All right, thanks everybody for joining us. I appreciate you taking the time today. My name is Ryan Fenske. I'm the high-yield services analyst here at B of A. Thrilled to have Emerald Holding joining us at the conference, and with me from the company up on stage, we have Hervé Sedky, Chief Executive Officer, and David Doft, Chief Financial Officer. Guys, thank you so much for making the time and joining us. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Good to be here. So maybe just to jump into it, for the benefit of anybody less familiar with the story, can you give us an overview of just the Emerald business to start off? Sure. I'll start by telling you who Emerald is. By way of background, we're the largest U.S.-based events organizer. We have over 50 large events in the trade show and conferences. We also have a large-scale platform of hosted buyer events in some consumer festivals as well. And essentially, what we do is we create an environment for customers to get leads. We basically serve leads for our exhibitors at our events. We also have a media business where we deliver leads to our customers through our media business. And that's the essence of what we do and why we do it. OK, great, and then within the connections business specifically, can you walk us through the various end markets that you guys serve with your events portfolio and how you think about diversification? Sure. Currently, we have seven different end markets that we serve. But even within the end markets that we serve, they're highly diversified. So one of the examples I like to give, for instance, is within the design portfolio, which is one of the larger end markets that we serve. Even within one of the end markets, it's highly diversified. So inside of design, we serve different end markets. We serve the hospitality market. We serve the. Health care. Health care market. Thank you. We serve different end markets inside of the design portfolio. And so while we have seven end markets that we serve today, our focus at Emerald is to continuously diversify the end markets that we serve. And we'll talk a little bit more about that today in terms of one of our key growth strategies is to continuously diversify and optimize our portfolio through launching more events, through acquiring more events in different end markets. And we've done that quite successfully in the last few years to continuously diversify the portfolio. OK, great. And how would you frame the value proposition, both for exhibitors as well as attendees? So essentially, the exhibitors come to our events to get leads, as I mentioned. And the attendees come to events to get inspired and to discover new. That's the essence of why people attend events. And so what we do is we've basically created a discovery engine, a discovery machine. And so everything we do is around inspiring and creating this environment for people to discover new things, the attendees to discover new things and to be inspired, and for the exhibitors to get leads. That's through the events business. But we want to continuously do that 365 days a year, not just at the events, because our customers want obviously to get leads all year, not just during the days of the events. And that's where we have a competitive advantage with our media business. Our B2B media assets are directly aligned with our events. Our media business, our B2B media business, serves the events in the exact same sectors that the events serve. So for instance, we own the largest pizza event in the world. We also own Pizza Today. So directly aligned with the event is a media property. The media property allows us to serve leads to the customers on an ongoing basis all year round, and that's that continuous ability for us to serve leads to our customers on an ongoing basis. So I would add, though, at the end of the day, companies invest in exhibiting and sponsoring at trade shows because it drives very high ROI on their marketing spend. And the majority of CMOs say it's among their highest ROI components of their marketing budgets. And so it works. And our ability to bring together buyers and sellers is at the root of that. At the same time, we've been investing in incremental data and technology offerings that enhance that ROI. Things that are simple in concept but more difficult to execute, like matchmaking, where we are gathering ahead of time at the time of registration the interests of the attendees, the buyer side of the equation, of why they're coming to the show, the sort of products or services they're looking for. And then we will set up appointments for them with the exhibitors that are providing those services to make their time on site more efficient. But we're literally walking new business leads into the booth at a set time for the exhibitors, which has very high opportunity for conversion and high ROI. And so there are ways that we are continuing to invest in optimizing that ROI and continuing to enhance the value proposition. OK. Great. And what's the typical retention rate for a first-time exhibitor? And you mentioned a matchmaking service just now. What are some other ways you're driving that number higher? Our typical retention rate for our customers is 80%-85% across the entire portfolio. But it's much lower for the first-time exhibitors. It's probably in the 30%-40% for the first-timers. And that is because they are not clear on what to expect. And so what we've done, and this is one of our growth strategies, actually, is to enhance that retention. And so we've done a lot in the last couple of years to enhance that experience. And so we've invested in a customer experience team that is really there to hold their hand. We've created a number of forms to educate them, to let them know what to expect in terms of how to exhibit. We've designed booth packages that are a lot simpler. We've priced it accordingly. And so by investing in resources in terms of allowing them to explain to them how to do it, holding their hand, explaining to them through different forms, and making it much easier, we're gradually improving that retention rate for first-time exhibitors. And we're starting to see some early results that are paying off. OK, great. And then maybe switching gears a little