not immediately accretive, we don't have a path to it being accretive at the enterprise level over a meaningful time frame. And so a financial analysis and the sensitivity around that financial analysis. What has to be true for it to be really good? And what could possibly go wrong? Where are the risks in the financial model? And then operationally, it's prudent to look at another enterprise and ask ourselves candidly, do we think we could get through regulatory approval? Are there any legal challenges? What are the cultural battles? What about supply chain? What about customer dis-synergy? Right? So these are operational components we have to evaluate in addition to strategy and financial. And so we have a disciplined process we go through as we consider combinations. Having said that, we're open-minded. And so we get ideas from many different sources about potential combinations.
We bounce it against our strategy and then run it through the criteria to decide if it's something we want to take a step further into learning more about and going through diligence and move step by step in that way. That does not mean just because we take a first step into learning more that all deals go through. You have to have the discipline to say, now that we've learned more, maybe something isn't going to be as attractive as we initially thought. So the last thing we want to do is get deal heat and get excited about something and just go do a deal because it looked good at the surface. I assure you that we have a level of discipline around how we evaluate as we move through that, peeling back the layers on any potential combination.
The last point of consideration is, we have to consider any acquisition or combination in light of our next best alternative, which is, what value can we create with our organic growth strategies? I'm really excited about our organic growth plan. We've got some really big swings we're taking. I think there's upsides. I'm very bullish on everything that we're pursuing. I would point to our more recent performance. And I believe we're on a very positive path as a company. So it's important to look at an acquisition on its own rights, but then compare it against the next best alternative we have as a company. And again, we're committed to maximum value creation. So we'll be very disciplined in how we analyze any potential transaction. But we remain very open-minded as we go forward.
Our next question is on AMR for Pat.
What AMR adoption rates are embedded in your growth outlook?
Yeah, good question, one that I'd probably have too if I was sitting in your chair. The reality is that we didn't build our growth outlook from adoption rates. The way that we built our growth outlook for AMR is effectively from the bottoms up. So I mentioned that we've got a full roadmap of new products that we intend to deliver. Each one of those, we've assigned an expectation to. We've built the business case for what we think they're going to deliver. Every one of Rusty's go-to-market initiatives, from an AMR perspective, we've been very specific in where we're going to make investments and what the return is. And that's how we've built our outlook for the future effectively. And that's what we're focused on, is the actions that we can control.
So really, adoption rates are the output. And we're not focused on planning our business that way. That said, we do expect adoption to increase in the industry, certainly through the initiatives that we're driving.
OK, well, we are at time. So we have time for one last question. And as a reminder, if we didn't get to your questions today, we will follow up after today's events. We have a record of all the questions that have been submitted. So here's the last question. You've covered a lot of ground over the last couple of years. As you look out to the long term, what are you most excited about? Where is your biggest risk? SA question for Dave.
Listen, I'm very excited about this growth agenda and this path we're on. I'm excited about growing globally. I'm excited about our new products, especially AMR.
I am very bullish on our opportunity to disrupt this industry. I think we've planted early seeds. I know what the pipeline looks like coming behind it. I'm just really excited about the growth path that we're on and what we're charting. I get paid to worry about risks. So I think about a lot of different potential risks. I will tell you that we are aware of the risks that are within our control. We're taking action to risk mitigate. I'm talking about executional risks and trying to deploy our go-to-market strategy and new products. I think we've demonstrated a level of agility in managing risk that I think is really compelling.
I would cite the pandemic and supply chain challenges, what we've done with robotics, that we've demonstrated the ability to identify risks, organize around it, attack it, reinvent ourselves, and get back to work. And I think the robotics, the equipment as a service model, those are examples of where we've been very nimble and agile in either identifying risks ahead of time or as they materialize, taking action to power through them and overcome them and deliver on our commitments. So I don't think there'll be any shortage of risks in our world going forward. But it's our job to succeed in the environment as we find it. And so we have to just keep tabs on our customer, get close to the customer, understand what their challenges are, and position ourselves to win out at the point of sale.
Excellent. This concludes our Q&A portion of the program.
I would hand it over today for closing remarks.
Thank you, Lorenzo. I want to thank everyone for attending today, those of you online as well. It was really a fantastic morning, a chance for us to tell the Tennant story. And hopefully, you come away as excited and energized as we are. We're available to you if you'd like to chat. You're here today. But certainly, if you'd like to reach out and have a conversation, we're available. We'll schedule time to do that. But thank you all very much for attending our first Tennant Investor Day.