Hi, everyone. We're ready to get started, if you'd like to please take a seat. Great. Good afternoon, welcome to the United Rentals 2023 Investor Day. My name is Elizabeth Grenfell, I recently joined to lead the investor relations role here at the company. I'm truly thrilled to be a part of this team and what lies ahead, as you'll learn more about today. Thank you to everyone who has joined us here in person at the New York Stock Exchange, for those of us joining via our webcast. Before we begin, please note that this presentation is being recorded. In addition, comments made today contain forward-looking statements. Please see the appropriate disclosures here.
For those of you new to United Rentals, we are the world's largest equipment rental company, with approximately $20 billion of original equipment costs and a diversified presence across North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. This is only a piece of the company's story. United Rentals culture, team, some of whom you'll get to meet today, and the significant opportunities for growth are all unique attributes which set the company apart from others. As you can see on the agenda, today, you will hear in detail from the United Rentals executive team what differentiates our company and sets it up for continued success going forward. We will take a short break after the initial presentations, followed by two more presentations and closing remarks by Matt Flannery. We will finish up the day with a Q&A session. Finally, two pieces of housekeeping.
Today's slides will be posted to our website at the conclusion of the presentations, and please silence your phones. Again, thank you for joining us, and I'd like to welcome Matt to the stage.
Thank you, Elizabeth, and welcome to the team. We're glad to have you, thanks, everyone, for joining us today. For those of you who I haven't had a chance to meet, my name's Matt Flannery. I'm the CEO of United Rentals, I joined the company in 1998 through the acquisition of McClinch Equipment. From there, I started as a branch manager and kinda rolled through the farm system of field management, so to speak, came up to corporate in 2008, I haven't left. All going well, I'm proud to represent the team today. Our team's excited to share with you all an in-depth look in our strategy and our vision for the future.
Our hope is that when you leave here today, it's with a clear understanding that our relentless focus on our customer and our people are behind our industry leadership. We deploy solutions to a very broad set of customers and end markets, and this gives us a diversified portfolio that not only adds to the resiliency of our business, but when combined with the many advantages of scale, it gives us the ability to drive top-line growth as well as bottom-line growth, and really good returns for all shareholders. Let me take a minute to share some stats with you. The business we've built over the past 25 years has grown our company to the industry leader in every way. We have over 1,500 branches and 25,000 dedicated employees, most of which are in the U.S. and Canada.
When we combine this network with over $20 billion of fleet, our ability to serve our customer needs is unmatched in the industry. This scale not only allows us to drive industry-leading revenue and profit, but it also allows us to drive differentiated value to the marketplace. Those of you following the story for a while know that this didn't happen overnight. As I mentioned earlier, I had the good fortune of joining on early in our journey, and I got to see the change firsthand. Each chapter of our story served its purpose to make us who we are today.
From the early days of consolidation, where we bought 250 companies in three years, became the market leader in the first year of the company's existence, to then, what I feel is the most pivotal time in our career, post-Great Financial Crisis, when we decided to transform the business from a focus on building scale to a focus on driving profitable growth and returns. We focused more on adding more products and services and got more to the resilient business that you see today, with a diversified customer base, serving a broad set of customers and products and end markets. This is all driven by an unbelievable culture. How are we going to do this? We're going to do this because it starts with our people. You're going to hear that a lot today. That's a recurring theme.
Our team feels strongly about our purpose to build a better future together. That starts with our vision statement of being the best partner for work site safety, productivity, and sustainability. This is underpinned by our pledge to live and work by our cultural values. Craig will talk more about this in a little bit, but building a better future means a lot more to us than just building the physical structures that we assist our customers with. It means building a better future for our employees and their families, and for our customers, and for the communities that we live and work in. To accomplish this, we have to make sure that we're leading in sustainability. This is about more than just compliance. I feel strongly that we can do well and do good at the same time.
Joli is gonna discuss this in a little bit more detail later on. We need to make sure we're a responsible operator and good stewards of the environment that we all share. This is not just altruistic, this is good business, and this is responsive to our customers' needs. In addition, if we truly are a people-first organization, and we are, we need to be that for all people. I couldn't be more proud of the company's inclusive culture and our all-for-one and one-for-all team mentality. How do we convert this great culture and engaged team into industry leadership? Well, it starts with having a go-to-market strategy to help lead them there. We've long deployed this three-pronged approach framework to our growth. When we think about this grow, deepen, and expand, it starts with our base business.
We wanna first focus on growing with our existing customers and our existing products. This is something that we can never take for granted. This is our base, our right of way to everything else we do. Then we wanna deepen our penetration with customers in verticals and end markets where we don't think we've quite got our fair share, and that's a great opportunity for us. As big as we are, there's still a lot of opportunity there. Then we want to expand our offering, whether that's through additional products or additional end markets, or even additional geographies that we can serve. Either way, we know that this is gonna happen both organically and through M&A. You've seen the organic growth. We've had the ability, thanks to a great balance sheet, to invest in a lot of growth capital.
Additionally, we've contributed through M&A, and if I think about the most recent Ahern acquisition that we did, that was both the play to grow in our core by adding capacity, as well as deepen penetration in markets where they might have had a little bit more depth in the marketplace than what we wanted in our share. If I think about the General Finance acquisition, which was very much an expand play, where we got to add a new portfolio for us to cross-sell to our customers, solve more problems for them, as well as add geographies. Either way, it's great that we have a strong balance sheet to leverage this growth to serve this growth. How do we bring this growth framework to life?
Well, number one, and the team's heard this a lot, we can never forget who pays the bills around here, the customer. Our people know that the customer needs to be at the center of everything we do. We need to focus on earning that business one transaction at a time. We have a lot of value that's enabled by our scale, whether it's the investment in the broad fleet that we've talked about, or whether it's investment in technology, those are all positives that we bring to the table. That first layer of value, that first layer of protection around the customer, is the basics of rental execution. We need to have the right equipment when they need it, we need to deliver it on time, and we need to make sure if something does go wrong, we're there to serve the customers immediately.
They're counting on us to get their work done. We have to make sure that customer experience is as seamless as possible. I'm a firm believer that ease of doing business is a key indicator to getting repeat business, and this is something that our team focuses on using technology to continue to ease that customer experience. When we layer on top our one-stop shop of trying to solve as many problems as we can for the customer, the more broad our offering, then the less of a need there's gonna be for them to look towards other vendors to serve their needs on the job sites and the plants that we serve.
We can accentuate that by driving better work site performance for them, whether it's through our proprietary Total Control technology or continue to leverage the investments that we've made in technology through scale, and make sure that we can drive better productivity for them on the site. We're gonna do better if they do better, this creates a very symbiotic relationship and a sticky relationship with the customer. When I think about these layers of value that we surround the customer with, this makes sure that we're not just the biggest in the industry, but also the best. As many of you know, and you've heard before, we made a decision long ago to have a go-to-market structured focus on key accounts, key projects, and national accounts.
For a while, we were the biggest company that didn't lead with national accounts, and we changed that as we came out of the Great Recession in 2008. Mike and Dale will give you a little bit more on this, but we specifically have a value prop designed for those customers. Looking forward, we believe that that large account focus, combined with leading scale, expertise, and technology, uniquely positions us for many of the tailwinds that are ahead. You've heard us talk about it before, but these tailwinds are plentiful, and most of these tailwinds are not macroeconomically reliant. For example, when you think about the two publicly funded ones here on the slide, whether it's the infrastructure bill or the Inflation Reduction Act, we believe that this stimulus is going to continue in any environment.
We feel equally confident that the manufacturing tailwinds that we spoke about, such as the electric vehicle plants, which I had the good fortune of visiting a couple of them last month, this is real opportunity, and this is more of a structural change in the automotive industry, rather than worried about volume, and not volume reliant. We believe those jobs are gonna continue, and these are long-term, big projects. The semiconductor manufacturing plants. We were talking about one at lunch today, where we have quite a bit of fleet on this one project, and that's one of many that are going on and many that are on the books for later on in the year. We believe that's more of a geopolitical play against on, to onshore that supply chain, versus worrying about how many Xboxes are sold over the next five years.
We really believe that these tailwinds are going to continue, all combined, these tailwinds, along with the continued opportunity for secular penetration, will drive significant opportunity for the industry. Another reason why I feel very confident about our opportunity to capitalize on these tailwinds is our talent. We have a group of key leaders here today that are going to present to you all, I'm sure by the end of the day, you're going to see firsthand their passion, their knowledge, and their expertise. We're just the tip of the iceberg, those of us who are presenting to you today. We're very fortunate to have a deep and experienced team in the field, making sure that we're supplying the customer service that's expected of us.
The leadership team here, as well as the leadership in the field, knows that our job is to enable those folks. I think about our organizational chart as an upside-down pyramid. Think about that top layer being the broadest part of those hourly folks, touching the customer at the moments of need, and then the rest of us going down the pyramid are there to serve them. I often say that I've worked 32 years to get to the bottom. When I think about what's at the center of this success, and I told you earlier, we hear it a lot, it is our focus on people. It's unique. You'll probably hear more about people in this presentation than any investor presentation you've ever been to, and it's because we do believe this is a differentiator.
We believe our culture, our ability to recruit, train, and retain, is a competitive advantage. We hear that, and Craig will take you through this a little bit more later on. When we stay true to that commitment to our people and our culture and execute on the strategic initiatives that you're gonna hear about today, we'll create value for all stakeholders. I feel strongly that our future is bright here in United Rentals, and we'll continue to evolve and advance through worksite performance and drive that through our people, through our process, and technology. I think technology is an area that's gonna ramp up speed even more over the next 5 years, and we have a lot of cool stuff going on, and you'll hear about some of it today.
Rather than me talk about it, let me show you a video of what that future could look like, how technology could change it.
I'm Craig Pintoff. I'm the Chief Administrative Officer of United Rentals. In this role, I have the great privilege to provide leadership to quite a few functions at our company, including human capital, employee health and safety, sustainability, and legal and corporate governance. I've been in various leadership roles at our company for the past 20 years, you know, I'm really excited today to talk to you about our people, our business, and our culture, as Matt talked about earlier. Now, having had an inside seat to so much transformation over the past 2 decades at our company, I can promise you what we're gonna talk about today is real, it's meaningful, and it really is a differentiator for us.
Together with Cristina Madry and Joli Gross, we're gonna talk to you today about our focus on culture and sustainability, because we truly do believe it's the right thing to do, but also because we believe there are significant benefits to our business. Through data points, through case studies, we're gonna show you some real examples of how our business is better by solving real customer issues with our customers and moving us forward down this leadership path. Let's dive in. Culture matters. It's truly an enabler for our strategy at United, and there's no better place to start than what our people tell us. We've been doing surveys, full company surveys at our company for 15 years, and we've never had a great benchmark.
Our results have always been outstanding, we've never had a really good relative sense of how strong until this past year. In December, we moved to a new survey platform with hundreds of millions of employee data points across thousands of customers, and we confirmed what we already knew, that our team and our culture is truly outstanding. We finished across every core category in the survey as a top decile performer, and this is truly consistent in what we're seeing in the external world as well. We're really proud of our recognition. I'll point to the Glassdoor Best Places to Work for 2023, top 100 company, once again, solely based on employee feedback. Our culture is real. Our employees are engaged and enthused, why does that matter?
Well, there's obviously so many reasons for that. I'm gonna point to three today. We're a service business, and people make all the difference, and when our team is engaged and empowered, they provide outstanding customer service, and that is absolutely critical. Two, it enables us to scale. Matt talked about the demand tailwinds. The ability to scale, retain our team, and grow with demand is critical, especially in some of the challenging labor markets we're all facing. Finally, you know, we're able to integrate businesses very effectively through our culture. I'll point to the recent Ahern transaction.
We just did a similar survey about a month ago of the Ahern team, their feedback was very similar to what you see on the slide, highly engaged, they're bought in, and they're very positive about their future at United Rentals, very positive data point. Ultimately, we are, as I mentioned before, a people business. People connect to customers, I've always viewed turnover as a key metric for us, a key differentiator and a key metric, and I'm really proud that we reduced our turnover last year in one of the more challenging labor markets we've seen. Not only that, we reduced it from what I believe is the strongest retention rate in the industry. Based on data we've seen, we believe our retention rate is 25%-30% better than the industry, if not greater.
