All right, great. Thank you to everyone for joining us today on our 10th Annual Retail Roundup, day two. It's my distinct pleasure to have with me, Chief Financial Officer of The Home Depot, Richard McPhail. Thank you for joining us again this year. We always appreciate your support of our conference. Absolutely. Thank you, Chris. Awesome. Yeah. So from an agenda perspective, it's just like the other ones. I'll ask questions, and we'll save time at the end for audience questions, so please don't be bashful. So my first question is, and it's the question we're asking all companies to kick off the conference, is more about the consumer. If you look across different companies with the consumer, there's varying feedback on green shoots in some COVID-winning categories, low-end consumer weakness, shopping around occasion. So the first question is how would you describe the current state of the consumer from your vantage point, and how has that changed over the past year? Thanks to everyone for being here this morning. You know, it's a great day and week and month for The Home Depot, and we've announced an exciting acquisition, which I'm sure we'll get to here in a minute. So our customer tends to be the homeowner, right? We sell into the installed asset class, in fact, the largest asset class privately owned in North America, which is the residence, right? With a value of over $45 trillion. So if you're a Home Depot customer, it's very likely you own your home. The homeowner has done exceptionally well over the last five years, really over the last 15, since the great financial crisis. But in a comparative sense, the homeowner has seen their balance sheet expand much faster than they would have expected through home price appreciation. They tend to be employed and have enjoyed strong income growth over the last three to five years, and so we see a highly engaged customer at The Home Depot. I will just caveat that all my comments are relevant through the end of our fiscal year. We won't comment on interquarter trends. But throughout that period, I think we saw the kind of two mind frames with the customer. The first was highly engaged in spending. When you look at the success of our holiday programs, whether that's through decorative categories, through appliances, that was... We had an exceptionally strong season. And so I'd say kind of the base of customer spending is very healthy. When you get to larger ticket projects, and for us, when you're thinking about a project associated with your home, the larger they get, the more likely they are to be debt-financed. And so we have seen the second mindset, really as a mindset of deferral, of larger projects that might be debt-financed. Our customer has the means to do large projects. They have the desire to do them, and they tell us that it's simply just, "Look, rates are elevated. We're not gonna do that right now. We could if we wanted to, we're just, we're gonna wait." Some of this is caused by this anticipation that, well, of course, there'll be, you know, Fed cuts, so maybe we wait a little while to do that larger project. And so the health is there. It's more just a, "Okay, when do we execute that project?" At the same time, we're seeing in our—what our pros tell us is that their customers still engage in projects, they're just of a smaller nature. So you might not do your entire—you might not renovate your entire kitchen, you might do that piece by piece. But very healthy customer. Excellent. So we'll pull that apart a little bit. An inherent nature of what you sell, there's a lot of replacement cycles. Right. And there's different replacement cycles. And, you know, when we were all forced to be locked down, we did a lot of replacement and a lot of upgrades in our home. I guess, what categories are you looking at to see when should the good spending starts to come back, regardless of the big-ticket stuff? Maybe some of those early COVID-winning categories, like paint and appliances and home decor. Are you seeing green shoots? And are there any particular categories that you're focused on as sort of the canary in the coal mine? You know, I don't think that we would look at any given categories as the sign that, you know, this is, we're back to normalcy. Maybe I'll start with a higher level comment, which is, you know, we've talked about 2023 having been a year of moderation after $47 billion of growth for three years. At some point, there was likely to be that moderation. We saw it in 2023. There are forces there that are still present that mean that 2024 isn't quite the year where we're back to a normalized market. And, you know, you think about those as many economists are calling for a deceleration in PCE. We still have a slightly higher share of PCE than we had back in 2019, so there may be some reversion. There's this mindset again of higher for longer or just higher at the present moment, creating this deferral. And then there's what you talk about, which is there was some form of pull forward in demand. Where we have seen strength that perhaps surprised us was in appliances, where, you know, there was enormous demand during COVID. We didn't know how long, you know, if there was a pull-forward period, whether there would be a lull. Appliances are doing extremely well. A big part of our success in appliances are some of the changes we've made to our customer service model, and we can get into that if you'd like to. But, you know, up to a certain product kind of, or a project price