Good afternoon. The next company presentation that we're gonna have for you is Distribution Solutions Group, DSG. This is a specialty distribution business built across a parent company structure in DSG with three different businesses underneath that, which one is a business that was here in Chicago, still is Lawson Products. The other is Gexpro Services, and the final is TestEquity Group. With us today from the company presenting will be the CFO of the parent company, DSG, as well as Lawson Products, Ron Knutson, and then also joining us for the Q&A will be Brett Scarborough. Brett Scarborough is here from the office of the CEO and chairman, which is Brian King. Brett works with the team handling capital allocation, decision-making across the three businesses. So with that, I'll turn it over to Ron. Ron? Great. Thanks. Thanks, Steven, and great to be with everybody this afternoon, so I'm gonna go through a little bit, a little bit of history on DSG. I'm sure some of you are fairly familiar with the story. Others may be new to it. DSG is a specialty distribution company really formed out of the strategic combination of Lawson Products, Gexpro Services, which was previously owned 100% by LKCM, as well as TestEquity Group. And you can see here that we are about $1.8 billion in total revenues with a EBITDA margin profile on a trailing twelve basis, so a little bit north of 9%. The most recent quarter, which I'll talk about here in a couple of minutes, Q2, we ended that at about 10.3%. When we think about DSG and some commonalities across all of the three verticals that we operate, we are highly embedded into our customers. We are a high touch, high service model. We place, for example, within a couple of our business verticals, bins and cabinets within our customers' locations, and so we gain real estate inside of their operations, which allows us to remain very sticky with our customers. We service about 180,000 customers across the entire platform. And we'll talk about some of the strategic initiatives going on within each of the three verticals, as well as some of the M&A activities that we've completed since we brought DSG together a little over two years ago. So we like to describe the company as a power of three, really being able to service really all aspects of operations within many of our customers' facilities. And so and we'll talk a little bit about, as we work through this, some of the operating aspects of each of the three verticals. But Lawson Products, a 72-year-old organization, provides VMI services, Vendor Managed Inventory services, to their 70,000 customers, and providing, selling really Class C parts, consumable MRO products. Once we develop that relationship with the customer, the customer effectively outsources a lot of that activity directly into Lawson. The other piece I would say, relative to the power of three, is that we also provide OEM solutions through Gexpro Services and also through the TestEquity Group. We can walk into a certain facility and identify specifically where they could potentially need our services, whether or not it's MRO products, whether or not it's supporting an OEM production cycle, or whether or not it's supporting industrial technology group, which is primarily in the TestEquity Group. As we think about the value that DSG provides to its customers, as I mentioned before, we are very well embedded into our customers. We have on the Gexpro Services side, longer term relationships there. We have strategic accounts relationships on the Lawson Products side. We have a pretty high revenue retention north of 92%. And so when we think about the products and the services that we offer to our customers, normally, once we're in, in particular with the larger customers, those customers stick with us for a very long period of time. We serve over 10 end industries on the Lawson Products side. You probably can't name an end market that Lawson doesn't sell into. With eighty thousand customers, you know, whether or not it's government, whether or not it's into the production, whether or not it's into distribution, whether or not it's local, state, and township support facilities, we sell into pretty much every end market. I'll talk a little bit more about Gexpro Services and TestEquity in a couple of minutes, but they have, you know, very discrete markets that they service into as well. We have over a hundred and eighty thousand customers. It's really one of the, you know, I think great attributes of DSG is that our end markets are very well diversified as our end customers are as well. From an overall adjusted EBITDA standpoint, again, I mentioned earlier, trailing twelve, a little bit north of 9%. We hit 10.3% in the Q2. I'll show a slide here in a minute that'll show the five-quarter trend on that. We have put out in our investor day that we held last September, overall, five-year targets of getting going from about $2 billion up to about $3.3 billion in revenues, and a return profile of about 13.5% on that $3.3 billion, which gets us up to about $450 million of EBITDA versus the call it $180 million that we're at today. I would say that our overall growth strategy is dual pronged. We have quite a few initiatives taking place within each of the three verticals to drive organic sales. Albeit, you know, I think all three of the verticals were up against some pretty tough comps from a year ago. So we have seen that flatten out a little bit over the last couple of quarters. And since we brought the