All right. Thank you guys for joining our East Coast IDEAS Conference. I'm Philip Cooper with Three Part Advisors. Our next presentation comes from Ascent Industries, traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol ACNT. Presenting for the company today is Bryan Kitchen, President and CEO. Great. Thanks a lot. Okay, if I go too fast, just slow me down. I've been mainlining coffee all day long. Just fair warning. Yeah, Bryan Kitchen, President and CEO of Ascent Industries. For those of you not familiar with Ascent, we've been in business for about 75 years. We started off our journey as a specialty chemical manufacturer here in the U.S. About 20 years into that journey, a decision was taken to stitch on some stainless steel related assets. Up until about, well, last year, we had been operating two different segments for many, many decades. Just to start off, Ryan Kavalauskas and I, Ryan's our CFO. He and I have been working together at several different companies for about the past 10 years. Prior to joining Ascent, we were both working for a company called Clearon, another small specialty chemical manufacturer here in the United States in Charleston, West Virginia. The reason why I bring that up, the reason why it's important is just for context. When we joined the company, as CEO and CFO at Clearon, we were losing about $8 million a year of adjusted EBITDA. We were on the verge of bankruptcy on a couple of occasions, breaking covenants left and right. That's where cash management became really near and dear to our heart. Over the four and a half year journey with Clearon, we had a transaction where we sold to a strategic. At the time we sold the company, we turned it around, and we were doing about $36 million of adjusted EBITDA on a trailing 12 basis. A pretty good turnaround in a pretty short period of time, and a lot of good lessons learned through that experience, together with Ryan and I. Lessons that we always said, "Well, if we have the opportunity to do this again, what are some of the things that we would do differently?" We're thankful for the opportunity to apply those learnings here, at Ascent. I joined the company back in Q4 of 2023 with the mandate at that time of building up and building out our specialty chemicals segment. About three or four months into that journey, our chairman called and said, "Just kidding. Can you please take over the whole company?" I've been President and CEO of the company now, for about two and a half years. Ryan joined shortly after I joined. It's been fun. It's not just Ryan and I, we've put together a really great management team. In fact, our management team that exists today is largely a function of us putting the band back together. We reached back out into our network. A lot of the people that were with us before at the prior turnaround, we've pulled back in to do it all over and to do it better with us here, at Ascent. That's really one of the reasons why we've made just such a material amount of progress in a really short period of time. The first year, 2024, was all about stabilization and fixing the foundation, taking cost out. Last year, 2025, was all about portfolio optimization. We've executed that. We are now a 100% pure play specialty chemicals business, so no stainless steel distractions. Laser focused in on driving profitable growth in the specialty chemicals industry here in the U.S. Last year, roughly $75 million top line. We have three manufacturing sites domestically in the U.S., one in Tennessee, one site in South Carolina, one site in Virginia, roughly 170 customers and roughly 200 employees that work alongside of us at Ascent. Another fast fact from an Ascent standpoint, roughly 95% of our raw materials that we use to manufacture our products are sourced domestically here, in the United States. It's important, because as we think, and we talked a lot over the past year about tariffs and the impact of tariffs and how it was creating a lot of chaos, for us, it was really more good news than bad news. In fact, we were pretty well insulated from all of the tariff insanity, but it was also a tailwind for us because as many companies were looking to localize their supply chains here in the United States, it presented a lot of new great growth opportunities for us to pursue. Just a couple of highlights. We've done a lot in a relatively short period of time. Pretty significant improvement in gross profit. Pretty significant improvement in adjusted EBITDA. Generated about $54 million of cash from the sale of the stainless steel related assets. We got out of a lease agreement last year that is translating to a $2.1 million cash improvement this year. Look, we've been very aggressive in buying back our own shares. Since January 1st, 2025 through Q1 of this year, we've bought back roughly 11% of the outstanding shares of our company. In the fourth quarter of last year, we've been working really hard at driving organic growth, and I'll talk a little bit more later why that's so important for us. We had a very large programmatic win that we announced in the fourth quarter of 2025, that's now at full run rate capacity here, at the end of Q1 in 2026. We're demonstrating that not only can we fix the foundation, not only can we strip out cost, but we're demonstrating that we can drive organic growth profitably. A little bit more about who we are, what we do, and how we operate. Look, we deliver tailored specialty chemical solutions that support a wide array of different markets and different applications. We're in things like personal care, we're in agriculture, paints and coatings, pulp and paper, oil and gas, water treatment, and the list goes on and on. What I would say from a focus perspective, when we came in a couple of years ago, we were participating in about 15 different markets, not with any real purpose. What we've tried to do over the past couple of years is really narrow that focus into oil and gas, CASE, which is think of coatings, and infrastructure as well. Because of that, we're