level, demand is really healthy, Chris. So I wouldn't say there's one category in particular. You know, the categories where we are seeing relative weakness through the end of 2023, you think about larger project spend, kitchen, flooring, those kind of things. Now, on the other hand, we see the reverse signals in gypsum, roofing, lumber, and so there's a bit of a mixed bag with respect to what we see in project. Look, we sell across a portfolio of products, and ultimately, our definition of normalcy is when we see healthy, positive growth in ticket and transaction, and we're not quite there yet. How do you, The spring season's all ahead of you. How do you look at the behavior in the fourth quarter as an indicator of what could happen this spring, right? Like, if home good- home decor did a little bit better, appliances seems like it's a lot of share, frankly, on your side, but appliances is doing a little bit better. How does that translate as you think about, you know, categories like grills and patio and garden, you know, that were such COVID beneficiaries? Yeah. Well, you know, we expect that at some point, those outdoor categories do come back. And, you know, look, we had a great year in 2023, even in many outdoor categories. Grills and patio were some of the exception outliers, where you had so much pull forward. You know, I might put it a little bit differently. We are. So when we look at the pressures that we saw in 2023, and we took a point of view on 2024, there's still pressure there. It's just not quite at the same degree that it was in 2023, and so that's why we've guided. If you think about comp, last year in 2023, we were a -3.2%. If you adjust that for lumber, it was about a -2%. And so think of our comp guidance of -1% as, you know, all in, all that pressure is relieved on a relative basis, but it's not quite, not quite back yet. As far as Q4 goes, look, we had one of the worst weather environments in January in history in terms of temperature and precipitation, and so, you know, you sort of have to take Q4 and understand that run rates off of exit comp rates are probably a little bit misleading. Yep. And then I guess on the, as you think about which turns first, you know, is it pro or DIY? And I guess how dependent it is, is the rate environment- Mm. on driving that? Well, larger projects tend to be executed, you know, more through the Pro. That having been said, the Pro performed exceptionally well for us on a relative basis in 2023, and I think that's a result of our initiatives. It's, it's really hard to say which turns first, and, you know, really, that's not how we look at it, and it's not how we run our business. Not to- I hate not to answer the question directly, but it's all end customer demand that we serve, right? Home improvement demand ultimately resides in that end customer. How it's executed, the rate environment is having a little bit of an influence on that, for sure. And so we're just gonna have to wait and see how that unfolds. Got it. So, good, good segue into a few macro questions Okay. that you always get. Yeah. Your correlation to existing home sales growth has typically been strong. You've also more often spoken to strength around really that home price appreciation drives your business- Mm. 'cause you're lifting the entire, you know, housing stock of the United States in that, in that Right. Situation. Do you think this time. COVID's so weird because of the share of wallet dynamic and pull forward? Yeah. How do you think about coming out on the other side? Which factor does the correlation or meaningfulness of existing home sales different this time versus prior cycles? I don't know that you'd say intuitively that it could or should be different, but I do wanna just revisit some of those comments and talk about what we've observed over history. There's no doubt that when you see significant shifts in existing home sales from year to year, that's gonna have an influence. You know, in the year where you purchase or sell a home, you're gonna spend double what you spend in any other year with The Home Depot. And so there is pressure when you see existing home sales drop to the extent that we saw over the last two years. There's an asterisk to that, 'cause there's a counter to that, which is improving in place, but we'll get to that in a second. So, when existing homes-... Spike or dip, yes, there is an influence on our sales. But over the long run, if you look at existing home sales over the last 15 years, you know, you're really kind of hovering right around 5%, 4%-5% of the housing stock changing hands. So the change in existing home sales is really not that significant, and that's why, while there might be a correlation, there's not enough movement in that number in a normal environment. Yes. I think it is interesting to see, with respect to existing home sales, what happens when you do see small decreases in mortgage rates, you see existing home sales respond really favorably. And I think that is evidence of the kind of chronic housing shortage that we've built ourselves into as a country, where there are just, you know, millions of households on the sideline, who want to buy a home and who are looking for the opportunity to do so. Coming out of kind of this period of moderation, I think you have to ask yourself, you know, what are we left with? What's different now than was maybe pre-COVID? And I go back to the incredible wealth created in the housing stock. That home price appreciation is, we