three companies together, we've made nine acquisitions and have deployed over $400 million in purchase price through those acquisitions, while at the same time delevering the company from 3.6 times when we brought the companies together to this most recent quarter, we were at about 3.2. As you can see here, I've touched on this a little bit already, just the end markets that DSG serves. This is on a combined basis, a hundred and eighty thousand customers, really sticky relationships. You'll see, electronic assembly, industrial, aerospace and defense, transportation, renewables, which is primarily on the wind side, and then technology, government, military. So again, a really well-diversified end customer base and a well-diversified end market space that we sell into as well. As we think about, you know, where DSG is positioned overall from what's happening from a macroeconomic standpoint, I would really point to probably three factors. One is, the continual struggle that most companies are seeing from a labor shortage standpoint. I think that puts DSG in a great position moving forward. A lot of the solutions that we're providing are providing the services along with the products. We, you know, we love our products. In fact, at Lawson, we sell about 40% of our sales are private label product, highly engineered products, but really what our end customers are paying us for is the service that we provide to that end customer, and I think that as that labor continues to be tighter and tighter, both at the Gexpro Services side and on the Lawson side, it places us in a really good position to be able to have our customers or prospective customers effectively outsource a lot of that labor directly to DSG. The other piece I would point to, which I think is a long-term tailwind for us, is just the overall, you know, electronification of almost everything that's happening today. So, I would say the TestEquity Group probably is in the best position to take advantage of that. As we think about all of the production, everything that it seems like that gets purchased today has some type of electronic component involved in it. The TestEquity Group not only sells equipment that helps test, they sell oscilloscopes, which basically test wattage, voltage, noise interference, and so forth to their end customers, which makes up about 20% of their sales, but also the products that support the electronic technology or the technology industry on the production side. So think of solder, think of adhesives, tapes, you can think about safety equipment, tweezers, magnifying glasses, everything that's being produced in the electronification world needs support from products such as that the TestEquity Group offers. And then lastly, I would point to some of the onshoring activities. Again, I think that places DSG in a great position. About 85% of our overall sales are within North America. We can support pretty much any of our customers anywhere in the world, but also on the U.S. and Canadian front and Mexico, with Hisco, we've got a tremendous footprint with our sales reps and our ability to service those customers in North America. Just really quickly, I think I've touched on some of this, on an individual company standpoint, but just let me take a minute or so maybe on each individual company. Lawson Products, MRO-focused. You know, if you think about MRO market, it's an $80 billion-$200 billion dollar market. We believe that we serve approximately in the $20 billion space of that, because we don't carry all the products that qualify into the MRO space. 72-year-old organization, 850 sales reps, vendor-managed inventory process. Our sales reps show up at the customers' every week to 10 days. They put product away, they refill the bins on behalf of the customer, really so that when a mechanic reaches into the bin, that product is already there. So if they're looking for a hydraulic fitting, for example, or a particular nuts or bolts, we don't slow the mechanic down, and we allow our customers to keep their production cycle up and running, or we allow them to put their fleet, you know, back on the road again. End markets here, again, on the Lawson side, we sell seventy thousand customers. Pretty much, any end market you can name, we probably have customers in that market. On the Gexpro Services side, an organization that really came out of GE Supply, was within the Rexel family of businesses, acquired by LKCM in February of 2020, and then combined into DSG, when we rolled the three entities together, back in April of 2022. So, Gexpro Services provides supply chain solutions to their end customers, again, within the OEM space. So they are selling and providing Class C parts into the production environment. Unlike Lawson Products, which it sells into the MRO space, Gexpro Services will sell directly into the production environment. So where Lawson may be selling a bag of 50 or 100 washers, Gexpro Services can be selling bags of 1000. So they will provide and handle the entire supply chain. Our customer provides us the spec that they need a particular Class C product manufactured to. We'll go out, we'll find a manufacturer, we'll carry the inventory, we'll put it in the customer's location in order to meet all of their production needs on really on a just-in-time basis. We've got tremendous insight into our customer's needs in terms of that production cycle, so we make sure that production line is up and running, and many of our customers look at this from an