It's absolutely critical when you're looking to scale your business, and ultimately, customer service runs through our team, so retaining that team is critical. Last year, we were able to hire over 6,000 employees, our greatest, you know, hiring rate ever, and once again, a challenging environment. When you think about culture, our employee referral rate was once again our number one source for talent. 30% of our hires came through that virtuous circle of talent, so very, very positive for us. Talent and culture plays through in other ways. One of the largest challenges, really in industry, but in the equipment rental industry, is getting a pool and a talent of skilled hourly labor: drivers, service technicians.
We recognized this issue for what it was a few years ago, and we set about creating a comprehensive skilled labor pipeline to make sure that we always had talent available. We have $20 billion of fleet, 7,000 service technicians at our company. This is an absolutely critical focus for us and resource for us, especially given the opportunities that lie ahead. We tackled the issue. We created what we believe is the largest skilled labor pipeline in the industry. We have over 500 employees in the pipeline, and they're joining us through entry-level jobs at our company, from the military, from high schools, tech schools. Honestly, today, we truly believe that this is no longer an impediment, but frankly, we see it as a source of strength for us going forward. It's a real positive note for us.
I'm just gonna close on just some thoughts as to why. Why is our culture so strong? How do we get to this place? I'm gonna go back to what our employees told us. This question from the survey was our strongest benchmark question, and frankly, there couldn't have been a better question for it to be so strong. It's around meaningful work, and our employees overwhelmingly connect what they do to the customer, and that empowers them, and that engages them. There's so many things we've done as a company to focus on our culture, talent development, and making sure we have the right leaders, obviously rewards and recognition, and doing the right thing for our team. When I come back to what's very special about it, us, is this ownership mentality that we've created.
Four times over the past decade, we've granted shares to every employee in our company. There's an ownership mindset and mentality in our company that's very powerful. We feel it on our all-employee calls. The team is engaged, and I know our customers feel it. When, you know, when our employees are empowered to support our customers, that's truly what we're looking for. That's customer service. I'm gonna show you a video that hammers that home a little bit more, and after the video, I'm gonna welcome Cristina on to talk about health and safety at our company.
We have a very team, and I think a quite professional team. The business really demands it. They have to be very engaged in every, you know, in every aspect of the business.
Well, we're very fortunate to have a team that really cares about what we do here. You know, our team, from the ground level, has always been engaged with our business.
I think one important thing that we do here is we engage all of the United Rentals team members.
I agree. I think the relationships that we have, we share them with the team as much as we can, and then people feel empowered to make decisions and feel to help CCD when they need to, whenever they can.
Yeah, I mean, we're definitely empowered to make decisions that are right for the business and right for the customer. It really helps to be able to go to a customer, deal with them, find out what they need, take care of them and then be able to go to your management after and say, "Hey, this is what I did. This is why I did it." They look at you and they say, "Great, good job. That's what I would have done.
What a great video around empowerment at United Rentals. One of the areas that we want to be sure that our employees always feel empowered around is safety. So I want to take a few minutes today to talk to you a little bit about safety at United Rentals. My name is Cristina Madry. I've been with the company for 10 years. I am the Vice President of Health, Safety, and Employee Relations, and in this role, I have the great pleasure of leading a team of highly credentialed safety professionals around the world, and also developing the company's United for Safety strategic roadmap. At United Rentals, it is our ultimate mission, from a safety perspective, to make sure that everyone returns home in the same condition that they left, if not better.
If there's anything that I hope that you take away from our time today, it should be that United Rentals is a clear and recognized leader in health and safety. This is something, as you'll hear a little bit more about today, that our metrics demonstrate, our employees tell us, and our customers seek us out for. In terms of our metrics, we drove, last year alone, the equivalent of 775 trips to the moon and back. To put that into a little perspective, that's like two round trips to the moon every single day of the year. We also had over 5 million customer touches, and we did all of this while continuing to significantly lower our preventable auto incidents as well as our injury rate.
Notably, we enjoy a very good reputation as being a leader in the industry in health and safety. This really does help us win business. This is especially true in the industrial sector, where having a good safety record is the cost of entry to many of our customer job sites. On our journey to zero, we've set a goal to reduce our injury rate to 0.40 by 2030, if not sooner. The team really could not be more excited about reaching that goal. Through our United for Safety program, which focuses on making sure that our employees are thinking about safety throughout the day, that they're working safely, that when they're on the roadways, they're driving safely, and they're making healthy lifestyle choices and living safely, we believe we're enabling them to be more effective and more efficient.
As we just heard from Craig, we know that when we afford our employees with a good, healthy, safety work environment, they're able to bring their best to work each day and drive a more meaningful impact for our customers. How does that translate out? Well, our culture runs so deep that even when our employees are away from their home branch location and they're at a customer job site, they feel comfortable and confident enough to speak up and say something when they see something. This real-life example that's on the screen today is just one of thousands that we could point to, where employees took a moment of pause to make sure that the right thing was being done and the safest known work practices were being utilized.
This tremendous sense of empowerment is not just good for us, but it's also good for our customers, because it keeps our employees safe, it keeps our customers' employees safe. Our customers really do depend on us to be their partner in health and safety. One really good example of this is our United Academy. Our United Academy creates an additional touch point and further entangles us with our customer. Through United Academy, we're able to meet the demand from our customers for safety training and advice on the equipment that they rent from us and the equipment that they own. This helps us meet our customer where they are and also enables us to drive value to the business at the same time.
To be clear, our customers request this training from us, and since the program's inception, we're proud to have offered over half a million participants best-in-class safety training, including OSHA. In terms of key takeaways, and in conclusion, like I told you at the beginning, we really are a clear and recognized leader in health and safety, and our very good reputation for safety excellence drives tremendous value internally, but also to our customers. To put it very simply, our safety culture helps us win business. Thank you, and I'd like to introduce Joli to talk to us a little bit about sustainability. Thank you. Good job.
Good afternoon. I'm Joli Gross. I'm the company's general counsel, and I'm also head of sustainability. Like Craig, I've been in various leadership roles within the company for the past 20 years. I've been actively involved in developing our sustainability program, and I've overseen it since 2020. In addition to being a leader in culture and safety, we are also a leader in sustainability. Why does this matter? Not only because it's the right thing to do, but it's also another way that we differentiate ourselves. With our customers, we believe it's good for business. With our employees, it creates additional engagement and retention, and also with other stakeholders, including our investors and our communities.
United Rentals was the first in the industry to set a GHG intensity reduction goal, and then we've since then set goals to divert waste from landfills and also to complete lighting retrofits at our branches in North America. In addition to these goals, our sustainability program has led to national recognition, including with The Wall Street Journal, who's called us out as the best-managed company, with Newsweek, who's named us one of America's Most Responsible Companies for several years, and also with the JUST 100. All of this makes a difference because it helps us to win business and to be a valued partner to our customers. During the past few years, we've made a concerted effort to include more electric and hybrid equipment in our fleet.
We've also made significant progress against our goals, including a 9% reduction in our GHG emissions and also 43% diversion of waste from landfills. A big, important thing, in addition to doing all this good work, is to make sure that we get credit for it. You'll see that we've enhanced our disclosures, including in our corporate responsibility report. Also this year, we've worked on our Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosure responses, also known as TCFD. The result that we've done from enhancing our disclosures is that we've gotten a A A level ESG rating from MSCI. We're also a first tier on the CPA-Zicklin Index. Why is this important? Because it translates to revenue. Many of our larger customers partner with us to help them reach their goals around sustainability and to figure out how much equipment they should own.
We've heard from our stakeholders for years that they wanted to understand the benefit of the rental model. Last year and this year, we worked to quantify the benefits, and it's led to great results. The work proved out that by virtue of our existence, less equipment needs to be manufactured, and the equipment that we have in our fleet helps our customers to reduce their emissions intensity because it's younger and more fuel efficient. Let's take a minute to absorb what this means. Due to United Rentals' existence, 400,000 fewer pieces of equipment are needed today, and because of our younger, more eco-friendly fleet, there's an equivalent emissions avoidance that's equal to 140,000 passenger vehicles driven in one year.
As a result of this, there are many large customers who seek our expertise and our advanced technologies for their job sites and projects. I'm gonna go through one of the many examples. A large general contractor who was awarded a multiyear $1 billion contract to build a data center came to us. They had goals to reduce their GHG intensity emissions, water consumption, and also to complete a certain number of green building projects. That customer partnered with us. We provided them with things like Ford F-150 Lightnings, battery cubes, hydrogen generator to charge their equipment and vehicles and to reduce their scope one and two emissions. Also, they leveraged our Total Control platform to evaluate their costs and also environmental benefits of the sustainable equipment. Also, we know that the current equipment isn't quite there yet, right?
We are working with these large customers. We're hearing their feedback. We're providing it to the equipment manufacturers with whom we have good relationships, and we're also working collectively to figure out how to get to that next level. In closing, our sustainability program helps because it solidifies our reputation as an industry leader. It's also a differentiator. Our customers want to partner with us to help them reach their goals. Craig, I'm gonna turn it over back to you.
Our goal in this section was to demonstrate that our leadership and our focus in the areas of culture and sustainability really provide a benefit, right? We do believe it's the right thing to do. We know when our workforce is engaged and at their best, they're gonna provide great customer service. When we're working with our customers to solve complex problems, as a leader in our space, that's what it's all about. Hopefully, we made that point to you today, now I'm gonna ask Dale to come on to the stage.
Thank you, Craig. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Dale Asplund, for those of you who I haven't met. I've been with the company since 1998. It's in my current role that I get to hopefully help all of our field people service our customers better. Over the next two minutes, I wanna cover three important topics. First of all, the size and scale that we've built and the importance of that, even more important, expertise that we offer our customers and what that is to them to be able to do their work safer and more efficiently. How, through operations and through data, we can actually help our employees provide better customer service. Of course, our ability to get better capital returns from the point we buy an asset to when we dispose of an asset.
As you heard Matt mention, and we look at our focus. I guess my mic wasn't working. Matt always tries to play tricks on me, so I guess that one worked. As Matt mentioned, and you look at our strategy, I'm gonna focus on that middle wheel that's highlighted in this example. How we can actually have one-stop-shop for our customers, our ability to continue to focus relentlessly on rental execution. Of course, how through people, process, and technology, we can actually deliver a better customer experience, and all the things Joli and Cristina talked about in safety, sustainability, and our ability to help our customers be more productive on a work site. Before I do that, I just want to take a minute to think about one day at United Rentals, and what's going to happen today.
Just to give you an idea of what's occurring. Today, we'll have over 15,000 face-to-face sales calls with customers. We'll take some 40,000 phone calls from our customers looking for support. We'll do 16,000 inspections of equipment to make sure it's safe to rent. Between pickups and delivery, we'll do over 34,000 different transportations, and up to 335,000 units that have telematics, we will produce 41 million data points for us, that we can use in a single day with that equipment. On top of that, to support the business, we'll have to generate some 30,000 invoices and make the parts orders some 12,000x in the course of one day. All of this, as you can see, produces a vast amount of data that we can use to help our business.
What do we hear from our customers? When our customers talk to us, they tell us a few things. First of all, they need to know we have the resources that they need when they need them, and we've done that. We've heard the number: we have over a million assets with a combined original equipment cost of $20 billion. That's only part of it. Having the assets is helpful, but having the expertise, whether it's to support in a vertical or through our specialty solutions, that our customers can count on to solve their problems. The second thing we hear from our customers is, make sure we have responsiveness, make sure we can respond when they're in need of our support. We've done that.
We've done that by building a network of over 1,500 branches. We've also done that by making sure our employees can react quicker to support that customer. The majority of our orders still come in with less than 24 hours notice, making sure our employees can say yes when those customers need us, is the first step to being able to be more responsive. You can see how we continue to create value for our customers, is the expansion of our specialty business. Our specialty business is an area that we've seen a CAGR of almost 28% over the last 10 years. This is a business that I will cover in a minute to show you why this is much more than just the assets that we own, it's a solution that we offer.
How do we differentiate ourselves with our customers? In the past, many of our customers may have had to interact with multiple branches, multiple companies, multiple different providers of service. We've taken that and changed it to a one-stop shop. By dealing with United Rentals, they can come to us regardless of what solution they need, and we can help them with that solution, making a better customer experience for our customers today. We can also centralize functions like logistics, service, and even sales support, making sure when the customer reaches out to us, they get a consistent experience. Our specialty business, let me explain this to you because it's worth taking a moment. This is an area we continue to see huge growth and our customers value.