beginning to drive some really good focused growth momentum across the portfolio. We love to come alongside of our customers and support them in the moments that matter most for them. In some cases, our customers need product development support. In other instances, they just need a reliable manufacturing partner. We come alongside of them and kind of meet them where they are in their process. Just a couple of examples on how we do that. This particular example, this was one of our first oil and gas wins that we had in 2025, or 2024, rather. Customer called us literally on a Good Friday and said, "We have a problem. We need some help." It was not an existing customer of ours. It was a prospect that we had been calling on, and we had gotten the opportunity to come alongside of them and help them. Bottom line, they had a technical challenge, along with some supply chain disruptions that they were faced with. Over the course of a few days, we had developed lab samples. We sent them those samples. Within a week, they qualified them in the lab. Within a month, they qualified that product in their field. It met all of the performance requirements that they had. Because we were able to operate at our customer's speed, and we were able to meet their technical requirements, we were awarded with $7 million of net new business at really compelling EBITDA margins and do it really, really quickly. Typically, in the specialty chemical industry, just for context, the sales cycle can be really long, and that's the good news, bad news. The bad news is it can be really long. The good news is, once you're in, it can be really sticky, good business for a relatively long period of time. We're very blessed and fortunate. We've been growing with this customer ever since that first engagement, but that's a really good reference point for a product that we have developed to support a customer-specific challenge. One more example. Last year, we were approached by a very large multinational who had another challenge set that they were dealing with, and they had a basket of products, a portfolio of products. They had 15 different products that they needed manufactured. We took a look at that, within a six-month period of time, and with countless resources, we were able to scale up that business, that resulted in a $10 million piece of net new business for Ascent. For some companies, a $10 million win is pretty small, right? But for Ascent, a $75 million company, that win is material. That business was won in the fourth quarter. We got to full run rates towards the tail end of Q1, and we're now in the process of optimizing that business to glean out the appropriate gross margin profile. We've got a whole slate of different capabilities, this is one of the things that makes us unique. Just going back in history a little bit, back in 2023, in our business model, roughly 90% of our sales were custom manufacturing. What that means is customers would call us and they would say, "We have a product that we would like to make in your assets." We can do that, and we've done that for a number of years. The other side of the equation would be for product sales. That's where we would develop a customer-specific solution to meet their needs. What we like to say is we can meet their customers where they are, in how and which, and where they choose to meet us. Whether that's product manufacturing, whether that's custom manufacturing, buy, build, operate, two of our five manufacturing plants are purpose-built for one product, one customer. Again, a wide range of how we can meet our customers in the moments that matter most for them. Our asset base is capable of supporting significant growth with very little capital reinvestment. Today, our utilization, this is the bad news, good news part of the conversation, right? The bad news is we're grossly underutilized. The good news is, from an investor standpoint, we're grossly underutilized. There's a lot more headspace for growth inside of the assets that we have today without significant CapEx required to unleash that. You can see here on the chart, over the past four years, we've averaged around a million and a half bucks or so per year. That's not because we're running our plants with duct tape and popsicle sticks. That's all that's required to maintain safe, reliable operations based on the product mix that we manufacture today. What we've been working on since 2023 is filling our plants with higher margin business that's more predictable, more ratable, more reliable. 2023, like I mentioned a minute ago, roughly 10% of our sales were product sales. 90% was custom manufacturing. 2024, we moved that needle significantly. Roughly 27% of our sales were product sales, 73% custom manufacturing. You can see last year, we shook out roughly 70/30. We continue to shift our mix intentionally towards Product sales, because generally with products, they're more ratable, they're more predictable, and generally more margin accretive because you're solving a customer problem versus renting out capacity, if that makes sense. You can see from a margin profile standpoint, we've driven some pretty good gross margin improvement as well as material margin improvement since 2023. Now, let me be clear, there's no ticker tape parade for 23% margins. No one's getting excited over that. Point being, we are driving stepwise change in the profitability profile of our business, and we'll touch on a little bit later where we're taking the company and how we're going to get there. With the gross underutilization that we have inside of our existing asset base, obviously organic growth becomes incredibly important. We've got an incredible team in place, from marketing, sales, R&D, that are all rallied around driving profitable growth for our company. Last year, and I'm not going to read all of this off, but we had roughly 100 different projects go through our selling project pipeline. The sales cycle was roughly three months. Roughly three months. We had a conversion rate that was slightly