Thank you again, everybody. We're going to continue our public company waste panels. I want to thank Ron Mittelstaedt, the CEO and founder of Waste Connections, and Mary Anne Whitney, the CFO. Thank you very much for being here. Similar to the panels we've run up till now, I'm going to ask you some basic industry questions and outlook stuff and then just some specific things, too, to your company.
I thought I would ask you, just as a perspective for someone who's been in this industry for so long, Ron, that the companies are doing well, the stocks are not doing so well. Do you think that there's something that's misunderstood from the investors from your conversations, or what's your take on that for right now?
Well, first off, I don't think the stocks as a group not doing well relative to the S&P or prior years or anything really has much to do with the industry. It's just a lot of rotation out of the industry, where many investors have made quite a bit of money in the last 5 - 10 years, and into AI-linked hyperscalers, data centers, semis. It's more of a rotation issue, I think, than anything else. We've seen this before. It'll happen again. I don't think it's any company-specific or industry-specific thing.
Okay. That's actually what I'm hearing from the investor base and people that I talk to as well. People are looking at things that are derivatives of data centers and things where they're in the industrial base, where they can get unusual growth that they used to not be able to get out of HVAC companies and out of building construction and electrical equipment companies, and now they're getting that there, and they're going into those waters right now.
I think the one thing that may, as you are well aware, there's a lot of new sell side analysts that cover the sector over the last few years. There's now 25, 26 that cover the sector, and a lot of new investors into the sector as well with the market caps of the companies. I think the one thing that isn't well understood is I think there's this belief sort of that all waste is created equal, all EBITDA is created equal, and that if somebody has a certain margin, everyone else can get there.
I think that is completely inaccurate, number one, and market selection, asset positioning matter tremendously in this business. There's reasons that companies are 10% and 15% EBITDA for a long time, or 20%, and they don't just magically become 30% EBITDA companies. There's more of a homogenization from investors right now looking at the space, and that's why you're seeing everybody pretty much trading in the same bandwidth from a multiple standpoint.
Interesting. Okay. Where do you think that the industry is right now in terms of maturity and ability to enhance the margins? There's been a lot of margin improvement over the last decade in this industry. There's been consolidation, and the companies have gotten bigger with acquisitions. Where do you think we are in terms of, let's use the baseball analogy, what inning are we in?
Look, this industry has been publicly traded now for 57 - 58 years, and in that time, in most markets in the country, except perhaps the West Coast because of the franchise model, the landfill is the local market moat, or landfills. Now you've moved over the last 10 years with the final public-to-public mergers. You've got four public companies that have over 90% of the airspace used in the U.S. day-to-day.
I think you're seeing that play its way through in the pricing story for most of the public companies and the industry, and you're seeing margins really move the last three to five years in the sector, pretty much universally on the public side. I think you'll continue to see that moat continue to be capitalized on by the public companies.
You'll continue to see price-led growth for the sector, and that will lead to continued margin expansion. What inning is it in? I don't know. Fifth inning. There's still quite a bit of room, I think. I think you're going to see, and perhaps we'll get to it, but the way the landfill created a moat, it took 50-some years to sort of get there as a public industry. I think you're going to see the next moat be technology and AI for the public companies that will have dramatic scale benefit relative to smaller private companies. I think that'll be the next moat that the industry creates.
Let's go there right now. Let's talk about that. What do you think is the opportunity? What are you doing? I know you've been kind of forward-thinking on this and what you could do with it in your company. Can you talk a little bit about how you're utilizing it, and what's the magnitude of improvement that you think you can get near term and then longer term, and how?
Yeah. Well, look, ultimately, in longer term, I think anybody who says they know is guessing. Look, we signed off at the end of 2024 to implement seven enterprise-level AI initiatives, using BCG as our outside advisor and assisting us. We did three of those in 2025. We're doing two in 2026 and two in 2027. We're spending about $100 million on these seven initiatives, or approaching that, and we expect to get about $100 million or 100 basis points of margin improvement as we come into 2028, into 2029 from those seven initiatives.