think, the primary driver of home improvement demand, and I expect it to be so, in the future. Don't want to forecast existing home sales, but obviously, if rates decline, you're gonna expect a response there. That's my next question. Yeah. Well, to finish it off, though, I think what was really interesting is we sat here, I think, or at least sat on the phone together, and at the beginning of 2023, many economists and analysts were calling for either a home price correction or a home price collapse. And home prices appreciated by 5% last year, and not much really changed in the underlying economy or points of view with respect to the Fed being restrictive. And so you look at that and think, "Well, why would. What, what are the forces pushing home prices down?" Hard to identify. And so we think that the fundamentals are there for, you know, given the housing shortage, it took us 10 years to build ourselves into a housing shortage, by the way. We have the lowest vacancy rate in the housing stock in the history of the statistic, which I think goes back to 1970. So you have a 54-year history, and we are now at the low point of vacancy in the housing stock. If you look at the chart, we've built ourselves into that position over 10 years of kind of underbuilding. It's gonna take us a long time to build out of that, so that's why we think there's support for home prices going forward. It is actually my next question. Okay. So if the, I mean, Jamie talked about last night, we'll see how the Fed actually plays out, but, you know, a year from now or beginning first quarter of next year, the market's basically pricing in if the 10-year, 30-year mortgage rates move with the 10-year, like, you know, we're gonna come down to, like, 6% from 7% mortgage rate. You spend a lot of time on econometrics. How do you think about what that would mean for existing home sales turnover against the dynamic of, one, the positive of you do see a lot of elasticity to rates, versus, two, the locked-in effect? I don't know how to balance those two, Chris. You know, we, we are, we're interested and, and curious observers of economics and econometrics, but I think, you know, to try to give a view on what the Fed might do and when, is, is obviously the central subject of conversation last night and today, so we don't wanna make a prediction there. I, I would expect that you would see a beneficial reaction from rate decreases, but we certainly haven't factored benefits of any kind of, Fed cuts into our 2024 expectation. And, you know, you mentioned the lockup effect. Just simply don't know. Is it a factor of folks waiting for rates to decline, or is there a mindset shift that becomes accustomed to a higher rate environment and says, "This is normal, I have to upsize, I have to improve in place?" We just... It's too hard to quantify. But we think it all points towards fundamental support for home improvement demand. I mean, there's just no question about that, and that's why we're so long housing and, and why we're so confident in the strategy that we've laid out for many years now. Absolutely. Another housing question until we move on to some other topics. So we've heard from some other retailers that maybe West Coast sort of started a correction first, both on the consumer side and certainly with the housing metric side, but some demand trends in the West Coast have sort of maybe seen some secondary improvement. Mm. As you look at your regional performance, how would you describe, and are you seeing any of that factor? Well, again, I'll limit my comments through the fourth quarter. Last year, we actually wondered, in the first quarter of 2023, we saw significant weather impacts in the West. We weren't sure whether we're macro or weather. From our observation, they were weather. The West, really all three of our divisions, Western, Northern and Southern divisions, all behaved similarly, and we don't see a lot of dispersion in our geographies right now, which is interesting. Understood. So maybe we'll, we'll segue here into SRS. Sure. Congratulations on the acquisition. Thank you. Yeah. We're excited. It seems like a very great growth asset. Yes. So I know you've received a lot of questions, so this is more- Okay of an open mic. Yeah. You know, what points would you wanna emphasize to investors about the SRS acquisition based on the feedback that you've heard over the past week? Great. Well, thank you for the question. Look, we have an opportunity at The Home Depot to sell to every occasion that that residential pro has, right? And residential pro is broadly defined. What's so exciting about this is I think we're the first company ever to be positioned to sell across really all types of residential pro. And so what the acquisition of SRS does is, it complements efforts that we have had underway for many years to sell more to the renovator remodeler, to the property investor, to the generalist pro, to the general contractor who buys across our product categories. And we're excited with the momentum we have in our organic efforts. We've seen great successes, and that's why we continue to roll out our capabilities. We'll have our suite of capabilities in 17 major markets by the end of the year, and we continue to build some of those central capabilities, like order management and trade credit. More on that if you'd like. So excited about what our organic efforts have meant in selling to that remodeler who tends to buy across categories, and is what we would call maybe a trade, a