If you think about the start of a job site and our most recent acquisition with General Finance, we offer today a mobile storage and office solution. That, in conjunction with our on-site service business that offers sanitation, helps us right at the beginning with the customer, being first on the job as they start work. Our trench and safety business, whether they have excavation needs or confined space, how they can safely protect their employees, is a key way for us to interact with our customers. Our power HVAC and temperature control business allows us to work with customers when they know they have a need for temporary power, heating or air conditioning, and they come to us to provide them what product will actually provide the service they need. Of course, our fluid solution business, that is a complete end-to-end from contain, transfer, and treat.
When our customers come to us with a need, we can provide them the service regardless of what level they need. All in, our specialty business is a key advantage to United Rentals. Now, let's think about what's changed and how our customers interact with us. Yes, the equipment industry may have lagged the industry a little bit on the technology curve, but we continue to see this ramping up. Today, we offer different levels of touch points for our customers, whether it's our online rental store that any customer can look to procure services through, bolstered by our web app that allows them remote access wherever they need to do work, or our Total Control platform, which really, when our customers grow with size, this enable them to be more productive.
Being in the rental business, this gets hard to hear, but our motto in our Total Control platform is to help our customers rent less. You think about that. In the business we're in, that might not make sense, but we believe with that platform, a customer that may be spending $10 million a year, of which, imagine we get half of it, can actually save money and rent less if they just partner with us. In fact, if they could reduce that spend by 20%, it's $2 million in savings for them. If they work with us to partner, and they get all the fleet from us, it's actually a $3 million growth for us. It can be a win-win. Of course, the last level, our largest customers that we work with, we've actually created direct integration.
They don't want to rely on somebody else's system. They want to place an order in their ERP system that directly transfers to one of our branches, and we can acknowledge that order. This area continues to grow. Q1, year-over-year, we saw a 57% increase in the number of users using our digital tools. We saw big increases in the number of payments we get. We saw our field service requests go up by 55%, and even the simple task of calling equipment off rent continues to grow. This is an area we will continue to make investments in because this is all about making the customer experience better. Now, technology is not just about the customer. We also use it internally, and we've taken what was once manual processes across our branch network and digitized them.
If you think about that, from the point we start a transaction to the time that a customer pays it, what we can do with technology. Today, as our sales reps are out in the field visiting customers, they no longer need to call a branch, all different locations, to find where fleet is available. They have the ability, through a mobile app, to find out what the price is, what the availability is, and what's the best way for us to source it, and being able to say yes to a customer on-site without ever reaching out to one of our facilities. In a minute, Erin gonna talk about some of the logistics, delivery, and pickup. I want to take a moment to talk about the topic of AI and what we see today.
For years, we've when we drop the equipment off, we take upwards of 10 photos, and when we pick it up, we take another 10 photos. This has always helped us when our customers may have had something that was at a lot more usage, whether it was from painting and had overspray or perhaps was dirty or had customer damage, to go back to the customers to show them. As you can imagine, this always required human intervention. Today, we take those 10 photos from when we drop it off and when we pick it up, and by the time we leave the job site, we've already notified our branch that somebody should inspect that asset that's coming in because it doesn't look the same as when it went out.
This is a way we can take away that objectivity and just make it a simple process for our employees to find where a customer truly has damaged a piece of equipment. This is an area, the more we invest with our employees, the more productive they'll be and the better the customer experience will be. Using data doesn't stop it in there. Better use of data means better decision support, as I've said, but it also drives capital efficiency for us, and I'm gonna talk about that in a minute. Both internal data, as I told you, we produce a lot of data every day, and how we can use that, but also external data, and looking at data we can get from third parties and giving that to our reps or using it in our credit department.
Today, I told you about the sourcing opportunity, where we can find the best way to tell a customer what's available, but we can also do other things, such as preventive maintenance. Think of a day where we don't have customer downtime because the equipment tells us it's going to need service before it breaks. Think of how that can improve the customer experience. Managing the fleet we have, this is critical. This is an area where we look at it by market, especially in an inflationary environment. We look at all of our assets in one of four quadrants. Let me walk you through this. Simple math. If you look down the left side, we have the demand, where we could have softness up to high demand. Across the bottom, we have our returns. Far left is lower return, moves over to the right for our higher returns.
You look at that bottom left quadrant, in a market, we may have excess fleet. We may not be getting the returns we want or see the demand. We can move that fleet, if it's at a certain age, we can sell the fleet. Either way, we can rightsize what fleet we have based on the demand we're seeing. You move immediately above that into our rate opportunity zone. We have products today that have huge demand. Unfortunately, we may not be getting the returns that we expect. In that case, we work with our field personnel to make sure we're constantly managing the price that we're getting for those assets. You move to that bottom right, you can see we have the sales penetration zone. These are assets we know we get good returns on, perhaps we're not renting them as frequently in the market.
You'll hear from Mike in a little bit about how we want to focus our sales force to go after customers that typically rent these products. Of course, in the top right corner, we have our most attractive zone. That's where we see huge demand, and we get adequate returns. This is where we want to continue to invest our capital as we grow our company. Our goal to support our customers is about having the right fleet at the right time, getting the right price, and yes, supporting our customers better. As you can imagine, when we talk about our vendors, what we look at is partnerships. Today, a lot of vendors want to partner with United Rentals. The size and scale, the ability to give them orders in advance, are all benefits to our vendors.
There's other things that we do every day. It's evaluating where we should route fleet to as it's coming in on purchase orders. It's also how we should buy and who we should buy products from through our analysis of total cost of ownership. Let me just walk you through some of this math for a second. This is an example of when we make a purchasing decision. Now, this is a simplistic form. There's obviously downtime or perhaps cost of capital, but let me just walk you through this quick. I'll look at brand one, and we'll say this asset costs $115,000. Then, over the course of that rental useful life or the time we plan to keep the asset, in a normal world, we can estimate how much we're going to see in parts and labor cost.
We'd add that to the initial cost. Then at the end of life, we get an estimate based on our historic sales of what the residual value will be. When you subtract that, it gives you that $53,000 total cost of ownership over the life of that asset. If you do that across all brands, you can see our decision to buy which, from product from which vendor, is highlighted by either brand one or brand two being our best purchasing decision, and our avoidance would be to avoid brand three. This is how we use data to make sure we're buying the right products from the right suppliers. What about at the end of life when we go to dispose of assets? This is an area United Rentals has had a very strategic advantage in our industry for many years.
It's about selling the assets, first of all, at the right time. Every one of our assets has a rental useful life. That rental useful life is determined by a lot of factors. Number one, if we keep that asset for one more year, what would the added maintenance cost be? If we sold it versus keeping it, what would we see the reduction in residual value be? Probably most importantly, over the last couple of years, what's availability of new fleet to be able to replace that? This is critical to determine when we dispose of it, and then how we dispose of it and at what price is where we really benefit. United Rentals has constantly believed through our sales force, we can leverage the retail channel versus using wholesale as a way of disposing the fleet we have.
I often joke with all of our field people, I say, "We are the, one of the largest manufacturers of used equipment in the world." When you think about that, we produce a lot of assets every year that we have to find the most efficient way to dispose of. We do that, we apply some third-party data, then through our algorithm, we apply what the utilization is we see, what's the condition of the asset, what's the hours the asset has. We set a fair market price that we can optimize the returns we get on assets. This is about buying assets the best way and disposing of them the best way, that is a big advantage for us with the data we have over 25 years.
I hope you see through the course of my presentation that, A, size and scale is a big advantage for us, but it's more about the expertise we can offer customers, not just the amount of fleet we have. We've made a lot of technology investments, and some of them are still early in the stage that we'll continue to invest, and the more we invest in technology, the more efficiently we can create for our employees and the more productive our customers can be. Of course, we look to optimize those asset returns through the course of data analysis. With that, I'd like to introduce Erin Neumann to the stage. Thank you.
Thanks, Dale. Good afternoon. My name is Erin Neumann, and I have the privilege of leading Operations Excellence at United Rentals. Our function supports that branch network through automation of the repeatable tasks and continuous improvement efforts that help us better serve our customers. We measure success in OPEX through efficiency and driving capacity to grow the business. My own background prior to joining United is in lean manufacturing and strategy in aerospace and defense. Coming from an OEM environment myself, it's been really exciting to see United apply these core lean and Six Sigma concepts to drive value in the industry we operate in. Let's talk a bit about our approach. At United, Operations Excellence is not a separate initiative. It's woven into the way we do business every day, and there are a few key themes that I believe differentiate our program.
First of all, we always start with the customer. Everything we do in OPEX is driving toward improving that customer experience. Second, our customers work across our broad network of branches, process is what gives us consistency to better leverage our scale and serve those large customers. Third, as we continue to expand our digital toolkit, it creates real capacity to grow, and that efficiency supports profitable margin growth. You've seen this graphic a few times today. I'm going to drill into the customer experience piece and talk a bit about people, process, and technology. Let's start by talking first about people. We anchor on growth and customer satisfaction as measures of success in United Rentals. It's important to realize that in our business, the customer experience happens in the moments, all those little things that have to go right to give the customer a seamless experience.
As Dale shared earlier, the volume of transactions in a single day in our company, everything we do in Operations Excellence drives toward improving the ability to say yes when we pick up the phone, the utilization of our trucks, so that every delivery and pickup is on time, and supporting over 2,000 service techs on the road every day, keeping our customers up and running. It's our collective success in these moments that leads to a best-in-class net promoter score. When we talk about net promoter score as a company, we don't benchmark our peers. We talk about companies like Amazon and Apple and Starbucks, how do we create an ease of doing business that draws our customers back and deepens our partnership? That's how we benchmark customer experience. I'm gonna drill down into some enablers of our approach: people, process, and technology.
Earlier, Craig referenced our customer-centric culture at United Rentals, and I want to recognize that this doesn't happen by accident. It's very intentional. A few events just recently that we've wrapped up, I'd like to share. First, this month, we completed our all-employee workshop. This is a full day. It's an 8-hour workshop. Every single employee at United Rentals sat through or experienced, I should say. That's 850 workshops. We took every employee out of the business for a day to sit down and talk about teamwork and further elevating the customer experience. If you do the math, that's 200,000 hours invested in keeping this conversation alive and driving us forward, and the feedback was outstanding.
The real value to employees coming out of that day, when you read survey comments, is that they understand whatever their role is, if they're an equipment associate, a driver, a branch leader, a sales rep, they know how what they do in their day impacts the customer. You heard that from Craig earlier. It shows up in our large survey results as well. Another event that we've been hosting twice a year since 2018 is our Customer Day. This isn't a big customer appreciation event. This is actually one customer invited to every single branch on the same day. It just happened last Tuesday, actually. What we do during that day is sit down and the customer gets to talk to the team that serves them. They talk about what we do well, they talk about our opportunities to improve.
We ask all 12,000 of those customers. Sorry, 1,200 of those customers, "What are your priorities?" This keeps us grounded, and you could see on the page here, price matters, but it's not number one. The customers tell us, "We need fleet available to serve our needs and responsiveness of your team and ability to communicate with us throughout the process." I, myself, read hundreds of comments from customers, and whether they're national accounts or local customers, it's those abilities to serve their needs that keeps them coming back. The important thing about these events is that they create a sense of alignment across our most powerful asset, our team. How does this play into our future? This is what allows us, as a distributed organization, to implement change quickly. Everyone is aligned around a common purpose, which lets us move forward together.
Like any other OPEX program, we are rooted in a foundation of 5S: good process, good organization to enable rental flow. We have a practical training program that you can see on the map here. 5S specialists have been certified down to the front lines. This embeds this culture with the people that are doing the work and serving the customers. They own it. To support that, we also have a corporate team and regional leaders that are working on solving the more complex problems and driving transformation. This approach from both sides is what really allows us to surface best practices. Here's the important thing: we execute. We have 1,500 branches that some of them are solving the same problems, and the answers are out there. Let me give you an example.
Recently, we found a branch in Southern California, was turning fleet through the repair process days faster than other branches in the market. We went and talked to them. We visited, we learned from their mechanics and their service leaders, "What is it that you're doing that's driving this result?" We found that they were staging parts in a way that we hadn't seen elsewhere. Today, we've implemented that same process in 35% of our locations, and we have a plan to get to 100%. This is the network that really generates our to-do list in operations to build a better future internally. Our teams work diligently to take waste out of the business, and this has been a key enabler to profitable growth at United Rentals.