bit, can you talk about the portfolio review process that led you guys to exit 20 unprofitable events? And is there any ongoing review at this point, or do you think that's it for now? Every good and healthy business constantly reviews its portfolio. And so we expect that we will continuously do that. It is part of our portfolio optimization strategy. That is, we've largely talked about portfolio optimization as the acquisition strategy and the launch strategy. We have, in fact, been very focused on our launches and our acquisition. But in reality, we've always also looked at how do we divest and how do we clean up the portfolio from the smaller nonprofitable events that are not adding value to the portfolio. And so more recently, because it was a group of 20 events, it created more of a headline. But we expect that we'll continue to do that. We'll continue to do that on an ongoing basis, constantly looking and revamping the portfolio to make sure that we have an extraordinarily healthy and growing portfolio. OK, great. And then over the medium term, how should investors be thinking about the organic growth profile of this business? I think excluding the unprofitable events that you exited, your guide implies about 9% revenue growth. So it's high single digits to right ballpark. Yeah, we've talked about mid- to high-single-digit organic growth for the business, which we expect to see, and we have a number of initiatives that we've put in place across the business over the course of the last few years that give us the confidence in our ability to deliver that, and those span a number of initiatives, from customer experience initiatives that I touched on to the creation, for instance, of an international sales team. We at Emerald were a bit underweight in terms of the import of international sales into the U.S. events business. So we weren't bringing enough international sales exhibitors predominantly into our U.S. domestic events, and so what we have is we've created a centralized team that have negotiated with a number of agent networks across the world. We have about 50 different relationships globally that have been established at the moment. And they are helping us, basically an alternative distribution channel that is helping us attract businesses into the U.S. Just one example of a growth channel that we've put in place. There are probably about a dozen or so examples of different growth drivers that we've put in place. Fundamentally, what we've done over the course of the last few years is we've changed Emerald from a company that was run as an independent group of events to a platform, a platform where we're running the company as one company, where we're keeping the brands running independently in terms of the brand, the sales, the marketing. However, pretty much everything else, we are driving some consistency, some synergy, so that we can have some rapid learning across multiple events and able to grow and scale much faster, but also leveraging from some of these central teams that we've created, like the customer experience team, like the international sales team, et cetera, that are really allowing us to grow faster than we have in the past. I think the other part, just underlying the organic growth assumption, is the initiatives have already laid out, and there are many more probably not worth going into all in detail. But they drive an underlying view that we can grow the exhibitor base by at least low single-digit percent a year. And on top of that, with the investments we're making into the incremental value delivery at the event, drive pricing improvements that are at least mid-single-digit per year. And the sum of that leads us to the mid- to high-single-digit. And all the initiatives underlie our ability to deliver that. OK, great. So mid to high- single- digits from an organic standpoint. And then from an inorganic standpoint, how do you guys think about the decision to go out and acquire an existing event versus building something new in-house? Let me just correct something. Mid- to high-single-digit organic. And on top of that, we are looking at M&A, so is how we view our business. So we have identified categories, sectors that are high growth sectors. And we have a proprietary database that we've created of the largest, most premium assets, if you will, in the sectors that we want to be in. And basically, very simply, are targeting these particular events for acquisition. And that's how we are looking to grow from an M&A perspective. Our M&A team is very focused on that. We have a very active pipeline. And we feel very confident in our ability to grow through M&A. And where we don't have, for instance, very good assets that we can buy in a particular sector of interest, we have a launch team. We created an accelerator team. Our internal accelerator team will then launch in that particular category. We have a nice group of dedicated team with a very disciplined approach to launch. We will either launch or buy. Great. And then maybe shifting to margins a bit. You guys have talked about getting margins back to pre-pandemic levels, around 35%. The guide for this year implies about 25%. What are the key contributors to get you there over time? Yeah, we are committed to getting our margins to 35% over the course of the next few years. And there are a number of initiatives that get us there, obviously through growth that I've talked about. I think the organic growth initiatives that we have in place will contribute to the margin growth, because the reality is that the platform strategy that I described is all about creating this environment where the incremental revenue growth that we bring in has a significantly better flow through to the bottom line. And that is how we're going to get to an improved margin. And therefore, over the course of the next three years, we feel confident that we can get to the 35% margin that we were at pre-pandemic. OK, great. And back to the M&A theme for a sec. Can you talk us through a little bit about what you're seeing in the M&A pipeline today? What's the quality of opportunities, or what are the specific priorities you might be looking to address? Yeah, I can't talk specifically about that. We don't talk specifically about