above industry average at 18%. We're not satisfied with that. We're continuing to drive improvements there, but that just gives you a little bit of context around how long it takes to monetize these selling project opportunities, how successful we have been, at least last year, in converting those opportunities into net new realized business. From a business model standpoint, again, on a 2025 basis, roughly a third of our pipeline was related to product sales. Two-thirds was related to contract manufacturing. You can see, we're growing with our existing customer base. We're expanding our share of wallet, which is incredibly important, and we're going to continue to drive that. We're also demonstrating that we can grow with new customers that we've been working with, and trying to bring into the fold over the past couple of years. The bottom chart there just gives you kind of an evolution of our overall selling project pipeline that we've had quarter by quarter. It continues to grow, not just in scale, but I would say it's growing in terms of the quality of the overall pipeline. Nothing makes its way into our selling project pipeline unless we believe that we have the capabilities to manufacture that product or perhaps we've done it before. What's not baked into pipeline are just crazy ideas where you have a salesperson that says, "I want to plug a really big number into a spreadsheet because it makes me sleep better at night." We don't have that here at Ascent. From a capital allocation standpoint, at the close of Q1, we had roughly $39.2 million worth of cash, inclusive of some proceeds that we have being freed up from escrow. We've got roughly $30 million worth of borrowing capacity, but we have zero debt. As I mentioned earlier, we've been very disciplined in how we allocate capital. We bought back roughly 11% of our shares, going back from Q1 of 2025 through Q1 of 2026. Why? Because we believe that our stock is undervalued versus where we believe we're taking the company moving forward. From a capital allocation standpoint, we're going to continue to focus on opportunities to invest internally inside of our existing asset base, where we have a really compelling return on invested capital. We believe that generally speaking, when you're investing inside of the current fence line, your return on investment should be higher and your risk profile should be lower. We're constantly challenging the team to bring us really good quality projects that we can support and fund. We've already talked about repurchases, then, from an M&A perspective, we've actually been active in M&A. We just announced back early May, I believe it was May 4th, that we closed our first acquisition. I'll touch on that here a little bit more in the presentation. I would say from an M&A standpoint, again, cash management has become very near and dear to, or has been very near and dear to our heart. One of the commitments that we've made to ourselves from a management team perspective is we're going to start small. We're going to demonstrate that we can extract the contemplated growth synergies, we're going to extract the contemplated cost synergies before we go too far too fast with acquisitions. Again, we have so much runway for growth inside of what we already have. The last thing that we want to do is go out and acquire something that compounds the current utilization problem statement that we have today, if that makes sense. The first acquisition that we announced was on May 4th. It was a company or companies called Midwest Graphic Sales, and they make barrier coatings. Like this bag illustrates here, think about dog food bags or golf ball sleeves. Any number of high-value packaging applications. Pretty cool story. I had never heard of Midwest until about nine months ago, when our sales organization came into the office. They were really excited one day, they said, "We got a new customer." I said, "That's great. Who is that?" Did a little bit of Google search. Nothing appeared on Google. Like, is this company real or are they not real? Long story short, Midwest has been a 40-year-old family-owned company. Gentleman started the company. Right now, roughly four of the kids are working inside of the company. It's been a small but really successful coating business for packaging applications. Purchase price, roughly $14 million, with about $1 million held back for escrow. One of the reasons why we liked Midwest is we saw an opportunity to do a couple of things. Number one, I've already described that we have an enormous amount of excess capacity in our existing asset base. This is a great opportunity to acquire a product line or product lines that we can then integrate into our existing manufacturing infrastructure without buying additional capacity. That plan is in place, we're executing against that. The other thing that we saw that we liked a lot was around commercial expansion. Relatively small company. Last year, they did about $10.8 million of top-line sales. As we were going through the diligence process and looking at the overall selling project pipeline, we saw a couple of really big opportunities that got us very excited. We got even more excited when we learned more about the technology that's been developed and, not just developed, but also commercialized on a really small scale. We're leaning in on some of the new growth opportunities very hard with Midwest. That's exciting. Certainly, along with this, there's also some cost synergy opportunities that the team is efforting. I would say, again, the most exciting thing about this transaction, it stands on its own merits. This was not underwritten by ridiculous growth synergy estimates or cost synergy estimates. It stands on its own merits by itself, but it has incredible growth runway, especially on the backing of a larger multi-site specialty chemical manufacturing company like Ascent. A little bit more context of who they are, what they do. Think like paper plates, so coatings for paper plates, more specifically compostable