I'd like to introduce our next speaker of the day, Bobby LeBlanc, CEO of Onex Corporation. Bobby, welcome. Hey, Ben. Great to see you. Great to see you. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure. Hey, Bobby, maybe we can kind of start off with maybe highlighting some of the key changes at Onex and developments over the past few years. Yeah, it's been quite a couple of years since I've become CEO, and we've got a lot accomplished. The first thing we really focused on was making sure we're being intellectually honest with ourselves where we had a right to compete, and then trying to organize our human capital and our entire business around those areas. That came with some tough decisions of shutting business down and selling some things, but I think it was important that we had that exercise early on, and I think we did a good job of that. I can get into more detail as we have our conversation. Secondly, we needed to help make our support functions more efficient. There were too many priorities being put on those areas that weren't being prioritized by anybody. Making sure that the right things were getting done in the right order was important, and I think we've done a very good job there. We've gotten back to successful fundraising across the board. Some places we've always had successful fundraising, but at OP, at OnCap, at Credit, we've had a really good couple of years fundraising, which was also important. Our NAV growth has been decent over those two years, which is important. We've been very forward-leaning with KPIs and public disclosure in terms of what you should expect from us as a management team and tying compensation to those KPIs. Three new board members have come onboarded in the last 18 months who have skill sets not only for where we are, but where we're going as an organization that I think's important. Quite busy, but it's been a good couple of years. Excellent. Listen, Bobby, what do you think makes Onex special? As a follow-on, like what areas has it really kind of earned the right to compete in, in your view? Yeah, so before the right to compete, I think our culture and the culture that Gerry built up over 40 years is by far the best part of our secret sauce. We're intellectually honest, we're investor-oriented, collaborative, all the things that have the makings of a great organization. I was able to see it under Gerry for more than 25 years, and I'm trying to continue on that path that he led us on. Where we have a right to compete, it varies by business unit. In large, in the mid-cap private equity, the OP franchise, financial services, industrials, with a particular emphasis on aerospace, and business services have been the areas that we've chosen to focus on. I think it's important in this type of fundraising environment for private equity that you really do focus on areas where you have demonstrated long-term track records. OnCap has done the same thing. They have three areas of emphasis, they call it, that they want to have all of their human capital focused on. I think that resonates much better in this kind of fundraising environment with LPs to not try to be all things to all people, but to be the things that people know and trust you in terms of an investment process. On the Credit side, we really, since Ronnie's taken over, have leaned into our structured credit business, CLOs in particular. We truly believe we have a demonstrated right to compete there. We've gotten that business to be seventh or eighth in the world globally in terms of issuance, from the mid-20s just a couple of years ago. Importantly, the team has been able to attract equity dollars to our CLO platform where our balance sheet isn't the only one supporting the CLO business, which is increasing the ROE of that business. Those are some of the areas, and now trying to get the rest of Credit to scale as well to be able to create FREs there. Those are areas where we really want to lean into. If we get all those things right, I think the capital raising part of our business, along with the team that we built around capital raising, will have a much easier job raising dollars going forward than it has been for the last couple of years. It's been a tough fundraising environment, don't get me wrong, for everyone. PE in particular has been a tough fundraising environment, but I feel pretty good about the accomplishments we've made there over the last two years. Yeah, we've made lots of progress. I guess the follow-on question, though, are there areas that still need kind of reshaping or that are under, I'll call it, evaluation? Yeah, so a couple of things. One is, I think we need to organize our businesses in a way that is done in a way where we have enough revenue to support our cost structures. It's nice to have more accountability around net income, FRE, whatever, however you want to define it. I think all the business units have done a good job at that. Credit in particular is scaling very quickly in terms of FRE generation. I expect that growth to continue. Right now, our structured credit business is really profitable. We have a couple of non-profitable products that Ronnie and the team are trying to get up to scale. Once they get up to scale, and they're close, the earnings growth will begin to accelerate. I think as we think about our business models going forward, we need to become more capital efficient in the way we fund our asset management businesses. You know, Onex historically has been a very capital intensive business. We've had to hold lots of cash to meet our commitments. We're still always going to be supportive of our asset management platforms, but maybe we don't need to be 40% or 50% of a fund going forward. The percent should be much lower. That'll free up a couple of things. It'll free up the amount of cash that we have to hold on the balance sheet. It'll also free up those dollars to try to figure out other ways to deploy that capital to create enterprise value. The thing that now, this has always been a goal of mine, but what I've really been focused on for the last six months and for the next, hopefully, many years is how to close the gap on our discount to NAV. It's been a frustration of mine how we trade. By the way, there's an asset manager on top of our NAV that's getting no value as well. I've never really understood it. I must not be explaining it well enough. If you look