When we started the OPEX journey just 10 years ago, we did 800 Kaizen events in a single year, this really generated a list of best practices that have evolved into the way we do business. If you think about a less mature organization, local leaders are firefighting, they're muscling through their day. Don't get me wrong, things go wrong at United Rentals. We have a branch leadership team that is the most responsive in the industry, we have taken waste out of the repeatable things. That has allowed us to actually grow the span of control of a leader. In the last 10 years, the size of an average GenRent branch has grown by 45%. In that same time period, we've expanded the count of locations by 82%.
Whether it's a cold start or an acquisition, having strong processes lets us get a team up to speed and up and running quickly. Maybe more importantly, it creates consistency for our customers. In a single day, a national account can be operating in 10 different states across United Rentals. Whether they have two job sites that are 5 mi away or 500, they're expecting that same consistent customer experience. That's what we drive toward with everything we work on in OPEX. We can't talk about efficiency without acknowledging the impact of automation. Dale shared this graphic earlier to give you an overview of our broad digital toolkit. Bear with me, I want to take you in the weeds for a minute to share how this shows up in every day.
Our dispatch tool will give us insight into every single truckload, the capacity that we've used on that truck. Not only how much area, but how much weight of that truck space have we used. That means this morning, we sent eight trucks into service in Manhattan, and Stuart, our dispatcher in Ridgefield Park, could tell you exactly how much empty space was on those trucks. That's really empowering the front line to own the business and drive those results. Another example, we have a mantra here called drivers drive. We measure by the minute how much time it takes a branch team to get a driver in the branch, unloaded, and loaded with their next run and back out. This process is really enabled by the handheld devices we have for people to complete the work on the spot without paper.
Lastly, our digital toolkit helps us make decisions. We operate in a high time utilization environment, when a customer calls, we might not have that piece of equipment sitting in the yard ready to go, but the person who picks up the phone has instant visibility into where we can service that customer from and what the most cost-effective solution would be. The punchline here is that technology for us translates into time for United Rentals and for our customers, and frankly, time is money. To wrap up, here's what this means for the business. First of all, we can be responsive to the customer. We have the fleet availability to meet their needs and the trucking capacity to get it to them.
We can operate as a single organization at scale with that local partner customer experience, backed by the resources of the largest player in our space. Matt kicked off the day by referencing our people and our customer-centric culture, and we thought, who better to tell you about it than the team themselves? Please enjoy this video.
We can make things happen that a lot of people can't.
This is a company that just will not slow down. This is a company that will adapt to meet any need of the customers and their employees.
This has been a great opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with One UR.
To me, One UR means never saying no. You offer solutions and find different ways to solve the problem, but it's never telling a customer no.
When we all come together and, you know, we all hear the same message, we're gonna sit there and scratch our heads and say, "What can we do to make it better? Everybody's made a commitment from the top to the bottom.
Like, if a customer needs a different set of forks, I can go downstairs, "Hey, Kevin, can you have EA run this out there?" We don't have to worry about hauling or having to stop what they're doing, and it's just like everybody works together.
We look for areas that we can improve the process, whether it's hiring or onboarding or job changes. Just think of how much time managers don't need to spend doing that.
I've got customers that use us because we have service techs that respond in three to four hours on their service calls, when other companies are taking three to four days to fix the equipment.
I've been out there, I've seen the equipment, I've touched it, and it's like, "No, you know, customer X, you may be better suited for this." I feel better equipped to answer that because I've gone out and interacted. Everybody's here to work, get stuff done, do it safe, do it quick. They're renting from the biggest company because they want the best equipment, you know, the best support, all that. You gotta be at your best to work for United.
Keep it simple. Work together, make the smart decisions, be focused on customer service each and every time, and we'll stay at the top of the game.
Thanks for your attention. We're going to take a short break now, and we'll get started again at 20 after.
All right, I think we're gonna get started. If everyone could take a seat, and we'll wrap up with the Q&A at the end.
Rentals understands that your routine is never routine. That's why we stand in the same dirt, ready to help you work, with unmatched equipment and expertise that turn worries into wins. As the weather shifts, plans change, and project complexity increases, we stand united with you. United Rentals, Work United.
Welcome back from the break. Hope everybody got a chance to catch a glass of water and get settled in for the rest of the day. I'm Mike Durand, I'm privileged to lead the sales and operations for the company, which includes all facets of our go-to-market approach and aspects of our operational strategy. I've been with the company for over 20 years, and I can truly stand here in front of you today and tell you that I have never been more excited to be with the company. As you've heard many of our colleagues today talk about today, our go-to-market approach starts and ends with the customer at the center. I'm excited to tell you a little bit more about our approach, which we believe is second to none in the industry.
Here's what I want you to take away from the presentation today. We've got a great, robust go-to-market strategy that's driving continued momentum across products, markets, and verticals. As Matt and Dale mentioned earlier, we believe our size and our scale, combined with the breadth of solutions that we offer, uniquely position us for success, particularly with our largest and most complex customers. We believe that we can bring solutions to the table to our customers, that many of our competitors cannot. While our aggressive specialty growth is certainly a benefit to our national accounts, we believe our local accounts can share that same benefit. Finally, the industry, as you've heard, is poised to benefit from some great tailwinds, which we believe will drive outsized growth over the next few years. I mentioned we're driving growth across products, markets, and verticals.
Those three different lenses that we use, when we think about evaluating and pursuing growth opportunities, and candidly, it's not always easy to think about these aspects in three different compartments, but we believe it's critical to make sure that we're thinking about all the advantages and how we optimize for our size and scale. Ultimately, the goal is to create value for our customers, and we believe value is created when we match our full suite of solutions to the unique needs of our customers, in particular markets and verticals. When we do an effective job of this, we can leverage the benefits of our size and scale to drive growth across our footprint and our portfolio. Just to make this a little bit more tangible, let me give you an example of one area where we've seen growth recently.
That's in the power vertical. It's an area of focus for us as a sales organization and something we've talked publicly about in the past. There's a solid opportunity for growth here across solar, wind, normal power generation, and of course, power distribution. Matt talked a little bit earlier about the fact that these investments are already funded, and we feel like we've got clear line of sight for this opportunity. Now, keeping customers at the center of what we do is critical to our approach. We recently rolled out an enhanced sales coverage model to improve our ability to connect with customers and do it consistently. Dale and Erin mentioned the many tools that we use to offer support after the sale, but we're doing this on the sales side as well.
Let's dive a little bit deeper to see what that looks like. Key accounts remains a fundamental focus, and continued growth here is critical. As Matt mentioned, we have intentionally built a business that is designed to meet the needs of our large key account customers, which in turn creates better resiliency in our business. We grow with these customers by deepening our relationships with them, which is largely supported by our dedicated account managers, who serve as a single point of contact for the customers. This effort is also supported by our regional product development managers, who are dedicated to their specific specialty business and focused on pulling their products through the national account platform. Now, likewise, our national account focus is complemented by growth our efforts in specific target verticals, like the power vertical I just mentioned.
These teams have significant knowledge of the verticals, as well as deep relationships within each of the customer segments that they're responsible for. Not every customer needs that high-touch approach. We know customers have different needs, and it's imperative that these needs get met by the best channel. Some are happy to connect on a mobile app or engage with us digitally. Some more infrequent renters may simply need a phone number to call when they need a product or service, and those we can operate centrally. To be clear, face-to-face selling remains a very critical part of our go-to-market strategy, and our outside sales team plays an important role in building relationships and supporting that growth.
Meeting customers where they are is a critical success factor, and our new and more optimized sales strategy is positioning us to grow our revenue and share, while ensuring we are aligning the right resources to the right customers. Matt took you through the grow, deepen, and expand framework earlier today, and nowhere has this been more prevalent than within our specialty business unit expansion. Dale took you through the products, and it's important to understand the capabilities we have with those products. As I stated a little bit ago, the real value is connecting the customer with the product and service in the right place at the right time. When it comes to our specialty solutions, bringing the right solutions to the table allows us to leverage our conversations with the customers to take us from being simply a vendor to a partner.
The breadth and depth of our General Rentals business forms the foundation for successful engagement with our customers. Our growing suite of specialty products allows us to drive deeper entanglement with these customers and taking our relationship to that next level. The right-hand side of the slide provides a result that we see when we introduce all business units in a more consultative approach. This is an actual example of a customer who we've been able to implement our grow, deepen, and expand framework with over the last few years. While out of respect for their privacy, I won't share their name, I will say that we've seen a fantastic growth by building on those base level General Rentals capabilities and bringing all the specialty business units to play.
Working hand in hand with our customers, delivering solutions rather than simply products, is right where we need to be and in support of our strategic framework. Now, when we apply this kind of methodology and thought across our footprint and our customer base, the results are outstanding. Building a strong specialty business has been at the forefront of our go-to-market approach for over 10 years, and we think the results speak for themselves. Doing so has allowed us to create tremendous value for our customers. But as you can see from this slide, it's also created some pretty nice results for our shareholders. Our specialty business has seen robust growth, as Dale said, at nearly 28% over the last 10 years, becoming nearly 30% of our business in 2022, and a cornerstone of revenue resiliency and margin expansion.
Finally, just as important as expansion has been to our performance, implementing specialty solutions help us drive deep and lasting relationships with our customers. Earlier, Matt discussed those key demand tailwinds that we see in our business. In fact, these are very well documented. I want to reiterate that we have several sustainable commercial advantages that we believe will allow us to generate significant growth from these tailwinds. As we've discussed throughout the day, our comprehensive General Rentals portfolio, combined with our differentiated suite of specialty solutions, allows us to provide one-stop shopping for our customers. We've built what we believe is a premier brand in the industry, and we have the reputation to continue our strong sales momentum with large national accounts.
Our scale, our geographic footprint, and fleet architecture create unique competitive advantages, allowing us to effectively serve the largest and most complex clients. Our unique digital capabilities that we've discussed today, help to ensure that all customers will have a seamless, empowered interaction with United Rentals. Just to put these demand tailwinds into context, there are mega projects tied to these, and Matt talked a little bit about some of those earlier today. In many cases, our customers are undertaking projects of this scale for the very first time. When you're talking about a plant down in Savannah, Georgia, that's 4,400 acres, that's a significant plant. That's a significant opportunity, and that takes a lot of different scale and a lot of different levers to be able to pull.
Simply put, our scale, our expertise, combined with the depth of our client relationships, puts us at the front of the line as customers identify full-service solution providers. Our go-to-market model, built on the strength of our footprint? Our full suite of solutions and our relentless customer focus ensures that United Rentals is the clear choice for customers operating within and across these opportunities. Now, before I wrap up, let me share the slide with you that I'm most excited about. There's a lot of great opportunities referenced here on this slide, but the takeaway is this: we're not done yet. In my conversations with customers, many are eager to hear and contribute to the conversation around, "Okay, what's next?" That means a couple of things to me. First and foremost, we've moved from being simply a vendor to a partner, and that's an important transition.
It also is an indication that we have additional run away, additional white space. One of the hallmarks of our growth in recent years is that we've remained flexible as our industry and the needs of our customers have changed. It's this flexibility that will give us the ability to respond to whatever trends emerge in the future. It will allow us to grow, deepen, and expand with our customers, even as their needs continue to change. Whether it's the current mega projects, the trends, or whatever might be on that next horizon, we have plenty of additional white space in our industry, and we're excited about what the future opportunities mean for our employees, our customers, and our shareholders. I'll wrap up right where I started. As a leader in the equipment industry, we are excited about the growth opportunities we see throughout the business.
That's why we're continuing to invest in our business, always looking for ways to strengthen our offering, bringing new and different solutions to address our customers' increasingly complex problems. We couldn't be more excited about the growth potential ahead of us. We think we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on the key demand trends that we've discussed with you today. As we've said throughout the day, the growth starts and ends by putting customers at the very center of what we do. Now, Ted's up next, but before he comes up to speak, I want you to hear from some of our customers and some key team members. Thank you.
United's my first call for equipment. If they don't have what I need locally, they'll get it brought here, you know, or recommend another option.
Their mechanics, as far as United goes, are... They're unbelievable. Just the nights they've been out in the cold, and we're talking 38 below up north, I mean, they've been out there taking care of us to push through these elements and get the jobs done. We rely on them. We really do.