We did two on the pricing side in 2025. In 2026, we're doing one on the sort of what I'll call real-time or dynamic routing, sort of creating Waze. As an example, for garbage industry, us as a company, I think us as an industry, we do a very good job of routing today, but it's static. It's as good as the data that was run when it was run. We're going to go to sort of a real-time, which is being fed not only internally with AI and our internal software, but through outside feeds.
Again, like Google Maps is, like Waze is, taking into account weather, traffic, street closures, construction, those kind of things. I think that is a big lift we should get. We're implementing that in the second half of 2026, hoping to get it fully deployed throughout 2027.
That's probably the largest piece of that initial $100 million from our AI initiatives. Look, we identified about 47 total potential areas we could use it in the organization, and we rank ordered the top seven for the first three years. Once we get through those, there will be more in 2028, 2029. Look, is it unreasonable to think that we can get, over time, a five to a seven-year period, 150 basis points - 200 basis points out of the cost structure and the pricing improvement in the business with AI? I think that's very reasonable.
In addition to those kind of enterprise-wide efforts, of course, within things like treasury, payroll, AP/AR, we see nice opportunity as well, and those may be more off-the-shelf solutions over time. We think of them as being a means for scaling as we continue to grow the business, so you would, over time, get leverage, incremental leverage in the SG&A.
Okay. You, I think, made a comment in the last, I'm not sure which one of you, the last earning call about the pricing ability was enhanced with the AI, and specifically pricing in a way that you had better retention. Maybe you could discuss that a little bit, because obviously that's a much healthier way to go about things, if you can keep your customers.
Yeah
What are you doing exactly over there, and talk about the impact that you're having?
Well, simply, I can't speak for every public or private company in here, but I think most of us have priced our customers or annually price increased our customers maybe based on level of profitability on a commercial basis or a residential basis, and we've given them ranges of 5% for this profitability, 8% for this, 12% for this.
That's the way the industry has typically done price increases in a non-franchise market. What we're doing on the commercial side now with a new AI pricing engine we built, or BCG built with us, is we're pulling together about 24 to 25 data feeds internally and externally that we have learned in time lead to a customer's ability to retain or push back on price, and where is that sensitivity by customer. It was all data we had, but we probably had it in 100 different databases. Okay?
There was no way to manually really do that effectively. If we had a market in Wichita, Kansas, and we had 6,000 commercial customers, they were probably getting somewhere between four and six different levels of price. Okay? Today, if you have 6,000 commercial customers in Wichita, they're getting 6,000 individual prices for obviously the same service in many cases, because you're taking into account very specific data about that customer.
It's much more pinpoint, it's very accurate, taking in what we have built with BCG, the likelihood to accept price or the likelihood to leave because of how much price. The whole idea is to reduce customer churn and maximize net price and minimize gross price. Okay? We are fully deployed on our commercials as of 2026, and we're seeing about a 20%-25% reduction in churn and a higher net retention of price with this than we saw in previous years.
Wow. I guess the first question you'd have in something like that is, do you think that's sustainable? It's an anomaly, we need some time to see whether this really sticks, or how should we think about that?
I think, look, the beauty of AI, as we've come to learn, and we certainly don't know a ton about it, is that it gets better as it goes, it gets better as it learns, and it gets better as your data quality gets better. We have to make a lot of internal changes to the ways we do things, and we continue to have to make more going forward to give that data greater integrity and allow the machine learning to happen and get better.
I do think it's sustainable, and I actually think it improves. Look, we'd rather to get 5% price, do 6%, and have a 1% rollback than have to do 8% to get 5%. Right? That's effectively what you're trying to do. Yes, I do think it gets better over time. That's what we're seeing.
Mm-hmm. If I think of the buckets of where the most opportunity is, would you say it's routing, then pricing, then customer service, or something like that? How would you think about the hierarchy?
Well, I would say initially the largest opportunity is on the routing side. We're running 14,000 trucks a day throughout the U.S. and Canada, and if you can save on a residential basis, you can save seconds between homes and tens of seconds between commercial stops.
That's a very significant incremental add. I would tell you that somewhere around 50 basis points - 60 basis points of that initial 100 basis we've talked about will come out of the routing side. For the most part, once you've routed and you're continually rerouting, you don't get that lift every year, right? Pricing you do. I would say the pricing is the compounder, the biggest initial lift and impact is the routing.