sectors or obviously specific opportunities. But what I'll say is I feel very confident about more confident today than I've ever been, actually, about the pipeline and very confident about our ability to continuously diversify the sectors that we're in. And that is really the core of our growth strategy around portfolio optimization, is to continuously diversify Emerald from a sector perspective. And so we have some really nice opportunities and a good rich pipeline that allow us to do that. And we expect that we'll continue to do that and we'll announce deals whenever we can in the near to midterm. We want to diversify, but we also want to diversify towards higher growth industries. Part of the portfolio optimization concept is to continually enhance the growth profile of our business by targeting higher growth industries with the events that we acquire or that we launch and/or reduce our exposure to less attractive industries, like we have recently with some of the events that we pruned. OK. Great. On capital allocation, how would you frame your relative priorities today? So we've been very clear for a while that we have a number of priorities in our capital allocation. Number one is surely M&A. We think that is the largest opportunity to drive value for Emerald and its stakeholders while continuing to enhance the attractiveness of the overall business. At the same time, those come when they come. And we are excited about where we sit right now. And this business is a significant driver of free cash flow. And so we've allocated cash to share buybacks. We have a moderate dividend in place that is fairly reasonable that we began over the summer. And all of that while managing our net debt to EBITDA to below three times. And so those are the different priorities. We have paid down debt in the past. About a year and a half ago, we paid down about $100 million of debt as well in order to manage the balance between all of those opportunities. OK, great. And then on the balance sheet, your 2026 term loan goes current in the second quarter of next year. How are you thinking about the process and timeline for refinancing that? So we're surely thinking about it, as you can imagine. We've done a lot of hard work to position the company to be in a strong place from a credit standpoint to have a successful refinancing when the time is right. We're surely paying attention to the market dynamics while at the same time focusing on delivering on our own financial results. I'll add that our LTM EBITDA today is up almost 70% from where it was when we extended the term loan just a year and a half ago coming out of the pandemic. And so hopefully, we've put ourselves in a really good position to have some good options at our hand for us. OK, great. And then taking a step back, how do you think about the competitive landscape for your events? It's quite interesting. This is an industry where, competition, there is no real competition because event organizers don't truly compete in that. There's very little overlap in terms of the events that we have because we don't have the same events that serve the same sectors in the same geography, and as a result, we don't truly compete with each other or have very, very little competition, so ourselves and our competitors don't have competing events serving the same sector in the same geography, and so while we do the same thing and so are seen as competitors, we don't truly compete. Now, we do compete when we go after M&A opportunities and we compete for talents, there we definitely compete, but in the day-to-day operations of the business, we have very, very little competition. OK, great. And then it'd be great to hit on your 365 strategy a little bit, starting with the media content segment. I guess, how would you frame the strategic value of that business? So the content business is strategically important to Emerald from two perspectives. One I hit on at the very beginning, which is the ability for us to generate and create leads for our customers on a year-round basis is critically important to our customers. To provide leads to our customers when they come to our events is important. But to be able to supplement and continuously deliver these leads on an ongoing basis year-round is also very important. The second and very important what the content business gives Emerald is the ability for us to market our own events through our content business. And that is a real competitive advantage that we have because we use our own media business to deliver to be able to market the events. And the ability to deliver these incredible, incredibly personalized experiences and marketing opportunities to our customers enhances the marketing messages and therefore attracts audiences to our events. And that is a key advantage that we have and one that makes the content business extraordinarily valuable to Emerald. OK, great, and then earlier on in the conversation, I think you mentioned this briefly, but over the last couple of years, you've been building out your international sales force. Can you speak a little bit more to that initiative and how it's progressing so far? It's progressing quite well. We've built it out. We have a central team. As I mentioned, we have about 50 or so network representatives now assigned around the world, and the reality is that about 10% or so of our revenues come from international, and that's slowly growing, and so we expect that that will continue to grow on an ongoing basis, and we're very happy with the results from that team, and so I think early success from the creation of that team gave us confidence that we'll continue to grow our fair share of international within Emerald, but I think a lot of the work to build out the extended agent network took place over the course of 2024, and so what we're really excited about is getting the full year benefit of that effort in 2025 now that that agent network is in place. Because ultimately, our events in an industry, it happens once a year. It happens twice a year. So it's not like you can bring on an agent and then you'd necessarily get the benefit for the next six months of a year if the event has already staged that year and the next event in that industry is coming up in Q1 