When we go to those jobs, we may go for one specific thing, but when they see one of our guys on site, they go, "Oh, hey, by the way, could you check this on this machine and that on that machine?" We do plan, once we send somebody there, that we might not hear from them for a couple of hours, and that's okay. You know, we want our customers to be able to grab our guy on the site and say, "Hey, can you help me with this?" I think we have a great level of success with that as well.
Transparent, very open communication. That's what we want. We're a construction company. We're pretty simple guys. We're not political and dance around it. We're like, "Hey, you screwed up." If we're screwed up, please tell us, and we're gonna fix it, but we're expecting the same.
I'd rather tell you the truth and have your business forever than lie to you and only have it once. We're doing a great job. We've built up a lot of equity. If United says they're gonna do it, they'll do it.
Like they say, it takes a village. You know, we have a very strong team behind us here at United Rentals with the ISRs, the branch managers, the service techs, our delivery personnel, OSRs, you know, and every moving part has to cooperate and work together in order to fulfill the customer's needs. Once we developed a relationship with their teams, they knew that they had the confidence to rent with United Rentals, with making that one call and washing their hands and knowing that piece of equipment or whatever they required was there when they needed it.
They're looking at the whole scope of the project, they're dealing with so many subtrades and contractors, you know, if I can take something off their plate and help them to make their world a little bit more seamless, that's what we're gonna do.
Good afternoon. Thanks, Mike. I hope you guys enjoyed that video, and it provides a little taste of how we deliver for customers every day. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Ted Grace. I'm the company's CFO. I've been in this position since last July. Prior to that, I ran Investor Relations for six years, and in that capacity, I had really broad exposure to all areas of corporate finance. Prior to joining the company, I spent about 22 years on Wall Street, mostly as an investment banker and research analyst, and during that time, I covered the company for the better part of a decade. I'm gonna talk about a few things today, but the common thread will be bridging the ways we drive customer value to the ways we drive shareholder value.
We do this by focusing on 5 things. First, driving above-market growth. We've done that historically, we're confident we'll continue to do so. Excuse me. Secondly, delivering industry-leading profitability. You see that in our historical margins, our goal is to get better from here. Next, we wanna drive higher returns and strong free cash generation across the cycle. Finally, we're gonna allocate that excess capital in the most advantageous ways possible to add value to our shareholders. This, to us, is the recipe for driving strong TSR.
This is a slide you've seen throughout the day. Matt, Dale, and Erin all talked about the center of it and our relentless focus on both customers and employees. I'm gonna focus more on the outer ring, which expresses our model for leveraging the inner ring to drive strong financial performance. The two most important things we hope you walk away with today are: A, the power of this flywheel to continue to drive strong compound value for our shareholders, and two, that the best is yet to come, in our opinion. Let's take a step back and look at our results over the last decade. On the left side of this slide, you can see the strong double-digit growth we've delivered over both the last 5 and 10 years on a compounding basis.
In the middle, you can see that we've driven profit growth at an even faster rate. Together, this has driven very powerful earnings growth that you can see on the right. The punchline here is a 10-year compound annual growth rate, an adjusted EPS of more than 24%. Now, to put that in perspective, that is 3x the rate of the S&P 500 over that same period of time. What's more, we've actually achieved this with less relative volatility. Let's dig into growth a bit more. Let me start by explaining this slide. The gray bar you see at the bottom of the slide represents the industry's growth ex United Rentals over the last decade, and the key highlight is about a 4% compound annual growth rate in the industry's revenue.
The blue line, on the other hand, represents our growth over that same period. Notice that we've compounded it better than 11% over that same 10-year period. The call-out bar really makes my point, but it is the substantial outgrowth that we have driven over a sustained period. Call it about 3x on a compounding basis. Acquisitions have been part of this, and those are a critical part of our strategy. But if you look at our pro forma growth over this period, it's averaged better than 6%, and that's been driven by the strategies you've heard our whole team talk about today. If there's one thing I'd want to emphasize here, is that we think going forward, that combination of strategy and tailwinds we've talked about all day will continue to help us outperform the industry.
Now, let's turn to profitability, which you can see here are our industry-leading margins that we have worked very hard to achieve. This chart doesn't really show our entire history and tell the story, so I'm gonna reframe it a little differently. If you go back to where Matt started, he talked about the three chapters of our company's existence, and that first chapter was call it between 1997 and 2008. That was the hyper-growth phase of our company. Our average adjusted EBITDA margin over that period was about 30%. He talked about the transformation that started in 2009 and went through, call it, 2013.
Over that period, we increased our EBITDA margin to about 37%, and that's really when we embraced a lot of best practices and the things you've heard the team talk about today and for a while. Since 2014, which is this kind of current chapter, if you will, our EBITDA margins have averaged better than 47%, even as we've absorbed several lower-margin acquisitions over that period. Now, there have been a lot of factors that have driven this, but the two most important are gonna be leveraging scale, which you've seen us deliver through growth, and driving operating efficiencies, which you've heard us talk about today. Erin did a great job highlighting many of the small things we do every day to drive higher margins.
The most important thing to convey on this slide is we are focused on getting better and driving further margin expansion. I'll leave it with the thought that we continue to focus on driving flow-through of 50% to 60% annually across the cycle. We're also very proud of the improvements to our returns that have been supported by both improved profitability and a focus on capital efficiency. As you've long heard us say, returns underpin all aspects of our strategy. It drives how we think about organic growth, acquisitions, capital allocation, and all other investments we make across the business. As you can see on this slide, we set a new high water mark for the fiscal year in 2022, reaching a return on invested capital of 12.7%.
What's more, 2023 is shaping up to set a new record. The most important thing to convey here is we don't plan to stop here. Finally, cash flow, which we view as the hallmark of our company. This is a busy slide, I'm gonna do my best to walk you through it. If you look at the upper left-hand corner of this page, you can see cumulatively, we've generated almost $9 billion of excess free cash flow in the last five years and almost $13 billion over the last decade. To put that in perspective, $13 billion is equivalent to about 55% of our current market capitalization. I also want to point out the upper right-hand side of this page.
You can see very strong cash conversion that has comfortably exceeded 100% over the last decade, and our free cash margin has exceeded 16%. In both regards, very strong results that we think help support our efforts to maximize shareholder value. That gets us through our results over the last decade. What I want to do is provide some relative perspective. I think as many of you know, we are a very competitive group here, and we like to measure things a lot of different ways. This again, is a very busy slide, so let me unpack it a bit as it relates to the next three or four slides after this. This illustrates our performance over the last decade, and in 2022 versus the entirety of the S&P 500 industrial sleeve, about 73 companies, including United Rentals.
The gray boxes you see on this slide reflect the median statistic for the sector for each measurement. The blue boxes, on the other hand, represent our results for that same period. We've then ranked each metric within quartiles, and at the bottom of this page, in orange, you can see our force ranked position across, again, all 73 industrial components of the S&P 500. I'll give you a couple seconds to process this, because I know that was a lot to walk through. Looking at this page, we've measured growth on two metrics, one, total revenue, and on the other hand, diluted EPS. Looking at total revenue on the left, you'll see that we've delivered top quintile results, both over a 10-year basis and last year, we think very strong results.
On the right-hand side, you'll see that same comparison on diluted EPS, where we've actually done a little better, delivering consistent top decile results. Let's now turn to profitability and look at this two other ways. On the left, you can see operating margins, and on the right, our net income margin. The punch line, however, is the same with the prior slides, very strong results. Looking at operating income margin, you can see basically top decile on sustained basis, and on the right, you can see similarly strong net income margins ranking in the 73rd and 83rd percentile, respectively, over these time periods. Let's look at returns. Again, same universe, 73 companies. Here again, we've measured it 2 ways. Now, we know we won't outperform on every metric, and that certainly wasn't the intent with this presentation.
One of the things you've heard us talk about today, and for a long time, is a focus on continual improvement, and this has certainly been the case with returns. Now, with all that said, we are very proud of the gains we've made on return on invested capital over the last decade, and you saw that highlighted a few slides ago. We're now closing in on the 60th percentile on ROIC, which is well above our 10-year average. On this slide, the most important thing I'd want to emphasize is we are committed to continuing to push higher returns on invested capital. On the right, you can see return on equity, obviously, a metric that does matter to shareholders. When you look at those results, again, versus this universe, we think very respectable, 81st percentile, 72nd percentile. Finally, cash flow.
As I said earlier, we view this as the hallmark of our company. On the left side, you can see the strength of our free cash margin. In both timetables, top quartile performance, and on the right, cash conversion, which has exceeded 100% over the longer term, ranking us in the top decile of the industrial sector. While cash conversion is not something we guide to, I will say our goal is to convert at 100% or better on a normalized basis. Now, we always talk about areas of opportunity, and this is an example of one. I'm guessing it won't surprise this crowd that this is not an area we don't rank as well, is valuation. Now, to be clear, I am absolutely not here to debate what our valuation should be. We'll leave that to the market.
Rather, we simply wanted to illustrate the disconnect between the fundamentals we've delivered on a sustained basis and the multiple we've gotten thus far. Now, this is an area that is largely outside our control. We acknowledge that. Our hope is that our focus on growth, profitability, returns, cash generation, and capital allocation will help unlock more of our potential. A few more things to touch on. Certainly, the balance sheet is towards the top of the list. It's been an important centerpiece of our capital allocation strategy since at least 2019, and it's another area where we are very proud of the results. The key takeaway here is the fact that our balance sheet has never been stronger. On this page, we express that through a leverage ratio.
You can see we exited last year at 2.0 x LTM EBITDA, and at the midpoint of our 2023 guidance, we'll finish this year at about 1.6. Now, this gives us a lot of flexibility for anything. I'll share a few other highlights on the balance sheet. From a maturity standpoint, I'll note that we have no long-term maturities until 2027, and we do have a fairly even distribution of those towers when we get to that point. You can also see our liquidity, which exceeded $2.6 billion in March, and you can see the balance of fixed versus floating rate exposure, all at 70/30, which we think is both appropriate and manageable.
When you take this all in combination, we've never been in a better position measured across leverage, liquidity, and maturities, which again, positions us really well for any environment. Now, I just want to pivot quickly to capital allocation. The core of our foundation has always been a strong balance sheet that allows us to invest in growth, both organic and acquisition. Once we've funded that growth, our focus is on deploying excess capital in the most advantageous ways to our shareholders, and that's really what you see on the right-handed side of this page. In January, as most of you know, we introduced our dividend, which we view as a very important milestone, and the early feedback has been exceptional, really everything we'd hoped to hear from the market. Finally, share repurchases that have long been a very important part of our capital allocation strategy.
Since 2012, we've spent about $5 billion buying almost 46 million shares back of the company. That equates to about 40% of our fully diluted share count over that period. Based on today's share price, those shares are worth about $16 billion. That translates to better than a 20% internal rate of return over that period on that investment, which, frankly, is your capital. It remains our plan to repurchase $1 billion of shares this year, and going forward, we certainly expect that share repurchase will remain an important tool for us to return excess capital to our shareholders. I also want to touch on M&A, which, as you know, has been a critical element of our strategy and an important means of us creating value for our investors.
You can see on this page, the larger deals we've done since 2012, have added key capabilities across fleet, product, solutions, technology, and real estate. Combined, we've spent $12 billion on these acquisitions that have benefited both our customers and our shareholders. We often get the question, you know, how did a certain deal perform? We talk about how difficult it is to kind of peel apart the taffy. What I can tell you confidently is, we look at each of these deals, they have at least met, and in almost every case, exceeded the intended internal rate of return that we shared at deal time. Those are results we are very proud of. What's more, we still think there's a lot of runway on this, in this area.
We think that we have a lot of opportunity to drive further consolidation and to augment both our General Rentals business and our specialty business to benefit both our customers and our shareholders. We'll always do this with a very sharp focus on capital discipline. Coming back to where we started, I hope I was able to share some insights in the way we've created value for our shareholders and where we think we're heading. We feel very good about our ability to drive above-market growth, supported both by our strategy and the tailwinds you've heard us talk about today. We will continue to focus on driving improved profitability and higher returns. We will continue to manage our capital in a smart, prudent, and disciplined manner, and we will continue to leverage the flexibility of our model across all aspects of the cycle.
In doing so, we are very confident that we'll reward our shareholders with very compelling total shareholder return over the long term. Finally, I just want to close by reaffirming our 2023 guidance. As we shared last month, the year is off to a strong start, and I'm pleased that we remain on track. I'll spare you all the details as they're highlighted on this page, but here again, we're reiterating all aspects of guidance. The last thing I want to mention is we will be reporting earnings on July 26th and hosting our call on July 27th. With that, I will hand the call, hand the meeting back to Matt.