Okay.
I think the other thing that, I don't know that you have touched on, would be the digitization of the customer experience, and the fact that tightening the relationship with our customers through better, more proactive communication around whatever it is, whether it is service, the timing, or a delay due to weather or something related to this routing effort.
All of those things work to strengthen those bonds, because if you think about it, what we are really focused on is keeping customers longer. Because ultimately what you are avoiding is the cost of getting a new customer.
Mm-hmm. Okay, great. I want to shift a little bit to some of the macro, what are you seeing in your client base. It is the commentary in the first quarter call, cyclical volumes seem to be flat to improving, and you had temporary roll-offs having growth in pulls and volumes in the Western Region, which I think you guys have a very strong position in the Western Region, so you might be the market over there. Are we seeing more of a cyclical turn now? What are you seeing?
Number one, to your question, we should see it in the West, it should be more indicative of the overarching economy, because anyone who is servicing customers in the nine Western states, they have some form of franchise somewhere. They are getting 100% of the growth in that geography, right?
I will tell you, that went from about a mid-2%-3% type volume growth in that segment in 2024 and early 2025 to about 1%-1.5% right now. We are just sort of seeing the economy not contract, not really expand. We are seeing it relatively flat. We see one month roll-off pulls are up 1%-2%. The next month they are down 1%-2%. We are seeing MSW volumes up about 1.5%. Special waste ebbs and flows.
It can be up 4% or 5% or down 4% or 5% in a quarter, depending on the timing of jobs. We are certainly not seeing the economy contract, for us personally, we are also not really seeing anything that is telling us it is about to have a lift-off. We thought that was starting to happen in March and April, and we saw certain green shoots that indicated that. When the Iran war started, after about the second, third week, we saw a lot of things start to just sort of slow down and tap the brakes a bit, particularly on special waste projects.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Maybe a little bit of a pause in the upward trajectory of-
Yeah, I mean-
Upward turn, not upward trajectory
Look, you tell me how long the war lasts, I'll tell you when it'll turn. I think anybody that thinks that the cost of crude and how it's rippled through to gas prices and therefore services, it's going to have an impact ultimately. If it doesn't last more than four to six months, I think it'll be a blip. If it does, that'll be a little different.
Yeah. Okay, maybe we'll pivot a little bit to the M&A and your opportunities over there. Are there specific markets or regions that you find more attractive? How are you thinking about things at this point? You've had a lot of deal activity over the last 10 years, and when you go to companies, I guess, how do you convince them that you're the right home for their company?
Well-
There's two questions there.
Yeah. Look, as you know, and many in the audience knows, look, our model is we tend to do 20 to 25 somewhat smaller private company acquisitions a year, usually averaging $5 million-$15 million in revenue. It's generally a multi-generational, family-owned business. It's often a relationship sale. Most of the companies that we acquire, we've probably made two to four offers, two in the previous 5-10 years, or 15-20 years in the case of the franchises.
A life event happens, whatever that life event it is. Some form of estate planning happens within that family, and they decide that they want to move on with their business. Obviously, value and structure is exceedingly important, always has been, but so is the relationship. We spend a lot of time with potential private companies in that.
They put a lot of concern in who's going to own their company. They're going to probably live in that market. They have a legacy. We spend a lot of time on that with them as well. That has helped us. Certainly, our model, the franchise model and the suburban rural model, has helped us in our M&A strategy. It's often north of 50% of the time, we're somewhat sole source negotiating the transaction.
I guess going back to that first part of the question in terms of, is there anything more attractive or less attractive nowadays in acquisitions from your perspective?
Look, M&A is opportunistic. We don't determine timing. Sellers determine timing. Every geography in the country and Canada has its pros and cons. Obviously, we love the exclusive market model of the nine western states west of Colorado. That's a lumpy M&A environment.
Certainly, when we're not in those markets, whether we're on the eastern seaboard, the southeast, the Rocky Mountains, or the Great Plains, we want to be in more of a suburban market, generally under 500,000 , certainly more likely around 250,000 in population. We want to own or try to own one of the only landfills for the market. We're not out looking to enter a large urban market in a non-integrated position or probably at all. That's not our model. Those things are things that we avoid.