cross-trade pro. SRS opens up really what I would call a second component of that residential pro or second segment, which is the specialty trade pro. So you have the generalist, and you have the specialty trade pro. SRS sells to the roofer, to the landscape contractor, and to the pool contractor. These pros have always purchased from The Home Depot, but much more so on a convenience basis through our stores. There are ways of serving that specialty trade pro that SRS, we think, is the best in the world at, and that our organic capabilities haven't necessarily been designed to serve. We'll talk about the sort of orders of value creation there. First, let me just talk about the size of the market. Up until SRS, we had defined our addressable market as $950 billion. There were elements of that specialty trade pro, the roofer, the landscape contract pro, that we didn't feel were addressable. With the acquisition of SRS, it will open up another $50 billion of addressable market for us. So it expands our market because we are acquiring a new customer type, and that's what's so exciting. So SRS provides us with capabilities to begin to better serve that general contractor, that renovator remodeler. It provides us an entryway into that specialty trade pro to get all of their wallet, not just the convenience part of their wallet. It allows us to begin to learn. Look, we're building distribution capabilities for that renovator remodeler. This is distribution. We will continue to build those capabilities out. Nothing changes there. But now we have a best-in-class distribution company with exceptional management, who we can learn from, and we can trade notes. SRS is gonna operate as a standalone company. They're gonna do what they do best, but we're gonna learn a lot, and they're gonna teach us. And so we're gonna have gains from that. And look, there are gonna be cross-selling opportunities. Think about exposing SRS's product catalog to our customers, which is not a hard thing to do. Think about that roofer who's using a nail gun, right? And nail guns are now transitioning quickly to cordless and battery-powered. You know, think about the power of being able to put a Milwaukee handgun in those SRS roofers' hands. Think about the power of onboarding SRS customers onto Pro Xtra to provide benefits when they purchase at The Home Depot. So there's some, there's some low-hanging value creation there, and we just couldn't be more thrilled. This is, Chris, we are a growth company. We are, full stop, a growth company at The Home Depot. This is a growth company buying a growth company and partnering with them to accelerate our growth. We get, you know, in the acquisition, a management team with an exceptional track record of growing sales and earnings every single year since inception, regardless of cycle. A team who not only excels in their historical verticals, and they grew up in roofing, but has successfully acquired and attached new verticals in pool and landscape. So we're getting a company that grows really in three core ways: organic, same-store sales, exceptional track record, greenfield, new branches, significant growth through new branches, and I'd say one of the best acquirers, if not the best acquirer and integrator I've ever seen. So we're just getting so much in this, in this combination of the two companies, and we couldn't be more excited. So I have a couple follow-up questions. So my first question is, there's a lot of subcontractors out there, subcontracting industries out there. There's specialty plumbing, there's specialty electrical. How would you contrast, like, the capabilities of the company and the management team versus the verticals that they operate in- Mm. in comparison to other potential verticals? Look, there's power in both, and both were compelling. It's the quality, so it's the attractiveness of the end markets that they're in today. You know, look, roofing is really non-cyclical. When you think about a vast majority of roofing is replacement, repair, it's not new construction. Same with landscape and pool. And so the beauty of those end markets is not only are they, they're attractive from an economic perspective, but they have lots of room to grow in all three. SRS has developed into a leadership position in all three in a very short period of time, and we want them to continue to grow in those verticals just as they have done historically. More importantly, it's the management team, their approach to business, the cultural fit, their ability to execute. This is a unique company because it has a unique management team and a unique culture. And if you, I'll tell you, do your diligence, ask anyone who knows SRS, they're known by everyone as exceptional strategic thinkers, but also operators. They have a track record of faster growth than any other scaled player in any of their verticals over the last decade. So they're the fastest-growing company in the both top and bottom line, they're the best acquirers, and they have a culture that fits seamlessly with ours. And, you know, we think that culture is an advantage of the Home Depot, that no one has been able to replicate. SRS has one that fits like a glove with us. So it really is both, great end market verticals with plenty of room to grow, but an exceptional management team and an approach to growth that we haven't seen, anywhere else in distribution. They've grown organically, and they've also grown through acquisition. How do you think about their ability to continue