or Q2 of 2025. And so there's definitely we would expect a real benefit of having a full 12-month exposure to the full international sales team and agent network for next year. OK, great. And that's actually true of a lot of our investments that we've put in place over the course of the last couple of years, which helps get to our 35% margin from where we are today. A lot of the investments that we've made over the course of the last few years are going to start really delivering on the results that we expect. And the investments have been made. So now what we're looking for is to reap the benefit of that investment over the course of the next few years. That's our expectation. OK, great. And your commerce segment, it's now profitable. So that's a great milestone. Can you tell us a little bit about the offering there? And big picture, what do you see as a realistic TAM over time? I think the commerce segment is from our perspective, we have two different commerce solutions. We have Elastic application that is really largely today in the outdoor space and serves that market extraordinarily well. Moving towards the indoor space, if you will, we have started to penetrate the kitchen and bath sector, and what we're really looking to do is to continuously penetrate more and more sectors where Emerald has events and has a rich customer base. The commerce marketplace is an important solution. The most important part for Emerald is really the data that it provides and the experience that it provides our customers. Because the reality for our customers is that as they attend an event, we're able to see what they're interested in, and David touched on the point of matchmaking, where we can see who they meet with, what their interests are. We can see what leads they get. Through the content business, we're able to see what they read, what they're interested in, what leads they get through content. What we need to also close that loop and understand the buying and selling and commerce that happens. And for us, that's the richness and the importance of the commerce solution. And therefore, what we can expect, even more importantly than the commerce solution in and of itself, are the solutions that we can build over and above in the future based on the data that we gather from the entirety of the Emerald solutions, from the event business, the content business, and the commerce business that we have. OK, great, and then switching gears, excuse me. Switching gears just a little bit. It'd be great to get your insight on the downturn resiliency of the business. Obviously, COVID was very unique, but how do you think about the stability of the business and economic downturns more broadly, maybe how the business performed in the financial crisis, and what are some of the key differences in the business today versus then? Let me think. Sure. So one of the reasons that we focus on diverse exposure of our portfolio is to manage the risk as well as the upside in different environments. And part of our diversification efforts have been to try to target areas that we view as either permanent growth industries that have very long runways of growth because of adoption of new technologies or disruption in industries or that are non-correlated to the economy. Now, during the financial crisis, which was a long time ago and before Hervé and I worked at Emerald, and it was a very different portfolio at the time, the business, I think for one year, was down in the kind of high single-digit, mid to high single-digit revenue. And then took a couple of years to bounce back. But that portfolio was a portfolio that was 50% or more exposed to more retail-oriented categories versus half of that approximately today for Emerald. And as we continue to scale, that percentage should go down. But just some examples. Hervé talked earlier about the design category and the different exposures within that. And so one of the exposures surely is we have the largest Kitchen & Bath Industry Show. And that could be deemed to be cyclical based on certain factors. And sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't, which is an interesting dynamic because there's the build cycle versus the renovation cycle that's been keeping it fairly steady and stable as a growth area for us for a lot of years now. But our exposure to health care is around hospitals and medical facilities. That's a little less correlated to the economy. And we view the need for health care and really innovation in health care facilities to only be increasing from here. And then we have exposure to schools. We have an educational design business called EdSpaces. And that's based on shifts of populations throughout the country, which is happening a lot these days, surely. And when population moves into areas, they need to build schools. They need to expand schools. And they need the desks. They need the equipment, the smart boards, everything for the cafeteria. All of those things people source, school superintendents source at our trade show. And I would argue that that's tied to school bond issuances, not tied to the economy. And so part of us building the diversified portfolio is with that in mind. And we think that minimizes our risk in economic downturns. OK, great. And then maybe just to leave us here, as we look out to 2025, what are you most excited about in the business? I'm very excited about the fact that we have created this platform strategy where we truly have now one Emerald platform to build on top of, that the acquisitions that we're going to bring in are going to get fully integrated into this platform, that the growth strategies that, as I mentioned, we have invested in over the course of the last few years, the investment has been made. And now we'll reap the benefit of that investment. And so for us, a lot of the hard work in terms of optimizing the portfolio of creating this platform is behind us. And now we're really maniacally focused on growth, whether it's through launching, whether it's through M&A, and reaping the benefits of the growth initiatives that we've put in place. So I think we're in a very good spot and very excited about 2025 and beyond. OK, great. Thank you both so much for joining us. Appreciate it. Appreciate it.