You don't see us in a Boston, you don't see us in an Atlanta, you don't see us in certain large markets. There's some we're in that came along when we did the Progressive deal predominantly, but we tend to be about 85% non-urban.
Okay. If you could talk a little bit about the voluntary turnover in the company. It dropped below 10% last quarter. It seems like it was a milestone. I guess the first thing, just to level set, because I think people measure the turnover differently in the industry. What goes in this? Is this everyone who joins and then leaves, or do you have this as this for people after 90 days they're there, 120? Talk about what you're doing that's getting that turnover down and the residual effects of keeping the turnover down.
Sure. Well, I'm glad you made that point, because everybody does count it differently. Some of the public companies, if they lost three positions and it was the same position within a year, they count that as one turnover. We count every head that leaves, voluntarily or involuntary, from whenever they were hired, within a year as a turnover. It's true total turnover-
Soon as you start
as a percentage of total employees. If you've got 25,000 employees, at 9.2% voluntary, we're losing about 2,300 voluntary turnovers a year, and we're losing about, not quite the same, involuntary turnover a year. We look at total turnover, and then we look very closely at voluntary. That's what's most important to us, because that's people quitting us.
That's people making a decision about our leadership, our way of doing things, how they feel they're treated. Involuntary, we discount that some because we feel we've hopefully given them an opportunity before a decision was made. We've changed the whole process for what we do.
We've changed our recruiting technology. We went from more of a fishing approach, throwing a net out, pulling it in, to more of a hunting rifle approach and sort of, I'm going to use the word profiling, who does well in what market and why, and where did they come from, and be more targeted in who we pursue. We've changed the onboarding process to be a lot more involved, particularly the first 30 and 90 days.
We find if we can get past day 90, we've got a much greater chance of getting past a year. Once we get past a year, we've got a very good chance to get to seven and a half to eight years. A lot more emphasis in that first year. We've changed the feedback loop for all levels of leadership with our frontline employees, to be more digital and frequent.
A number of things. We also opened two driver academies in 2024. We thought we'd put about 30%-35% of our need per year in CDL drivers through our own academy. In 2025, we put through almost 60%, and we believe this year we'll approach 80% through our own academies. That has been a huge change. Our retention of a driver that doesn't go through our academy is only about 45%-55% at 100 days. Our drivers that go through our academy, at one year, our retention has been 92%.
Whoa.
There's been a dramatic change of we're pushing very hard to put people through our own CDL academies that we run.
It seems like you're, if I just want to sum it up, there's being more careful in the front end as to who you're bringing in, someone more likely to succeed. Frankly, it seems like opportunities within the company. Is that fair?
I think we're putting more time and training, hopefully, into them. Trying to get the DNA of who succeeds in what role and why better on the front side, doing more on the training and development side, more on the communication feedback side, and then hopefully, career opportunities if that's something that the employee desires. It's all of those things.
Look, you ultimately have to have great pay, benefits, but ultimately, it's how people feel about where they work and how they feel they're treated by their local leader, and their local leadership team. That's what we look real closely at, because we feel voluntary turnover and people leaving us is a direct reflection of our local and our corporate leadership. There's a heavy emphasis on a feedback loop on why are employees doing that or might be thinking about doing it, and doing what we can to prevent it by market.
If we see an improvement economically, we could see more of a labor crunch. I don't know if you'd call it a crunch, but more of a tightness in the market. Do you feel like you've appropriately positioned the company for a potential for something like that to happen?
Yeah. Look, absolutely. The labor market was very tight two years ago, as you know, 2023 coming through into 2024. Beginning at the end of 2023 going into 2024, we started driving turnover down. We did it in a contracting and very difficult labor market. Yeah. I'm not saying if you go to 2.5% unemployment, that our number won't move a little, but we're very committed to keeping that voluntary number to 10% or less. We'll do everything in our power to keep it there within reason.
I'm going to ask you a little of a contrast question. We had GFL here just beforehand, and they're in the process of buying Secure. I think you're fairly familiar with the assets because you yourselves bought part of what was Tervita acquisition. Can you compare what is in your business right now from those assets, to what's being bought by Jim?