Thanks, Matt. Thanks, everyone, for your attention today. I think you're all pretty familiar with this flywheel. Hopefully, you all got a taste of how excited we are about what the future can bring for United Rentals, how much passion and knowledge and experience the team brings to the table to support the broader team network. We feel strongly that if we stay true to our culture and continue to support the people at the center of this, of this flywheel, stay focused on our people, stay focused on our customers, that this truly will be a bright future for United Rentals. We're very proud of the company that we've built over 25 years, but we're even more excited about the opportunity ahead. With that, I asked the team, "What's possible?
What can we do?" Well, we believe we could be a 20 billion dollar company. We believe that our focus of continuing to outpace our specialty growth to serve more of our customers' needs and continue to be that one-stop shop is part of that path. We believe that we could drive approximately $10 billion of EBITDA. More importantly, true to that pivotal period I talked about early in our history, about pivoting to profitable growth, we believe we can drive 15% return on invested capital. These are all aggressive aspirations, but ones that we see a path to and ones that we know will take or require some aggressive organic growth as well as some M& A. If we look at our history, what the reality of this says is we'll need to outpace the industry growth.
We have a long history of doing that. If you recall Ted's slides earlier about the 11% growth, well, this would take us outgrowing the industry by about 3x over this time period. This isn't multiyear guidance that we're giving here, but we see a path, and we wouldn't be presenting it to you all. We just wanted to use some numbers, which I'm sure you're all happy to see, to just kind of show you what is the future. We talk about a lot of exciting things. We've got a great team, and we've had a great history, but I think the better days are ahead. With that, I'm gonna have Ted and Dale come up on the stage. We're just gonna do a little working around here, and we're gonna move into Q&A. Thank you very much.
I couldn't help myself. I had to participate.
Maybe we could have found a more graceful way to do that? We could. Thought about it all day yesterday, that's the best we got. Fortunately, we save all that logistical prowess for our business, for our day jobs. This isn't known to be a shy group. We've got Morella and Donna have some microphones out there to help, and we're here as well as the team to answer any Q&A.
You want to start with David?
Donna, Morella, come on over here. Morella.
All right. Thank you. With those targets, it looks like a revenue CAGR of 7.5% between this year and 2028, and EBITDA at 8.3%. I guess two questions: Do you see, I mean, obviously, we're thinking about 2024 and all the macro risks. Do you see in that path a down year within that five-year run? Why would that level of top line, would the EBITDA not grow much faster than the revenue? Thank you.
May not have noticed the squiggly lines there. This is not exact guidance, but to be fair to the point of your question, how we really think about this, David, is a couple of things. number nine, that outpacing of the industry growth is a starting point, and I believe that our number, and correct me if I'm wrong, Ted, was a little bit over nine, like 9.4% CAGR.
2022 to 2028, he's saying.
Oh, he's saying you're taking the midpoint of this year's guidance. Thank you very much. We were calculating that from the 2022, but to your point, that $10 billion is basically assuming that we continue to target 50%-60% flow-through, right? I think it connotes about low fifties flow-through on that business, and that's how you get to about a $10 billion EBITDA target.
The idea of growth, and also maybe how much of a revenue is M&A?
The reason why it's not multi-year guidance, 'cause we don't know who the M&A targets are. As you guys all know, we never budget for M&A, but the reality is we're probably gonna do some M&A between now and 2028. It really depends on the attributes of what M&A we buy, and you all know that the different asset attributes come at different multiples. We'll say we'll get most of the way there through our organic growth plan, and it doesn't require M&A, but we do think there's a task there to fill in with some M&A. We're not putting a number out there publicly of how much. It's gonna depend on as we progress and what the opportunities are.
One thing I will say, even though we put out this number, we're not gonna chase that number by doing bad deals. I think you all know that already. That's why we don't put M&A targets out there. We view M&A as a way to accelerate our strategy and not the strategy itself. It's just a lever to use to accelerate it. I'd say majority of that by 28 will be organic, David, but certainly, if we can accelerate it with some M&A, we'll do that.
I think there's one more part of the question, which, I mean, David, we don't have a crystal ball that tells you where the economy is going. We're obviously very pleased to reaffirm guidance today. You heard what we said in April. If you look across our business, every vertical was up, every region was up, every customer segment was up. Our customer sentiment survey is very positive. Make no bones about it, we feel very good about 23. But we don't have a crystal ball, so a lot of what we've talked about is trying to understand history, looking at the nature of downturns, and then putting that in the context of these tailwinds we've talked about. I'm happy to get into the weeds. It's a long diatribe.
Many of you heard me do this, the punchline is, we do think we can very plausibly grow through a call it an average recession. Which would mean not just a mild recession, which seems to be kind of what many of the market experts think could happen. If that happens, we'd be better positioned. When we think about the nature of drawdowns in an average recession and how we think these tailwinds could play out, we do think we could actually grow through a classic non-resi recession.
Jerry?
Thank you. Hi, everyone. I wonder if you could just talk about, given the company's size, given all the organic and M&A success you've had, how does that change the profile of the type of acquisitions we should be looking for going forward? Because it's gonna take a lot to move the needle for you today compared to, you know, five or 10 years ago. Maybe if you just talk about specialty in particular, what sort of areas could be interesting for you folks, thinking about the next 5 years?
We're aware, right? The scale of our success creates challenges on counting on M&A, which was why we built a very aggressive organic growth plan. We still think that's important. There's still opportunities, and we just did a tuck- in last quarter. There's still opportunities, even within the base business, the General Rentals space, to continue to add capacity, and we do believe that consolidation is good for the industry. You've heard us say before, the bigs getting bigger is good for the industry. Just a little fact that I think I might have shared with you all before, the top three in the industry, just over the last year, went from 29% to 34% market share. We think that that's gonna continue.
We're not exhausted, but there are less targets of scale than there used to be. With that being said, the specialty focus is as much about finding more solutions and having that broad portfolio. We have opportunities in some of the newer specialty businesses that we have to fill out that footprint, both organically or through M&A. There's also, think about any product and service that's temporarily there on a site, whether it be a plant or a work site, something that's not gonna stay with the physical plant? Well, we see it right away an opportunity to supply those products and services. We don't really talk about too much openly for competitive reasons of what they're going to be.
I can tell you that we looked at the mobile storage business for quite a while before we found the right partner, and once we find it, we're going to move, execute quickly, and then grow the heck out of it. That's, that's how we look at, how we'll use M&A in the future.
you know, from a free cash flow standpoint, since the model doesn't assume acquisitions, you're going to be generating a lot of cash in that scenario that you laid out. How should we think about, you know, is there going to be a standard allocation of X% of CFFO to stock buyback or anything along those lines, given how steady the free cash generation has been for you folks?
As you know, this is something we take annually, so I don't know that I'd want to put out a specific rule of thumb. We've got this year laid out. We'll buy back $1 billion of equity. We've got about $400 million being returned via dividend. And in terms of, where we go in 2024 and beyond, that's certainly something we'll talk about later this year as a team, and we'll update the street, when the time is right.
Thanks.
I think your point is spot on, Jerry, which the high-class problem of this company is what to do with all the excess cash.
Thank you.
Rob Wertheimer in the front.
Donald, right here. Rob?
You have your choices of Donalds, either one.
Howdy. You guys have executed very well in an industry that's had some, obviously, a ton of volatility in the last two years, but supply chain constraints, supply of new equipment, and that maybe has contributed to fleet productivity, whether time unit or pricing, you know, kind of even better. Ted, I think you said your ambition is to grow margin. I guess one question is, to the extent you're willing to talk about time utilization, I mean, do we expect that to normalize back downwards, or are you continuing to reach new levels that you didn't think you could have reached maybe three or four years ago? Then just with all the operational improvements that E rin and others talked about, you know, what is the outlook for some of those productivity drivers over the next five years?
Do they get better and better and better?
I'll touch on the fleet productivity quickly, and then maybe Dale takes the operational improvements. When I think about the fleet productivity, once again, and I know during the first quarter, there's a lot of conversation about this. Maybe I could have done a better job, but we're really going to look at it pro forma, right? That's the way we're going to look at it. That gap between the as reported and pro forma is going to remain steady throughout the year because that's what was there. To be clear, we're going to improve the productivity of those assets. It's how we knew we could be a better owner. It's going to take a while. We probably, in an ideal world, wouldn't close deals in December and think about the BlueLine acquisition.
We had a similar challenge, but that's when the opportunity was there, and that's the one we know we're going to take it. There may be a drag on the metric for a little while, but by year-end, you will see these assets fully integrated into our system, operating like United assets, and whatever assets we feel can't, will be sold, discarded. As far as the future of efficiency and productivity in the business.
Yeah, I think, we shared a lot with you today of improvements we've made and where the opportunities still exist. We've actually started to look at ways we can utilize our facilities, our branches, in a much greater amount of time each day. Today, we don't operate a lot of facilities, multiple shifts. We believe that with the technology we've enabled and the demand we're seeing, we can continue to push more volume through our existing footprint, drive more hours of availability, getting assets picked up, serviced at all hours of the day, allowing us to create more capacity through existing branches. We've got a lot of upside in what we've built today just by trying to leverage that footprint and the products that we offer. There's a lot that we can do. I mentioned some of the AR opportunities.
You see how many customer touches we get every day. Technology will continue to enable us to make those 25,000 people, that Craig talked about, more productive every day.
Tom, I didn't answer your point about fleet productivity, time utilization cap. I wouldn't call it a cap, but one of the things we did mention in April that I want to reiterate, is there are a couple of categories over the past few years, and I think our peers have actually reported this well. They just ran too hot. We couldn't be the responsive customer service company that we want to be, partner we want to be, but we always strive to set those by categories that have opportunity. What, whether we hit a ceiling long term, I think there's a couple of things that matter. The efficiency that we can drive through density in our network is one of them, and then the opportunity to take maybe less time util productive assets that we have and maybe change them, right?
At the end of the day, we're going to look at it as the output of what's the return on that asset category, and not necessarily the individual metric, but the return on that asset.
Steve Fisher.
Donald. Steve, right?
Thank you. Thinking back over the last couple of cycles, over the last 10 years, some of the challenges that have been presented are when some of your end markets turned down very quickly. Thinking specifically about oil and gas, because it's a commodity market, you know, when the commodity changes quickly, the customers react quickly. You change your strategy by not working with the customers that are likely to turn on and off that quickly to mitigate that risk. What are the areas within your business today that still carry some of that risk of things turning relatively more quickly?
The fleet in general, it's a very big fleet, doesn't turn that quickly, but what are the areas that you could still improve upon, if there are any, to kind of mitigate needing to turn that ship very quickly when things turn down?
Well, it's a great question. That was a very unique dislocation coming out of 2015 in the oil and gas, because it wasn't only products that we had set aside from, but it was at the highest relative rate, if you recall. I mean, it was just a gold rush out there, and it was the highest rate. We had two dilutive issues. We had the volume dilute, and then we had the highest rate dilute. That was really why we got out of there. We wanted to get off that roller coaster. We're still in there a little bit. Probably about 2%, 2.5% of our business is in upstream, but it's strategic. It's with customers that we wanna be with. That would be the only one I would point to.
I don't really see us having that type of issue. One of the most resilient things about our model is the end markets that we serve are with the very same fungible assets. We don't really see that. The oil and gas were hard on the assets, they were priced premium, and there was a lot of waste in the system that I think they've done better, but I don't really see a parallel to that right now. Dale, I don't know if,
You know, I would remind everybody, we have never, in our industry, seen a violent downturn like what we saw with the pandemic. That was a bigger disruption to our end markets than anything, and it wasn't specific to any product, it was across the board. As a group, we found ways to internalize work, leverage our employee base, eliminate third-party repairs and hauling, and maintain margins through that time. Granted, maybe it didn't have the longevity that a downturn can have, but I think when you look at that period of 2020 and how we reacted, it showed the flexibility we have in this model. I think we're always gonna get some type of ups and downs on the revenue side. It's how well we positioned ourselves to manage the cost side to adjust the business.
I think we're positioned well, and we're in a good place for whatever comes ahead, strong growth or some type of slowdown.