overall value perspective to them. From an OEM perspective, Class C parts might make up 70% of the individual units that may go into the production environment, but may only be 5% or 8% of the cost, so our customers basically hand that entire process over to Gexpro Services and outsource that entire process to us. They'll focus on those items that are 95% of the cost, and they let us manage those items that represent 5% of the cost of production. And then on the Industrial Technology side, which is really TestEquity Group, a combination of what we call legacy TestEquity plus Hisco, which was an acquisition that we made in June of 2023. Again, selling oscilloscopes, which represents about 20% of their overall business, and then also the electronic or the production type of supplies that are necessary in order to fulfill you know what our customers need from a production in the industrial technology production space. So you know solder, tweezers, magnifying glasses, safety equipment, those types of items. And that represents about 80% of our overall business. So we are in the process of fully integrating the Hisco acquisition, which was about a year ago, into the TestEquity Group. So we are—it's a full integration around ERP, around our sales force, around SKU rationalization, and then also, you know, really helping our overall combining customers on some additional SKU overlap as well. So from an overall free cash flow perspective, you know, we define that as really our Reg G EBITDA, you know, minus working capital, minus CapEx, and our goal there is a 100% conversion rate. We've been able to achieve that goal over the last trailing twelve. We have, you know, really been able to. We'll talk about acquisitions here in a minute, really been able to fund our acquisitions through free cash flows created through the entity, as well as our expanded credit facility. We have most recently upped our overall credit facility. When we brought DSG together, we had a $500 million credit facility. A year ago, we bumped that up to about $800 million, and just about a week or ten days ago, we added another $250 million on top of that, and then we utilized a portion of that for the acquisition of Source Atlantic, which we announced a week and a half ago. Our CapEx, you know, one of the reasons we really like the platform is the free cash flow that we create. Our CapEx typically runs at less than 1% of our overall sales, and our working capital, if you look across the entity, runs at about 23% of sales. So on the M&A strategy, as I mentioned, over the last two years, we've made nine acquisitions, about $400 million of deployed capital. We have a separate M&A team consisting of three individuals that really support all three of the business units. And then we also have tremendous support within the LKCM team, identifying and looking for opportunities for acquisitions that not only fit within one of the three verticals, but also adds value into the overall DSG platform. And maybe a really good example of that is the Hisco acquisition that we made a year ago. You know, we really viewed that as there was tremendous opportunity there around combining that company with the legacy TestEquity business. However, you know, a sizable piece of their business was-- is down in Mexico as well, and you know, one example is that Lawson today does really no business in Mexico. So we're able to take advantage of the infrastructure that Hisco has in Mexico. We are in the process of recruiting some sales reps on the Lawson side. So I think that's a really good example of how when we look at acquisitions, you know, they certainly have to fit within one of the three verticals, but we're also looking for overall strength in terms of what it adds to the entire DSG platform. So on the overall financial highlights, I mentioned on Q2 really strong quarter for us. We ended the quarter at about 10.3% of sales. You'll see that we sequentially drove about $9 million of additional EBITDA. About $1.1 million of that was from acquisitions that we made in the really in the Q1 and in the middle of the Q2. So the majority of that overall margin profile was driven from an organic standpoint. I would say that typically we, you know, seasonality does play in for DSG. Typically, Q4 and Q1 are typically our weakest quarters just given the fewer selling days, in particular in the Q4. So but we've seen some nice margin expansion here. You'll see Q4 and Q1, we were seeing some headwinds in some of our end markets, and I would say in more of our profitable end markets within some of our units. But as we look at most of those verticals or most of those end markets that were causing some headwinds in late 2023, those are on a positive trend as we look at the monthly and quarterly trend for Q1 and for Q2. So I touched on this briefly. From an overall leverage and liquidity standpoint, when we brought the three companies together, 3.6 leverage, we came down to about 3.2, along with deploying quite a bit of capital on the acquisitions that we've made. Today, we sit with about $280 million of availability. The $210 that's on here was as of the end of the Q2. Today, it's more around $280, given the additional financing that we put together a week or so ago, minus what the acquisition that we just announced and that we closed on a week or ten days ago, being Source Atlantic. So we have, you know, we feel like we're in a great position from an available firepower standpoint. You know, our ability to generate