Well, if you go back, I guess it's almost 30 months now, 27 months. We acquired what was 42%, approximately, of Secure's E&P disposal and treatment assets in Western Canada, and it was about 45% of their EBITDA of the E&P business. We didn't buy any metals recycling or oil brokerage or infrastructure business, construction business from them. What GFL is buying and buying Secure, they're buying that other 48% of the E&P treatment business.
They're also buying the other three businesses, which we did not do. Happy to have GFL. Secure's been a great public company. Western Canada and the E&P disposal business, it is effectively a duopoly, a government-approved duopoly, by the Competition Bureau. That's how it was set up. Secure's been a great competitor, and I'm certain that GFL will be as well. We think it's a positive for us and I think a positive for GFL.
How do you expect that part of your business to grow over the next, say, three to five years?
Well, relative to the U.S., because remember, we're also in this business in the U.S., Canada is a production shale play, drilling play. About 80%-85% of the business in Canada is linked to production. There's a lot of reasons for that are regulatory and otherwise in Canada versus the U.S. Whereas in the U.S., we're about 80%-85% drilling linked.
Okay.
You've got more price that happens in Canada in the business on an annual basis in E&P and less really volume growth. In the U.S., you have less price in E&P and you have more volume. They sort of counterweigh each other. When we put the two, and that's one of the reasons we did this back in 2024, it brought us to about a 50/50 mix of production and drilling activity. It devolatilized the E&P disposal business that we had.
You're happy with those assets?
Thrilled with those assets.
What are the margins of that business compared to what you've got in the rest of the business?
Well, remember that the E&P business in both the U.S. and Canada is predominantly a landfill disposal business or a transfer to landfill disposal business. The margins there look similar to our landfill business in solid waste. They're in that 45% to low 50% level, just like U.S. landfills are in many cases. In this case, that whole system is.
One question, just I should have piggybacked this on one of the first questions, was just on the M&A environment, I'm just going to jump back there, because the public companies, the valuations have come down, but you're buying a lot of companies in the private markets. Is there any difference in the valuations you're seeing in the private markets over the last year or two?
No, not really, because look, I think us, and I certainly believe our peers, we don't really look at a multiple. People talk about that because it's an easy way to rationalize and have the conversation. Look, we're looking at an all cash in, cash out investment, looking at an ROIC on that investment and looking at the NPV of the discounted cash flows, and are those positive and how positive relative to the size and the scope and the risk of the investment.
Multiple, that's just something people use to communicate. It's not really how the deals are done. They're ultimately a cash-on-cash return done deal. Look, and I wouldn't expect private sellers to say, "Well, last year my home was worth $1 million, and now you're telling me it's worth $600." They're not going to probably do that. If they live with it for five years, that might be a different story. I don't think, we never have done deals on a multiple basis, and our change on our valuation doesn't change what we think we can pay.
Got it. One thing as we get towards the end over here, is there any update on what's going on in the Chiquita Landfill in terms of stabilizing and pricing and the amount that's needed to-
Yeah
keep creating-
No real huge update. I would tell you that, I would say over the last four or five months, Chiquita's sort of gone from being in the windshield to now sort of being somewhat in the rear view mirror. It's still there. It's still important. It's still something we're dealing with. It's really consistently improving. The reaction is slowing. The costs are coming down. The EPA has been heavily involved at our request. That has been a very positive development. I'd say it's playing out pretty much as expected at this point.
Okay. We've got about 30 seconds left. It's just a quick one. Do you think there's any key trends that you see now that will impact the solid waste industry for the next 10 years, other than like we talked about AI? Is there anything else that you would foresee?
Look, obviously the magnitude of the consolidation of the landfill ownership will continue to be a lift for the public companies for a long time to come. It took 50 years to get there. I think you're finally seeing it. That's certainly going to be impactful the next 5- 10 years. I think the magnitude of the opportunity for technology, particularly AI technology, to ripple through so many areas, in what is viewed as an old line industrial service industry, I think is underappreciated right now. People are going to be favorably surprised.
Very good. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Much appreciated.
Thank you. Appreciate the time.
Thank you.