Steve, the thing I might add, just to put some numbers around what Steve is getting at. If you went back to 2014, we probably had 11%-12% of our business that was directly exposed to the upstream business, so drilling, completion, production. We went through that painful downturn. We had even more exposure that was indirect, right? It was that stimulus by high oil and gas prices in Texas, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, and elsewhere. When we came out of that episode, we rescoped the business to about 5% or 6%, thinking that that was a more manageable exposure. Then 2019 came, and the rig count, you know, kinda collapsed again. So we've rescoped it to about 2%-2.5% of our business. That would absolutely be kind of the highest beta exposure we have.
Now, if you think about where we've grown and how we've replaced and backfilled that, you go back to 2016, we talked about the Power Vertical Strategy. At that time, meeting utilities, we were probably about 5% exposed to utilities. We're now 10% exposed to utilities. That is obviously very low beta work. You think about infrastructure. We introduced the Infrastructure Vertical Strategy at that same time. At that point, it probably would have been a mid to high single-digit percent of the business. It's now low teens. And obviously, both of those are verticals where you've got very strong secular outlooks, such that, with the exception of that 2%-2.5%, I really can't think of a truly high beta end market that we have any, like, exposure to.
Great, thanks. My follow-up is, Mike Durand mentioned some of the, or that there is white space areas out there. Are you prepared to talk today about what some of those white spaces are that you could move into? Are they some of the things that you've talked about over the past handful of years? Anything you can kinda share with us about where those white spaces might be?
As I mentioned earlier, whether it's continued deep in the penetration in some of our specialty products, right. Even in power and trench, which are our two most mature specialty business units, they continue to spin off 20% growth, right. Really strong growth. There's others, like mobile storage, Reliable On-Site, which is portable sanitation, that we haven't even filled out our full footprint yet from the GFN deal. We still have a lot of white space there. Additionally, in some verticals. There are still some verticals, manufacturing, M&A. I think there's still run and maintain, R&M, there's still opportunities to replace embedded owned units there. I think municipal is an end market where there's areas for rental to get further penetration.
There's white space for us internally because we're not as penetrated. There's white space because there's end markets, not many left, but a few that have not really gone to rental yet, that haven't bought into rental yet. Lastly, just deeper penetration in the markets that we serve.
Thank you.
Mike, in the back right, please.
Ronnie, yeah.
Hi, thank you. Just wondering, when you show the slide, how you're outperforming metrics against S&P Industrials, you highlighted the one slide where it's valuation, and you highlight how there's only so much you can do about that. I am curious, when you think of that valuation slide, how does that factor in to the M&A paradigm? You know, specialty, 30% of your business, some of those public peers are trading at 10x-14x, EBITDA, way higher multiples than the market's trading on you now. Just with where you've gotten URI today, how do you kind of think of that valuation slide and how that influences your M&A decisions going forward?
Do you wanna answer? I think it may influence what we could pay for assets, but not necessarily what assets we're going to go after. We don't want to continue to grow, especially because some multiple change. That'd be great. We're gonna do it because our customers need it. If we continue to build upon customer service and what our customers need. We really feel the financial part will take care of the rest, as long as we're making smart purchase decisions. There's a reality of what we trade at and what some of those assets trade at, that you have a point of reality to say, "Okay, is this gonna change our multiple? Are we gonna be a better owner of this deal?" Sometimes that answer is gonna be yes, sometimes it's gonna be no.
It's always gonna start with: will we be a better owner of this asset, and do our customers need this?
I guess the thing I'd add, right, not to bore people with kind of corporate finance, but I will. If you think about a multiple, that's the shorthanded view of cash flow-based valuation, right? We talk about multiples externally. Internally, we don't talk about multiples. When we look at deals, they're all based on internal rates of returns, so really cash-on-cash measurements. The question is, what do we pay for an asset? What can we do with that asset, you know, both under our, you know, management and then as we grow it? It's really That is essentially how we think about, you know, where we've got the right to own assets, is what kind of returns can we achieve with your capital?
When they meet the hurdles, right, then we can get a deal, then we're excited about it. When they don't meet those hurdles, that's when, you know, we're gonna be good and disciplined and good stewards of your capital, and we're gonna walk away.
That's a great point. We paid one of the highest multiples we ever paid for General Finance, we're gonna crush the model on that deal, right? It's what can we do with it more than a multiple.
The one thing I would add is every deal is accretive to our specialty business. When we do a deal, even in the General Rentals business, it creates capacity, it creates facilities, it creates employees that we can leverage and help grow that specialty model. Getting that capacity is an accelerant. Even when we do a General Rentals deal, that helps us grow that business. You can see the 28% CAGR that we've done in specialty, and it hasn't been fueled by just doing a bunch of deals. All those General Rentals deals that we've done have enabled us to take those branch leaders and branches we've consolidated, and found ways to reuse the facility with a specialty business and give us capacity in a new market.
The growth of that business is not just dependent upon going out and doing a high multiple M&A, it's about creating capacity with people and facilities as we grow it.
As well as customers that didn't have the specialty products to cross-sell to before.
Every deal we do, by us giving them that expansive specialty offering, it creates cross-sell opportunity for us. It's a win.
Great. If I could just follow up on that slide that shows these big buckets with infrastructure, you know, EVs, semiconductors, LNG projects. When we think of these projects, how does it change the algorithm? Is it higher margin projects because only a few players have the scale and capacity? Or is there a trade-off because it gives you longer duration, more visibility, 'cause they're multi-year projects, and maybe less on the margin side? Curious how we think of, with all these big projects coming up, if it changes the algorithm at all when you assess that.
Really, where the big projects give us an advantage to drive profitability is in servicing those large chunks of revenue in one location. Just think about if you put $80 million worth. Pick any number from 20 to 100. You pick $80 million of fleet that we could serve on one project, as opposed to splitting that up over hundreds of projects at, you know, a couple of hundred thousand a time. That concentration really is a much lower cost to serve an opportunity. Now, there's a little trade-off in price when someone's giving you that kind of scale, but we obviously feel very comfortable with the balance, and feel that the economics of large projects, that's why we pivoted to it many years ago, is a positive one for us.
In the back left.
Thanks. Two questions following up on both of those, actually. For next year, I know you don't want to provide guidance, there is a concern about what non-res might do, and you do have these mega projects, IIJA, IRA, CHIPS and Science. Just curious, you did a nice job on the first quarter call of breaking down subcomponents of non-res, where there might be weakness, where there's some strength, and then also what you're getting from these mega projects. Could you give us a feel for Ted, you mentioned a soft recession, you could grow right through that.
Could you speak about the componentry of all those pieces, if it, you know, as we move into next year, and where we might see weakness, where we would see strength, and maybe mix of all that together? Thanks.
Sure. Scott, to be honest, I don't have a crystal ball. We don't have a crystal ball that'll tell us where you may or may not see pockets of weakness. The way we've come at this is by looking at the last eight or nine nonresidential recession, right? If you actually look at those periods of time, what you'd notice is a roughly 12% drawdown, construction put in place, inflation adjusted, over about a two-year period. On average, you'd be facing 6% declines in back-to-back years. That's what history tells us. Now, if you put that in the context of the current non-res market, in total, public and private, it's about $900 billion. You'd be facing back-to-back drawdowns of $50 billion-$55 billion.
The question we ask ourselves is, when we think about those tailwinds, you know, how can they help offset that? You start with the infrastructure bill, $550 billion, the headline number. We think there's $510 billion of addressable market. Congress's intent was to spend that over five years. Theoretically, at run rate, it's $100 billion a year. Coincidentally, that offsets the entire 12-point decline, right, that we're talking about. Now, obviously, in 2024, to go through this hypothetical, you're, you know, who knows what 2024 spend looks like, right? Maybe it's 50 in the first year of spend, and then it doubles to that run rate in the second year. That actually would plug the entire hole of a average recession, right? That's not saying mild.
That would be average over the course of the last, really going back to 1964, it's eight or nine episodes, right? That's before you get to IRA. There's not as much definition around IRA, but the work we've seen from brand name consulting firms thinks that the spend is well over $1 trillion. Right? It'll take a long time to spend $1 trillion, we'll concede that. If you thought it would take 20 years for the sake of argument, that's $50 billion a year. That's six points of tailwind, all else equal, again, in this context of this, these six-point drawdowns. You think about autos. You know, we think there's probably at least $300 billion of spend in North America over the next, we said, five to 10 years.
I think most auto companies would tell you it could be shorter than 10 years, right? You play with numbers. Let's say it did take 10 years. That's $30 billion a year. That's 3.5 points of tailwind, all else equal. You know, CHIPS is gonna be a similar three, four, five points of tailwind over the next, you know, call it handful of years. LNG is something similar, $100 billion a year over the next five to 10. You know, these are all areas where we do exceptionally well. When you think about the nature of our national account strategy, it wasn't designed with the intent that we'd have these five tailwinds, but it turns out we've really got a differentiated value proposition that puts us in a great position to be the prime supplier across all five.
Those are the ways we think about it. You come back to your question, like, what does 2024 look like? We're not gonna suggest we know the answer to that, but that's what gives us confidence that this business can very realistically grow through, you know, call it an average recession.
Excellent. Thanks. Appreciate that. Just a quick follow-up. Back on specialty, the implied five-year, not guidance, but aspiration, is going from 30% mix to 35% mix. I'm just curious, if you so chose, and again, with General Rentals still growing nicely, could you get that mix a good bit higher on specialty? Would it require you going outside of your six core buckets of specialty into other areas? Are you viewing things in your pipeline, along that line? Thank you.
Yes, good question, Scott. I think. Look, first of all, if between now and 2028, we can take our $3.5 billion business we reported last year and turn it into a $7 billion specialty business, that'd be a big win. That'd be doubling the size of a very strategic business for us. Yes, it will be expanding what we have today into all the different markets and looking outside of the existing products, as Matt said, to determine where can we grow. The General Finance acquisition is a great example. Just on paper, it might not look like the greatest returns we were gonna get, but how we've been able to accelerate that business, combine that with our organic growth of our portable sanitation business to be first on the job, it's really opened a lot of doors for us.
It's given us the kickstart to actually help cross-sell our General Rentals business. The way these all combine together is what's gonna drive the next five years to get us to that $20 billion aspirational target.
Let me quickly just jump in there because GFN was a good deal. I want to be sure we're clear about that.
Great deal.
Yeah, based on the base model, which, as you can tell from Matt's comments, we're exceeding, the internal rate of return on that was about 15%. At the time we announced the deal, our cost of capital was about 7.5%, and our hurdle was 10%. We had a 50% buffer to our hurdle rate, and we've been earning about 2x our cost of capital. While it wasn't as high as the General Rentals deals we've talked about, still, we think, a very attractive deal for our shareholders.
It's back to the point, it's not the multiple that drives the value, it's what you do with it.
Rob?
I have a question about mega projects and the future of construction. This may be a little bit abstract, but I kind of wanna hear what you think about it. Construction has a ton of inefficiencies in it, and I'm curious about the value you bring and what the mega projects are showing us about where it's going. You think about a typical construction site, you have general contractors, subcontractors, owners, financers, lots of different parties influencing lots of decisions, and you have waste throughout that. You know, I've asked you before what market share looks like on mega projects, but maybe you could just talk about the value you bring throughout, whether it's, you know, reliable delivery or anything else that kind of tells us where inefficiencies can be wrung out and where you can bring value.
Certainly. When you think about, especially these projects we're talking about now, but the scale of any large project or plant, same thing in a plant, right? If you're talking about a refinery or large-scale facility, couple things that are important to them and why they really want to deal with as few vendors as possible, is safety and security of the site. It's no different on a big project. Project's even more complex because it's a changing organism every day. Every day, it changes, the footprint changes, the attributes change. It's actually even more important to make sure people are safe and aware in operating in those environments. If you have 10 different vendors coming in and out of there every day, you're gonna lose a little bit of control there.
I think you're going to see, we've already seen it in some of these mega projects, really little instances of it my whole career, but it's been accelerating of sole source. It may not be 100% sole source, but at least a first call where the customers and the construction managers are letting us be on site, number one, so that we can be more responsive to this big block of business there, that we can do safety training there, that we can really do soup to nuts right there on the site, is, I think, a trend that you're going to continue to see in these mega projects. The inefficiency of the industry is if you've.
10 different companies serving, I'll use that $80 million worth of fleet again, they're gonna send a lot more people than if we're just gonna have two techs there full-time, all day long, taking care of that. I think that's one of the things that you'll see, these mega project trend. It also gives the larger companies an advantage, because if you can embed some technology, some data and analytics to these customers for the entire project, and not just one sub-trades little piece, we think it can drive a lot of efficiency that way as well.