to grow? Are there any sort of, I guess, handcuffs that you, you're putting on them as once you integrate them? And how do you prioritize them to focus on the existing verticals or optionality on new verticals? Well, look, the deal isn't closed, and so, you know, they are right now, they're an independent company. And, and so, you know, what I will tell you is they have fantastic discipline when it comes to capital allocation, and capital return. They are one of the, they are an outlier in return on investment. They know how to grow through acquisition in a return, accretive manner, and we want them to continue to do what they're great at, which is that. And so, look, we're, we certainly aren't looking to put any handcuffs on SRS. They've proven they can grow. We want them to continue to grow. Understood. So I'll—I'm gonna ask a margin question, and then we'll open it up to the audience for Q&A. So, you know, there's a, I think, a healthy debate around The Home Depot's margin structure in terms of, investors recognize that you're about growing the bottom line, 5%-8% earnings base case, seems a little conservative, the bullish case, given all these structural factors, once the cycle comes back, seems more realistic. But oh, specific to the margins and excluding SRS, you know, you've spent a lot of money over the past six years investing in the large pro build-out. So there's a view that you're actually under-earning from a margin perspective. And so there's—that's the first part of the question. The second part of the question, if that's true, is the under-earning simply, is it more like the investment dissipates, or is it more that you're building this fixed asset base, and then once you... the asset base is in, you start to leverage that asset base, and that's just not occurring yet? Well, there's certainly a component of being early with respect to, or being early days with respect to leveraging all of our supply chain assets. And we knew that there would be, you know, a bit of a headwind in margin in that respect. But I wanna zoom out a little bit to answer your question, because our primary financial objectives are to grow sales and earnings per share as fast as possible while generating exceptional return on investment. In a base case scenario, we would expect to expand margins, we would expect flat gross margin. There's a whole lot of productivity underneath the surface there that we reinvest. And then in operating expense, there's investment in there, too, embedded in there, but net, we would expect to generate operating expense leverage during a normalized environment, and our base case calls for 3%-4% top line growth, and that leverage creating mid- to high-single-digit EPS growth. When we think about an acceleration from that case, we are focused on sales growth, earnings per share growth, with exceptional return on investment. There's nothing to say that, or maybe put differently. Absolutely, as we begin to leverage fixed assets that we've invested in, there are gains to that. Those gains provide the ability to reinvest in the customer value proposition, right? And so, that's why we aren't setting long-term guidance more definitively than that base case and the accelerated case. I also think it's important to note. So we're playing the long game. We are playing in a $1 trillion addressable market. We have a small share of that market, and it is incredibly fragmented. The long game means it's never gonna stop. We didn't build 10 years of capacity in our supply chain. There will as we grow, and as we can prove growth and the ability to generate return on investment, we will always invest in our company, and so there's not a moment at which investment in The Home Depot stops. And I think that's the best way to answer it. It's a flywheel, and as the scale player and the low-cost provider, we create room for ourselves every year to out-invest others in our space. Understood. Excellent. So, please, if you ask a question, if you could grab the mic so everybody could hear you on the webcast. Yep. Hi, thank you. So, you guys manage the business very conservatively, and last night at the fireside chat with Jamie, he talked about preparing for a range of potential outcomes in the business. He said it would be wise to prepare for potentially rockier times ahead and even through 7% or 8%, you know, ten-year rates out there. So would just be curious how you guys are thinking about that and what kind of internal discussions you've had thinking about preparing for potential range of outcomes. I know everyone's really eager and excited, anticipating the inflection of potential recovery in home improvement demand, but just if you could address that. So I think, thanks. Yeah, thanks for the question. And I think there are two parts to the answer. The first one is, during COVID, we learned that it's much more important to be great executors than it is to be great predictors of the future. We could have never predicted a 20% comp. We wouldn't have had a plan that even allowed us to comprehend what it would take to push that much volume through our system, and yet, we did it. We got our hands on the inventory, we got our hands on staffing, and it worked. And it's because we know how to execute. We operate on a short cycle basis. At the end of the day, what are you really managing? You know, over a short period of time, you're managing inventory, and you're managing staffing. And of course, there's pricing and cost and all that, but you're