coatings for paper plates. That's going to become increasingly important as the regulations begin to change in states like California, who are driving and mandating fully compostable systems. Beverage packaging, printed materials, playing cards. Fast fact: Midwest makes the only coating that is approved for the World Series of Poker. That's interesting. A lot of cool value-add niche applications. Again, I described to you our sales process, whether it's oil field or paints and coatings, what we really like to do is not sell off of a line card and say, "Here are the 150 products I have. Which one would you like to buy?" What we really want to do is come alongside of customers, understand their technical challenges, and then innovate technical solutions to meet their specific needs. When you do that makes that relationship more sticky, and generally, the volumes are more ratable and more predictable and generally a little bit more margin accretive. The thing that we liked is that's Midwest model, right? That's what they had been developing over the past 40 years, which is why when you look at the top five customers that they have, they've been working with them for over 30 years. It's a great business model. Financial overview. I mentioned earlier top line last year was $10.8 million. Roughly $2 million of adjusted EBITDA, really healthy adjusted EBITDA margins already. We've already covered the transaction price. Again, this thing was not underpinned or underwritten by aggressive synergy estimates or anything like that. It's based on the existing earnings quality of the business. Demonstrated really strong margin profile and a durable embedded business model. It's very complementary to what we have. The other thing that gets us excited is all of these customers that are buying these coatings, they're also buying other related ingredients, things like defoamers and things like waxes, other things that Ascent already manufactures today. There's a really nice complementary cross-selling opportunity that we can pursue. The last thing I'll mention is because this was passive deal flow, there were no bankers involved, and we spent less than $20 thousand on outside resources, right? We did the quality of earnings, but we didn't have any outside legal counsel, no banker fees. Really pleased with how our team has rallied around this opportunity and got the transaction over the finish line. Even more exciting about the path forward and the growth that we can unleash with Midwest. A great group of folks there. Path forward. Durable earnings growth. That's really the name of the game. Take a step back. If you look at our existing asset base, we have three manufacturing assets. We should be capable of punching towards that $120 million-$130 million worth of revenue inside of the existing asset base. Last year, we were roughly $75 million, we have an opportunity to drive significant growth inside of the assets that we already have today without significant reinvestment. Our gross margin profile when we get to that $120 million-$130 million range should be in that 30%-35% gross margin profile. I don't need to go in for a drug test. If you look at our peers out there in the industry, you'll find that they're delivering gross margins kind of in that same range. Again, when we get to that $120 million-$130 million, our SG&A should be about 15% of revenue. We're not at 15% of revenue today. We have to grow into our SG&A. We've made a lot of investments, purposeful investments over the past two years to help us build up and build out our sales growth engine, and it's now, again, beginning to build that momentum. We're excited about the path forward. Again, SG&A 15%, and then the flow-through to adjusted EBITDA will be in that kind of 15%-20% adjusted EBITDA range. That's how you should think about what we're capable of doing organically inside of the existing asset base that we have today. Why invest in Ascent? I'm super excited. I've invested heavily in the company. I'm a little biased, but we do have a great team. Again, a lot of the folks on the management team have been with us in other similar turnarounds. Quite frankly, my intern from 100 years ago at Dow Chemical has now joined the team. We've just stitched together a really great team, hard-charging, motivated, violently aligned is what we like to say, because what we're doing is not easy. It's really all about the people. We have stabilized the company. We are absolutely growth ready, where we demonstrated to ourselves that we can go out and win at all scales, small customers, medium-sized customers, and more recently, a really large multinational that we're very excited about all three of those different tiers. We have the growth capacity in place. Again, grossly underutilized today, roughly 45% utilized, so plenty of headspace for growth. We've got near-term upside, and we've got a really strong balance sheet. A really strong balance sheet with no motivation to go out and do anything stupid with the cash. We've demonstrated that we're committed to buying back our own shares. We're believers in where we're taking the company. We're going to continue to be smart from an M&A standpoint. We believe that we're undervalued, and we know that we're undercovered. We've got the right people. We've done it before together, and we're here to have a little bit of fun and create some real compelling earnings for shareholders. With that, I'm happy to take any questions that you might have. Yeah. What exactly do you do? You're sort of a chemical company, you're also a sort of compound. You mix things up in. Help me understand. Hey, I've got an expertise in this. Yeah, no, that's a great question. The question was, what in the world do you guys actually do, right? It's a fair question because that was the same question that I had when I did diligence on the company before I joined. I don't understand. The business model at the time was just to be really a toll manufacturer. We would come alongside of customers that just needed excess