If I'm allowed, I have an unrelated follow-up. Ted, you tossed into the growth that you achieve versus the S&P, a triple or whatever, and some of the other metrics. You achieve some of that with better stability. Dale, I think you mentioned 2020 was a short downturn, but a really severe one in profit.
Sure.
I think you were more stable than the average S&P company. Could you talk about the non-construction part of your portfolio? What sort of volatility we should expect from that in any, you know, upturns and downturns, and whether that stability is driven, you know, by that base, or, you know, how you think about, you know, the less volatile end of your business? Thanks.
Sure. There are some aspects of construction, frankly, are gonna be lower beta, and I'll get into those. Probably 35%-36% of our business will be that classic industrial MRO. If you think about the volatility of industrial production, it's obviously substantially lower than construction put in place and even non-res construction put in place. That provides some balance for sure. We talked about some of the growth we've had in targeted verticals. Power is one we mentioned. It's now, you know, 10% of the business. Even before you get into the secular growth there, that is funded largely through infrastructure, IRA, and some of these other opportunities, that is obviously lower beta than commercial construction, classic strip malls, you know, what have you. You think about infrastructure, right?
That's now kind of a low teens. Classic infrastructure is a low teens % of our total mix. That also will have secular benefits from these investments. If you look at that, historically, it's actually had a countercyclical profile, so it's got a negative correlation to private non-res. Those are just a few examples. You know, certainly our customers have been a big aspect of reducing that volatility. When we embraced this kinda key account strategy Matt talked about, actually, the idea behind this whole thing was less volatility, right? Have bigger customers with larger projects across bigger backlogs who would come downstream in tougher times. The whole idea was that would help reduce volatility of our business. That's a consideration. Specialty is now, call it, 30% of the business.
In 2012, well, after the financial crisis, it was only 12, right? That business is somewhere between less volatile, non-volatile and countercyclical. Now, there's some double counting here, so don't add all these up, but that also provides balance. I just point that out so people don't start adding up numbers and coming to certain conclusions. The point of all that is the business is considerably less volatile given the transformation that we've, you know, really engineered over the last, you know, since 2008. Would you add anything?
No. Well done.
Jamie, in the back?
Hi. Good afternoon. One question, Ted. Obviously, you showed the slides where your margins, returns, cash flow, everything has improved over the past sort of 10 years. You know, as you have these tools in place and you've invested in technology, are there certain parts of the portfolio, you know, or geographies that are still an overall drag on margins, and there's a self-help opportunity that could help improve your margins over time? My second question is, understanding international hasn't been big for United Rentals, just your updated views there. I know in one slide you said selective international opportunities, just your latest thoughts there. Thank you.
Do you want to take the first part or?
Yeah. I don't know if you're connecting technology, Jamie, or not, but anything that may be margin dilutive is probably ROIC accretive, and it's more about the asset attribute. Think about tanks, think about containers, long-lived assets. They might not drive as much EBITDA, but they're gonna be a heck of a return. It's really the balance of those and not anything because we haven't implemented any of our technology or any of our systems there. Outside of that, I wouldn't call out anything that's from a margin issue.
Yeah.
If you want to take the second.
I'd agree. The second was on international, I believe.
On international. We're international today through the acquisitions of BakerCorp. We're operating 14 stores in Europe, and we're the largest mobile storage company in Australia and New Zealand. Those teams are doing a great job, and we're gonna continue to support that growth. We look at opportunities of in some of those markets, is there an opportunity to find a good partner to go for a full suite of offerings? There's a very high bar to reach for us to do that. I think equally important, I thought some folks might draw this parallel that the goal that we laid out, a five-year goal, that 2028 goal of $20 billion, does not require international.
We view international as a growth opportunity, but not necessary to reach our goals. We have plenty of white space here in North America.
Was there a question down on the front on the left? Yeah.
Thank you. Couple left, please. Ted, you talked about the flexibility of the business model, and the way you've framed the significant opportunities that exist, clearly, it seems unlikely that you're gonna need to invoke that flexibility. I understand that the signals that were provided in 2020 were pretty unambiguous with regard to the demand outlook, it seems likely that this time, if we do start to see a slowdown, the signals will be more ambiguous. Can you help us understand what needs to happen for you to, you know, face the decision as to whether you need to slow fleet growth, even sort of stall the fleet?
How you balance what are very clearly very significant long-term opportunities with, you know, with, you know, with the need to respond to that? Obviously, in the past, it's probably fair to say that the larger rental players haven't wanted to be the first to shrink share, shall I say.
Do you want me to take that?
Just I'll take the last part. In the past, you'd have to almost refer to 2008, and the industry is so different today. It's not comparable. I'm not. I was in it, so I could tell you that. Not just us, but the whole industry is so much more sophisticated. There's so much more intelligence and information, and people are more metric-focused on how they drive their business. On top of that, it was, you know, the largest crisis that we've ever seen. I don't think there's any chance of something like that happening again, and that reaction, just because of those two reasons. It was such as a fear decline, and the industry wasn't ready for it, like, we just weren't as sophisticated.
We've grown so much, the public information that's available, I'll give Ralph some credit, right? They helped in that as well, that we drove the ARA, the public companies that report out, just such a much more sophisticated industry that's relying on information and not instinct. I don't think I could have said that in 2008.
There are a lot of things, right? I mean, we have incredible insight into the business every day. We have BI tools that every day are giving us insight down to regions, and you can drill into the regions and look at districts and individual branches, right? We've got a lot more information at our hands that we can monitor, and we do monitor the business. You've got checks and balances constantly going on. That's every day. We've got fleet managers, you know, across the organization that are looking at supply and demand and trying to figure out, are we optimizing and balancing those? If not, why? What actions might we need to take? Those are examples of things we're doing.
As a leadership team, we sit down every two weeks, we go through the operating plan, as kind of an overlay hedge to make sure that the field is, you know, reacting as appropriate. The one thing I'll say is the flexibility serves us both ways. We can flex down, but we can flex up, and I think, you know, we would obviously lead on that well, right? You think about CapEx, you know, we admittedly, the last year has been a very tough position, but historically, we've been in a great position to partner with our OEMs to get more fleet when we needed it. You heard Craig talk about our ability to hire, right? That's a massive competitive advantage. We think about real estate. We've really kind of revamped our whole real estate strategy.
It's one of those really random things people don't think about, but it can be a real bottleneck to a growing business. We've gone through, and we've kind of really redesigned our whole strategy in real estate to more effectively serve us, to flex up when the time is necessary. When you flex down, we've got all these tools. You know, we talk a lot about our cost structure. We only have about 10% or 11% of our cash costs that are fixed, and the vast majority of that is gonna be leases. Right, we lease about 90% of our facilities. The truth there is, you have between, you know, five to 10 year leases, even those are rolling.
You know, when you think about kind of that semi-variable to variable part of your cash cost structure, it's about 90%. If and when we need to make decisions, right, in your case, you're asking if we had to flex down, we have a lot of ability to very readily make changes to rightsize the operations.
Okay, thank you. Perhaps a quick follow-up. The balance sheet leverage slide that you put up showed the history, the deleveraging that's taken place and the band within which you've targeted leverage 2x to 3x . That history was during or showed really a period where interest rates were a great deal lower. Is it time, now that rates are higher and likely to stay there for a while, in my opinion, to just at least bring down the upper end of your ceiling? It's not gonna make a great deal of difference to you currently, clearly, because you might remove a bit of flexibility, but not a lot.
Yeah, look, there's a lot of considerations that will go into, call it the next leg of this capital allocation strategy. If you go back to 2019, when we introduced, you know, kind of the 2x-3x leverage ratio, we did say that could be the first step of a multi-step process, and we wanted to get to this range, live there, demonstrate to the street that we were serious about it, and then try to measure the benefits so we could do more thoughtful cost-benefit analysis. You know, we've certainly collected a lot of data, and we think we've got a pretty good idea how that's added value. As you think about the next leg of capital allocation, right, we'll sit down as a team and talk about this as the year progresses.
We'll obviously discuss this with the board substantially, it's not inconceivable that we could decide to live in a different zip code. Now, will we or won't we? Time will tell. We're in the middle of kind of thinking through that. Certainly, that'll drive an important element of our capital allocation strategy. Certainly, as we think about that fixed versus floating rate exposure, as I mentioned, we've got about 30% floating rate exposure. We're fixed on the rest, right? So we're not worried about those maturities, and frankly, we'll generate so much cash that we can really manage the balance sheet through any environment.
Thanks.
We probably have about five more minutes. Jerry, do you want to?
Yeah, thanks, Ted. I'm wondering if you can just talk about what you're seeing out of the industry now that everyone has better access to data with Rouse, pricing, et cetera. How are you thinking about the parameters around what the next rate downturn would look like? You know, what's interesting about what we're seeing now, used values are coming down, but rates have actually accelerated into the first quarter, which is a bit unusual versus history. I'm wondering if you just touch on what you think you're seeing in the market as well that's driving that. I know you folks don't talk about rate for yourselves, the industry data shows a pretty interesting distinction. I'm wondering if you think that's driven by interest rates or other factors.
I think it's driven by a couple of factors. Number one, the cost of equipment's gone up, right? Proves that people in our industry can do math. That's a very important starting point. All kidding aside, demand's been high. I think like I said, the information that people have, where now they can look at, you folks may not have access to it, but you can look at what's the average rate in your marketplace, right? You used to rely on people, your sales team, and customers to tell you what the market rate was. We have data to do that. I think the tools and some of the scars, quite frankly, from 2008 and earlier, the industry's learned from.
I think what we're seeing is a very responsible industry, and understanding that how important profitability versus just volume is to our industry that has to serve debt. I think the public companies are doing a great job leading the way, but I think the whole industry is following. We see it in the supply-demand dynamics, right? The days on rent, days in fleet, for those of you who remember it, remains in good position. We see it actually in improved utilization, well, we'll call fleet productivity overall. I think it's shown in many ways, Jerry, this is just a much more disciplined, informed industry than we were 15 years ago.
Matt, hazard to guess on what peak-to-trough rate could look like in the next cycle, 2020, 1%, 2009, 15%. Hazard a guess on what it could look like going forward?
I mean, look, we are not very good at predicting rate year to year, so I'm not going to take a crack at that. I think that the resiliency that's been built into the industry, the capitalization, that, you know, we have the bigger companies that are going to drive this or better capitalized. The diversification, specifically for us, is going to drive a much different outcome than anything you've seen historically, is about as far as I'd go.
Thank you.
Well, we have time for one more, if there is one.
David? Mariano Rivera over here.
It's sort of minutia, but people worry about it. You know what's in your book right now, and what you're carrying book values of your fleet. When we think of the last, say, 10 years, the average used equipment margin sale is high forties. You're currently running high fifties. Can you give us some perspective on, with used prices coming under at least some pressure, what's in the fleet right now when you think of where you are, book value versus current rates, just so we have some sense of, you know, what you would think be some degradation coming on your used equipment margins?
hear the book value.
The rental fleet value is on the balance sheets.
All right. First of all, I think the overall tone of your question is that people worried about used sales have been so high for so long, eventually, what goes up must come down, right? One of the biggest drivers of what your used value is going to be is what's the cost to get new. As you continue to see those new prices raised, which they have, it's going to act as a little bit of an umbrella to cover just how much they may come off. Now, we may not get whatever sale, what was it last quarter? $0.71 cents on the dollar recovery originally, we see. I don't think we're going to drop back down to where we were, and it would be inappropriate to, because the used prices are higher than they were.
We may come down a little bit, but it's not something that we're concerned about as an industry. Even furthermore, for us, because of the retail channel and that machine that we've built, that we kept feeding, even when equipment was tight, we did not say no to retail used equipment deals. That was the only deals that we didn't stop the team from doing, because it took us so long to build that pipeline and that retail engine, and we think that's going to be something that'll help us get through any adjustments in used pricing. So far, so good. We're really seeing it, and I do think the new pricing will act as a little bit of coverage for that as well.
All right. Thank you.
Certainly. Great.
All right.
Well, thanks. I appreciate everybody's time today and attention, as I had said earlier, and we'll talk to you. What's the actual date, July?
July 27th, is the call.
We'll talk to you all again July 27th. Thanks again for your attendance. Appreciate it.