at our, if you look at the way Onex is being valued today, we, and if you say our cash is worth $1, so that you don't put a discount on cash, and just say our credit and public companies are worth $0.90, for no good reason, just to have a place to begin to look at math, the markets are telling us our PE assets are worth $0.50 on the dollar. We have about $5.4 billion of our NAV today in PE assets. What boggles my mind is there's a perfectly functioning secondary market that would ascribe much higher values to our PE NAV than our own shareholder base is ascribing it to. That market has exploded. There are so many dollars there to support secondary trades that have been raised that there's pretty good bids for assets, even in a tough DPI environment that we're in today. Getting, figuring out a way to make the business look more profitable and less capital intensive on the asset management side is one of the goals, right? I'll never quite understand why that arbitrage exists. I would like to try to figure out a way to create enterprise value through that arbitrage and deploy the balance sheet in a manner that allows us to get viewed in a way where whatever we were to invest in next, nobody would value it at $0.50 a dollar. It'd be too clear that you shouldn't do that. I think we have an opportunity to get a re-rate on our multiple if we do our jobs right over the next little while. Excellent. I mean, what's the ultimate vision for Onex as a company? Again, I come first and foremost, have a culture and a value system that is a place that we've always had. It is a place where people want to come to work and fight to come to work. I mean, that's when you know that you're having fun is when people, you're not out recruiting. People are recruiting themselves into the organization. We've gotten that back like in the last little while, which has been exciting. Success is going to be getting our intrinsic value reflected in our share price. As much as share buybacks are fun, and we've got, we've done $2.5 billion, by the way, of share buybacks since 2020. We're believers in the math that I'm outlining for you that there's a disconnect between intrinsic value and real value. You know, trying to create enterprise value where you know people are being viewed on something other than hard NAV only going forward. That includes, again, getting proper value for the asset manager, but also having our capital deployed in larger, chunkier places where people would say, boy, they've been great at that industry for 30 years. I understand why they're doing that. Excellent. Listen, going back to the hard NAV then, I think NAV per share, if my math is correct here, it's probably compounded at 15% over the last five years. What gives you confidence that'll continue, and what do you see as the key levers to do that? Yeah, so again, if you, given where your, it depends on where your cash position is at any given point in time, right? Because you'll put whatever modest interest rate on cash that you'll want to do, right? Credit, we've tended to get 10%- 11% on our Credit returns, but then $5.4 billion is in PE, so figure that needs to be in the high teens or 20. When you blend that all together, 15% seems reasonable. Whether it turns out to be 12% or 17%, even if we can't figure out a way to close the discount onto our NAV before the asset manager, just being able to compound NAV at a rate that doubles no matter what happens, your share price has got to at least follow even at a poor discount. I think those are reasonable goals, and I think anywhere within reason on those goals over a five-year period, the share price has to move in and of itself before we think about ways to create enterprise value and to get proper value for the manager. I feel pretty good about those. I think we're running a little bit below 15% year to date, but like you said, the five-year has been 15%. Any given quarter can be bumpy, but over the long run, I think we've done a pretty good job compounding NAV. All right. What do you think the sunset clause of the multiple... Oh, sorry, one more thing on that. Share buybacks help too, because it's 15% on a per share basis. Every time you buy a share back, it gets a little bit easier. You can actually miss your goal and make it because you're buying shares back so cheap. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, fair enough. Good point. Again, staying with the shares, what do you think the sunset of the multiple voting shares really means for the Onex team and its shareholders? It's funny, you know, Gerry asks me this question all the time, like, are you worried about May? When May comes, there's no longer going to be MBS. I got to tell you, and maybe I'm wrong, I don't think about it for one second. The way our management team goes to work every day, we try to do things that will create value for the long run and hopefully have those efforts reflected and those results reflected in our share price. I don't think we'll run the business any differently than we are today the day after the MBS goes away. Our job is to create long-term shareholder value, to have a strategy that people understand, and then to have those numbers reflected in our share price. If we do our job and do that, it won't matter whether there's MBS or not. We should be held accountable for our results, and if the results aren't good, I should be the first one that's accountable for that. Hopefully, if the results are really good, our team gets credit for that as well on the outside. All right. Let's talk a little bit about the operating conditions, right? It's obviously been a challenging environment, but there are several paths to monetize investments. How do you describe the current deal environment, and what do you expect, or how do you expect to see that evolve over the next 6- 12 months? Yeah, the M&A environment for PE has definitely picked up, and there's many more ways to achieve realizations today than there were even five years ago. The current market conditions for exits are difficult in a couple of places. One is anything related to tariffs, or people don't know really how to price something right now. It's not that the assets aren't sellable. Buyers and sellers don't know what the real numbers are to debate against. I think there's going to be a pause there, which has taken some DPI, some steam out of the market from an M&A