setting appropriate inventory levels for anticipated demand, and you're staffing those stores with the associates, so that they can provide the level of customer service that's, you know, second to none in our space. And so we know we can do that regardless of the environment. And so if you think about upside or downside, look, we took last year as an opportunity, and this is kind of the second part of the question. First of all, we delivered on our expectations. You know, we did, we set guidance, you know, after Q1, and, you know, in terms of sales and margin rate and EPS, and we nailed, you know, a little bit better than the midpoint. We knew exactly where we were headed, and we proved that we could operate the business as great stewards in a -3.2% comp environment. We knew the levers that we would pull. Those were all short cycle levers. It was the natural reduction in staffing as transactions decreased. There are some other levers in the P&L that we, that we pulled that were short-term in nature. The lever we did not pull was the investment lever. We have tried to be very clear that we have the ability to pull back on investment, but given our belief in the long-term fundamentals of the strength in home improvement demand, we're focused on the next five to 10 to 20 years, and we're not going to pull back on investment unless the environment truly demands it, and we don't think that we're in that spot. So really the second part of the answer is, I feel more confident at the end of 2023 than at the beginning of 2023, about our position in running a great business and being ready for whatever comes our way. We took last year as a year to get some things right. We had had $47 billion of growth. After that much activity, you kinda have to take stock and say: Where do we stand? We needed to reduce inventory. We were fine, but we weren't happy with our level of inventory. If you look at the reduction in inventory, down 20% from the peak to the end of 2023, we did exactly what we felt we should do to be prudent stewards of our balance sheet and your capital. Number two, at the same time, we improved in-stock. That's incredible! Our in-stock is basically back to where we want it to be, back to pre-COVID levels. And so to do those two things simultaneously, we have really, I could say, probably never felt better about our inventory level and our in-stock level at the same time, to the degree we feel now. We certainly were operating in some respects, deflationary environment last year. So managing costs down and appropriately pricing ourselves in the market while costs came down was another huge project for us in 2023. For the last few quarters, we believe that prices and costs in our market have largely settled. And so we're in a mission accomplished with respect to successfully managing through the disinflationary environment. And then finally, retention. Associate retention was that last thing we had to get right. At the beginning of 2023, we were not in the spot we wanted to be. In 2022, we saw that retention decline more significantly than we would like. There's so much more value in a nine-month associate versus a three-month associate, and so if we can get associates to get comfortable and really learn the ropes for that first three to six months, they become so much more valuable. Our retention rates are now back to pre-COVID levels, thanks to an investment we made at the beginning of last year, $1 billion in wages. So our to-do list, check, check, check, check. We're in fantastic position from an operational perspective, and we're ready for whatever environment. I have a financing question, around SRS. You've mentioned that you wanna get back to 2x leverage- Yes. within a few years. Yeah. You're gonna raise about $2.5 billion of financing. They've got a little over $5.5 billion of debt that you'll be assuming or paying down, when you bring them on. What's your thought in terms of putting in short-term versus long-term debt that you can use as part of your deleveraging? And is the debt you're assuming from them, is that assumed just to be paid down with cash that you generate over there? So to be clear, the purchase price of $18.25 billion is on a cash-free, debt-free basis. Their current debt, we expect to be paid off at closing, so then it's really Home Depot financing at that point. We expect to raise proceeds in both short and long term, so both in the form of commercial paper and also longer-term debt. And we're gonna be flexible as market conditions evolve, you know, towards closing. But a significant part of that financing will be in the form of commercial paper. And we're doing that because our cash generation allows us to be able to pay down debt very quickly. And so we've suspended share repurchases. That will allow us to build cash towards closing. Then whatever remains, in terms of financing need, we, you know, it'll depend on market conditions, but a significant part will be CP, so that we can pay it down, you know, over what we think is a roughly 24-month period to get back to 2x leverage. Thanks. Over here. I actually have two questions. One is just: What are the, like, the limiting factors on additional M&A? Like, are there enough targets? Are there big enough targets? Are there enough quality management teams? Is it, you know, leverage or ratings? How do you view, like, the limitations here? Well, I think, you know, the bottom line limitation is, would an acquisition provide or enable us to accelerate our strategic efforts