capacity, really, or specialized capacity. We sold a little bit of products on the side. What we're shifting the company towards is really being that application science-driven company that can come alongside of customers in the oil field or in the coding space, where we can solve their technical problems. We can make a better product with better performance to meet their needs. That's who we're becoming. That's not code for we're running away from contract manufacturing, that's still going to have a place inside of Ascent moving forward based on some of our specialized assets. We are manufacturing value-add chemistries that can help our customers solve their most difficult technical challenges. Does it have to be on sort of off-the-shelf ingredients, I'm assuming, and it's just a formulation? Oh, no. We're actually doing reaction-based chemistry. We range from super complex chemistry where you have multi-step reactions. In some instances, it takes 36 hours to manufacture some of our products, all the way to it can take an hour to manufacture some of the products that we're making today. It really depends on the specific market, more specifically, the application and the product itself. Your application chemists, they sort of are driving. Yeah, our technical sales folks are really at the core of engaging with customers to hear from their R&D team and their procurement organization, what are the strategic challenges that they're having? What support do they need? Then they bring that back and work with our R&D organization to hypothesize and develop solutions and bring that back to the customer. It's really a collaborative effort, right? Because it's not just us going back and working in a dark, smoky room somewhere and say, "Ha ha, I've got the Holy Grail." It's really working hand in hand with customers. They work with you because they're way too small for Dow or anybody else? It's another great question. Why do they work with us? Where we have found a lot of growth runway is in the small to mid-size customers that might be buying surfactants from one of our larger peers. Yes. What they're not able to get, like a Stepan maybe as an example. What they're not able to get from them in some instances is a technical partnership. We manufacture, our process is a batch manufacturing process. Our competitors, like a Stepan, they're operating a continuous manufacturing process. They're making a number of different products, but it's really about the volume that they can punch through those plants and getting the absolute lowest unit cost. Whereas for us, we have reactors that are 500 gal all the way up to 8,000 gal. We can develop customized solutions for customer-specific problems and then bring those, you could commercialize those in any scale that the customer needs. It's a real point of differentiation. The other thing that we're able to do is we can operate at the speed of our customers' needs. From a resource allocation standpoint, and we demonstrate this every single week, when there is an articulated customer need where we think that we can help them, we allocate the resources and we go. Now, that doesn't mean that we're overstaffed, but from a prioritization and a cross-functional alignment standpoint, we have the rhythm. If you and the customer develop a really cool product Whose product is it? Yeah. Generally speaking, it's RIP. Because we're developing that, right? Okay. We're listening to their needs, and we're bringing them a solution set to solve those needs. That goes into your product sales. Can you sell that product to other people? Sure. Okay. Thank you. Yep. Getting close. Sure. A question about your goals for your capital structure, let's say, three years from now or if you have a different timeline. You spent capital to make a major buyback of stock. Correct. You've said that you, it's kind of obvious you need acquisitions to improve the ROIC of your existing assets. You have cash now and no debt. That's correct. In, let's say, three years from now, what's your capital structure look like? Look, it depends on how far we go with acquisitions. What I would say, we don't have to do M&A to build out an incredibly successful company with what we have today. When and where we can find an accretive transaction, we'll go for it, which is exactly what we did with Midwest. Will there be a point in time where we take on debt or raise capital? Sure, absolutely. Now I don't see that happening in the next 12 months. You mentioned your experience at Clearon. Yeah. Turned it around. Yeah. Now you're great at estimating what the backlog is going on. What's your secret recipe? Why the prior management team failed, and you're not working with what's special about your process, philosophy, management style? Yeah. What's the secret sauce? For me, it's all about our people, right? It's all about our employees. When we rolled into Clearon, there were a lot of learnings to that process, and one of the learnings that I walked away with was how critically important it is to put the right team in place right out of the gate. In some instances, we got it right, in other instances, we didn't. As Ryan and I walked into Ascent, we made the necessary changes, and we did it promptly, and we were able to identify, attract, recruit incredible talent that in many cases we've worked with before. We were able to give them the keys and tell them to go do what they do best and to let us know how we can help them. It's all about the people. Do we have well-cared-for and maintained assets? Absolutely, we do, right? At the core of all of it, you have to have great people to operate the plant. You have to have great people to manage your regulatory portfolio. You have to have great people to go out and sell the actual value of the products that you're making and your customers' products and processes. Across every single function, it's all about the people. Identify, attract, recruit, develop, and retain. Those five things are etched in my backside. That's a good place to stop. Okay, great.