perspective. Strangely, very large enterprise value companies within PE, even the largest sponsors, don't want to put more than $1 billion or so into any given deal, which means you need a functioning IPO market as an alternative to a strategic bid. It's always the best to get a strategic bid to help with those monetizations. The IPO market hasn't been particularly healthy in the last little while in all areas where we invest. That will change over time. For A assets and for things that aren't impacted by tariffs that are service-oriented, the M&A environment's pretty good right now, and the valuations being generated are pretty good right now. It's still not, and the credit markets, importantly, are wide open. There's plenty of credit capacity to do as much M&A as we'd like. Importantly, our customers, the industry's customers, the LPs, really want DPI back. There's a genuine desire for them to get it and for us to be able to give it back to them. There's a couple of macro factors impacting the pace of that DPI now, but it's better today than it was last year. All right. I think you've had successful capital raises at OP and OnCap. Can you give us an update on PE fundraising activity? Yeah, so OnCap completed their fundraise last year. I might have the number a little bit up. I think they raised 70% more third-party capital than the prior fund. They did a really good job in a really tough PE fundraising market. That's really going to help their revenue line to raise that much more third-party capital in our quest to have profitability metrics at all of our businesses. That's been well. They're about halfway through their fund. I don't know when they'll come to market next, but they've done a good job on deployment as well. Our OP fund, which was raised for the OP franchise, has had a really good start to the investment. They're about a third away through their fundraise. I would expect OP to be in the market for OP6 in Q1 or Q2 of next year, given where the pace is right now. I think that fundraising from that perspective, I think, will be good. Their DPI, especially for fund five, which people really care about DPI for fund five before we go to raise fund six, we have things in the pipeline that'll have our DPI stat be just fine in my view, unless something weird happens in the next month or two from a DPI perspective. I think that'll all be good. Credit has, you know, credit on the structured credit side and on, you know, a dynamic product we have called OnTap. Even in our smaller high-yield senior credit, we're really beginning to get traction there to help those businesses get to scale. Look, fundraising is still difficult generally for PE. I don't want to miss things. It's better for credit than PE. We've done pretty well in a tough environment with our recent fundraising successes. All right. Key there, again, when you think about Onex Partners VI and kind of the pathway for that fundraising, it's really improving the DPI. Yes, it's a couple of things. Firstly, OP5 and the ops fund need to have good results, which they do. I think that's probably the most important thing. You don't even get to talk about DPI until you have good investment results. The next thing that LPs want, and there's different numbers that float around, but figure they want to see 0.4 DPI - 0.5 DPI within your most recent fund come back. In that case, the most recent large fund, which should be OP5. I think we're on a path to be there. Lastly, I think Nigel and Toppik have done a really good job of, again, being intellectually honest about where we have a right to compete. When they're going back into market, only having three sectors that they're speaking to that have decade-long, multi-decade-long track records that'll attract capital. I'm hoping it's actually able to attract capital not only in a normal fund construct, but in sidecars or industry-specific type structures where some people for whatever reason just might want to invest in our aerospace deals, but not in business. We hope to be able to find a sleeve or a solution for people like that. I feel optimistic that that team and the job that they've done reorganizing that team and their go-to-market strategy is going to pay dividends in the first half of next year. Excellent. Let's talk a little bit about the Credit platform. I think you mentioned it a couple of times in our discussion here. It seemed particularly strong AUM growth. Can you talk a little bit about what factors are driving that and also what kind of growth investors should expect for the next 12 months - 24 months in terms of AUM? Yeah, something like the credit team has really done a nice job. I'll bifurcate for a minute between what I'll call structured credit and non-structured credit. Structured credit in the way Ronnie has it organized is CLOs, OSCO, which is a fund that's related to that he runs. It's related to CLOs. A new product we have called OnCap really isn't structured credit, but we kind of bundle it there where people like Mercer and Lacera give us money and ask us to allocate it amongst all of our products rather than buying just one product. That business this year, just that business alone, should do north of $60 million of FRE. It's a good business that's scaling, that's becoming less capital intensive. People want to buy the equity in our CLOs, and there's LP demand for the products related to structured credit. I see that continuing to scale. The one thing that could disrupt that business, particularly on the CLO side, is if the M&A environment totally shows up or there's a macro event or something like that. The CLO business is really reliant on, not only reliant, but heavily reliant on a healthy M&A pipeline and loans being created to fuel that pipeline. There are refis and other things you can do, but it's really hard to continue to grow the way we're growing, having another great year in structured credit without a functioning M&A market. Some of the other products that we have, high yield, senior credit, things like that, they're beginning to get to scale. We're conscious that we're negative FRE on those businesses, and we are doing everything we can to try to negotiate deals with people to help them get to scale. Once those businesses get to scale, the earnings growth rate will even take another step function forward. Once they're no longer, let's say they're losing $10 million - $15 million