faster than organic efforts, and also provide a better return on investment, right? So there's always a buy versus build question. And so in that respect, acquisitions will always be, you know, an option for us. The limiting factor, though, such an important factor in the SRS acquisition is, you just can't overstate the importance of quality management and all that's associated with running an exceptional company. They're exceptional operators. You know, think about how they integrate businesses. When they make an acquisition, they close that acquisition on a Friday, and that Monday, that company is up on their ERP. That's the mark of an exceptional management team and an exceptional acquirer. So I think quality is maybe the most important limiting factor when it comes to making acquisitions. Quality of management, quality of business platform, quality of end market. Now, all of those are important. Thank you. And I guess the second question is just, are you more confident in the NC State men's team or women's team? Both! No, I thank you for asking the question. I'm a multi-generation NC State grad, and have been a massive fan all my life, and I absolutely expect both teams to win the title this year. And so place your bets. And, you know, couldn't be more proud of them. We're excited. So it's been a big couple weeks for me, you know? And it will—that's gonna continue through the weekend. We're really so proud of both teams. Yeah, hi. Quick follow-up on SRS. I'm just curious if the ambition is to go after the more complex pro in end markets they're not in. You know, you mentioned roofing and landscape and pool. And in order to enter another market, say, HVAC, plumbing, take your pick, can you do that organically, or would you need an additional acquisition to go into one of those more specialized, complex pro verticals? Thanks. You know, again, the nature of SRS and the nature of that specialty trade pro, it would have been hard for us to penetrate that specialty trade pro in any material sense without SRS, without an acquisition. And, and that's why it's so exciting. This is opening up a new customer for us. There are many verticals. You know, they're in three. We, we fully expect them to evaluate further verticals, but it comes back to discipline. Now, they're a disciplined acquirer, we're a disciplined acquirer. There's not a necessity to take on every single trade vertical, and I don't want anyone to get that perception. But where we can generate acceleration to sales and earnings per share growth and generate exceptional return on investment, that's always gonna be an opportunity that we look at. Additional questions? Scott? Hey, Richard, just- Yes, Scott. Any idea why now? What was the... Was there some magical thing that happened, you know, while you were watching the game? You know, just you know, why now? Is this something presumably you've been working on for a long time, et cetera? So we have, we've learned a lot in our evolution, in going after the residential pro. You know, we have several years of developing these capabilities in our major markets, the distribution capabilities, the selling capabilities, and then the emerging platforms of order management and trade credit, the true enablers. And that has been going as well as we had hoped, right? Our pros, prior to SRS, our pro customers tell us we have the right to win because we're providing a value proposition that no one else in the market ever has. We can sell across all product categories to that renovator/remodeler, and we know that when we're able to execute, we get that order. We're taking our time, and we're doing that because as we build capabilities, we wanna make sure we don't overextend ourselves to our customer. We don't want to win an order that we can't fulfill with excellence, and some of those order management capabilities aren't quite there yet. So we're gonna continue the expansion of what we have been building. Nothing changes there. The SRS opportunity was really a unique window in time for both of us. We've learned more, and we've become more optimistic over the past few years about truly being able to address what is one of the largest end markets in the U.S. economy, that has one of the most solid fundamentals. Again, going back to that $45 trillion asset class, we wanna sell to every residential pro occasion. I'd say, a combination of increased optimism and attractiveness of that end market, coupled with the opportunity to acquire what we think is the best-in-class distributor in specialty trade, was an opportunity we were not going to miss. So the bottom line on it is, this acquisition will accelerate our ability to grow sales and earnings per share faster with the Pro, which means faster than the base case we laid out in June. Great. I think that's. Oh, wait. We actually have one more over here. I'm just curious to hear, with all the secular growth drivers you talk about for home improvement industry, do you see the industry growth rate for the next five to eight years be actually higher than where it was for the last decade? I do think that those underlying supports mean that this is one of the most attractive consumer markets in the U.S., and definitely on a comparative basis versus the general economy, I think it's advantaged from a fundamentals perspective, yes. Great. Well, thank you very much for your time, Richard. We really appreciate it. Great. Thank you, Chris. Awesome. Thanks to J.P. Morgan. All right. Take care. Thanks, everyone.