free cash flow, that plus what we have established through our credit facility and our syndication of our bank group provides us in a really good position to be able to continue on the M&A strategy. So I think we have about ten minutes left. I know I burned through that pretty quickly. Certainly open to any questions or diving into any details that somebody might want to go into? You know, as a group, what's the expectation for revenue growth? So in our investor deck that we put together last September, getting us from about $2 billion up to about $3.3 billion, about half of that growth is we put forward into our M&A pipeline, and the other half being organic growth. So historically, if you look back at these companies, they are, you know, call it GDP, maybe GDP plus a little bit. And so and we have many initiatives taking place within each of the three operating companies that our goal is to be GDP plus a point or two? How is the sales force going to involve? S o a big undertaking at Lawson Products. So we have about 850 sales reps today, field sales reps today. As many of you may be aware, we took on a process, kicked it off probably about a year ago, around really optimizing our sales force and our sales territory. Our goal over the next couple of years is to basically double our ability or double the sales reps' productivity. I'd say that we're probably still fairly early in that process. You know, some initiatives that we've undertaken, one is we've taken some of the smaller, and I would say, less profitable customers and moved them over to our inside sales team. If you look back a year ago, we had four or five an inside sales team of four or five individuals. Today, we sit with about 25 individuals. So that process has gone pretty smooth. We are also looking to really make our sales territories more dense in terms of trying to help our sales reps become more productive, spend less windshield time driving from customer to customer, and even driving past each other, and making sure that their market that they're serving is a lot tighter. We recently put in a CRM tool, just went live in April of this year. So that's starting to give us, you know, the early metrics around how often are our sales reps going to customers, and what does that success rate look like in terms of how many times does that result in an order? Historically, the only visibility that we had, believe it or not, with over 900 sales reps, was whenever we placed an order, we knew that the sales rep was out, you know, active in the marketplace. So we now have the ability to, and again, it's really all, you know, meant to help them become, you know, more productive, and for them, make more money, right? Because their commission rate gets tied directly into their sales volume. So, you know, we expected some disruption, you know, going through this process. We saw some of that in, you know, mid-2023. I think for the most part, we're behind that. Looking forward, it's tools like CRM, you know, you know, territory optimization, where we think can add a ton of benefit going forward. In our most profitable sales, really, and it's the most profitable for our sales reps as well, is to be able to allow our sales reps or help our sales reps, you know, create more volume. May I ask for more? How did you start integrating them? I t was. So we had a process in place. So we made that acquisition in June of 2023. We did have an earn-out that was a pretty short time frame. I think it was the measurement period was the end of October of last year. So really, a lot of the efforts around that started early here in late 2023, early 2024. So, it's really has gone better than even how we underwrote the business in terms of us tracking not only opportunities around the sales side, some gross margin expansion, as well as some costs. So, it continues to move really, really nicely. Yes, sir? Can you talk about how you're maintaining this type of business with special CapEx, because what makes the business so capital intensive? F rom a CapEx standpoint? Yep. So I mentioned earlier that our overall CapEx is about 1% of our sales. It's just, you know, when you look at this space on the distribution side, I mean, typically, distributors generally don't require a ton of CapEx, you know, going back into the business, you know, unless there's some type of brick-and-mortar expansion. We, you know, we feel like we have sufficient capacity right now within our distribution network to not have to deploy a bunch of capital, you know, back into the business. So, you know, for the most part, it's maintenance CapEx, you know, and then technology investments that we're making as well. Yep. Can you explain the... Sure, and Brett's probably just as well to be able to answer that, too, but let me, I'll take a stab at it, so LKCM started acquiring shares of Lawson when Lawson was a standalone public company back in two thousand and twelve or two thousand and thirteen. In the open market, LKCM had acquired about 30% of the shares of Lawson. The founding family of Lawson Products exited their last 20% in January of two thousand and nineteen, and LKCM stepped in and acquired that 20%. So at that point, LKCM owned about 50% of the shares. When we did the merger with Gexpro Services and TestEquity, given that Lawson was the legal entity, we, we issued more Lawson shares, or now DSGR shares, to LKCM in exchange for them contributing the two companies into the DSG platform. So at that point, they went from about 50%.