in aggregate, if you can get that to positive $15 million, the operating leverage you get on that delta will really begin to highlight how valuable a business credit really is. We've debated, like, again, we don't get any value for it in our share price, but we've had multiple sophisticated investors come to us and say we'd like to buy 10% or 20% of your credit business, right? I look at it and the valuations are nice, right? Sometimes they even come with assets that they give you to help get your sub, you know, they give you money to put into your subscale business to help them immediately get to scale. That would be really helpful. I look at the growth rate, right, and say, do I, is this the time that you want to sell, you know, a piece of your Credit business to simply prove to our owners, to our shareholders that there's value there? I'm hoping as this year progresses, the shareholders begin to see the value in that Credit FRE better than they are today. If not, there are constructs that we could do to prove it. I would prefer just not to have to sell a piece of a business to prove it. I would rather say, just believe me that we could do that and have it valued. It's kind of almost akin to the secondary market being at 90 and the market valuing our PE assets at 50. Like that ARB shouldn't exist and Credit shouldn't be worth zero. Our whole asset management business, including OnCap, Credit, and OP, should not be worth zero on our balance sheet, particularly when you consider the carry being thrown off on the PE side of the house. In context, right, if I took a very simple approach and I valued it 15x, 20 x your expected year-end run rate of $55, I think in Canadian dollars and the stock price, it's $16.50 - $22. Yeah, so throw that on top of a $170 NAV and today you can buy for whatever it is, $115, $117, whatever it is today. That's the goal, right? The goal is to figure out a way to close that gap. I think the way you close that gap is by being able to attract more third-party capital and have more carry and fee dollars coming in, and to have a strategy to deploy that capital not only in the asset management business, which we'll continue to do and support for sure, but also in other areas where you can create enterprise value where people cannot, you know, in their right minds value that at $0.50 on the dollar today after you do a strategic transaction. By the way, we can use the capital to help grow our asset management business organically as well. I don't see us doing a huge inorganic asset management merger or buy. I think the culture fits and those tend to be hard. I think it'll be better to focus on deploying capital within asset management and areas that are derivatives of asset management where we have a demonstrated right to compete. Excellent. The clock's running down a little bit, but I want to spend some time back on capital allocation. Okay. All right, so you've got a strong balance sheet anchored by about $1.5 billion, I think, in cash. Let's talk about current capital priorities. Yeah, so again, I think the asset management business needs to become less capital intensive. We'll still be highly supportive, but less capital intensive, which means that you need to hold less cash to fund forward commitments than we have in the past. I think share buybacks anywhere near the share price we trade at is going to be a fundamental part of what we do. I think we've bought back $300 million already this year in our own shares through NCIB, which is hard to do to get in size without an SIB. How do we redeploy that $8.5 billion? We have $8.5 billion of net worth and no liabilities. How do we deploy that in a way around areas that we have a right to compete that will be more readily apparent to shareholders that there ought to be a multiple ascribed to that that's reflective of market valuations rather than a portfolio of assets that are hard to value? I think those are the main areas that we focus on. When I think about normal course issuer bid versus SIB, we like both tools, right? We tend to get better pricing on NCIB, but very small amounts because there's rules about upticks and downticks and limits that you can buy every day. Like we proved it last year, we're also willing to, if we can get our shares back in size, pay more than the current market price to be able to get them in. We tried to do that last year. We had a $400 million SIB. I've been told maybe we shouldn't have done it around the Christmas holiday, but that's what we did. We didn't even get the order filled $9 above the current share price. We got $240 million of the $400 million filled. We're going to continue to try to be creative in ways to do that. The job of our management team is to have a strategy that's understandable in a way where we no longer get ascribed a discount to our intrinsic value, which includes both our NAV and our asset manager. That's the job. I'm hoping, hoping, I'm not saying, I'm confident that we can demonstrate why that gap should close and ultimately be eliminated over the next couple of years. All right. Maybe again, in closing, why don't you summarize what you think the primary value creation levers are over the next two to three years? Again, thoughts on closing that gap between that market value and fundamental value. Yeah, it's successful fundraising around our investors. We have an investment-first culture. I think we always will. We have a very good investor base right now. The teams are strong. We're going after the right areas. We're going to see the right opportunities. Continuing to compound that NAV in whatever form the dollars are invested is first and foremost. Being able to attract dollars around those areas and scale and growing scale, by the way, would be second. The manager starts to get reflected with share price. Enterprise value creation and share buybacks, all of those things are the levers that we have to pull. In the meantime, while we are waiting for people to be convinced or not convinced, we'll continue to buy back, to continue to buy back the shares. Excellent. Great conversation. Again, Bobby, I'd like to thank you personally for taking your time to speak with me and investors today. On behalf of Scotiabank Global Banking and Markets, I'd like to thank Onex Corporation for your continued support as well. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. I'm [Chris Topple].