Thank you for joining us, and good morning. Really happy to have Herc here with us. We've got Larry Silber and Mark Humphrey, CEO and CFO. I'm Sherif El-Sabbahy. I work on the machinery team here at B of A. I'm just going to pass it to Larry and Mark for some opening statements. Thank you. Well, good morning, everybody. And thanks for joining us. And Sherif, thanks for hosting and having us here in New York City on a beautiful day. I'd like to begin this morning with a brief overview of our company so that you can see who we are and what we do. It'll only take 3-5 minutes. But with me this morning is Mark Humphrey. He's our Chief Financial Officer. And Leslie Hunziker up here on my right, who's our Investor Relations person. So to begin with, I'd like to begin with talking about our first slide, which is our vision, our mission, and our values. But I think I was supposed to do something about GAAP before that, saying everything here is a reminder of our Safe Harbor statement. Apparently, that was missed. But everything here will make sure everybody's reminded of our Safe Harbor statement about what you hear here. And we'll be talking about some non-GAAP financial measures as well. But our mission, vision, and values are pretty consistent from when we started this company and separated and became an independent public company almost eight years ago now. And we're really a support and purpose-driven company around supplying our customers with mission-critical equipment to get their jobs done on their various projects and sites, whether it be construction, industrial, or any related type of area. And our pledge is to equip our customers and communities to build a brighter future in terms of what we are doing. A little bit about Herc. Oh, there's the Safe Harbor. It was out of order. But Safe Harbor statement, again. A little bit about Herc. We are 58 years old this year and have been consistently doing business across North America in all of the largest communities and largest cities around North America. We have about 7,600 employees to date. We operate out of 412 locations. We have about $6.3 billion in fleet. We are operating in a marketplace of $83 billion marketplace. We are only in North America, five Western Canadian provinces, and 43 states in North America. Our strategies have really been around five main areas, which is growing the core of our business, continuing to add fleet to existing locations, and expanding those locations with a specialty fleet that brings us into new markets and new products as rental begins to expand outside of core businesses. The next area has really been an investment since we started 8 years ago in technology. We believe we have the industry-leading technology today in terms of supporting our customers, managing our fleet, managing the logistics, and giving us the kind of information that we need to operate the business profitably over a longer stretch of time. Allocating capital has been around fleet expansion, about expanding through greenfield operations as well as through selective M&A in major metropolitan markets that allow us not only to grow the local business, but they add density for us to be able to transact at mega projects and other types of activity in these top 100 markets. We've also been able to execute at the highest level. We're doing that through what we call E3OS, which is an E3 Operating System that allows us to drive our top-line growth, leveraging our assets, and accelerating our profit expansion through technology and through better utilization of our business. This is really our commitment to our E3OS as being easy to do business with, expert at what we do, and efficient in everything we do for ourselves and for our customers to continue to improve value and improve the bottom-line performance of the business for our customers and our stakeholders in the business as well. Also, we're going to be continuing to drive growth as we scale the business. We have the right pieces in place to scale. We've recently gone from a focus on the top 50 MSAs to now the top 100 MSAs. We're primarily we want to be in marketplaces that have 1 million people or more. We feel that those are recession-resilient, more so than any what I'll call suburban markets or non-primary marketplaces. So we're focused on the top 100 MSAs. We continue to be an industry leader, generating above-market growth. We have a broad-based operation with value-added rental solutions, equipment experts that add value and allow us to charge for that what I'll call engineering or near-engineering capability and delivering premium products and best-in-class services for our customers. We have been since late 2020 a market consolidator. We've completed 46 strategic acquisitions since launching the M&A strategy in our business. And as I mentioned earlier, we've made tremendous investments in technology that are paying off in our ability to manage our business consistently. We're executing the business on a multifaceted approach through both diversification and expansion geographically. And we believe that our strategy will reduce uncertainty or will increase resilience in uncertain times and enable us to manage the portfolio in a very profitable manner. And finally, we have a very strong balance sheet that will continue to allow us to invest in the strategic areas of fleet growth, of greenfield growth, of M&A, investments in technology, and most importantly, investments in people, education, and training that will allow us to continue to grow. So with that, I'll turn it over to Sherif. Excuse me. Thank you for that overview. I think just to start us off at a higher level, the question on everyone's mind or investors' mind really is growth and the ability to grow. It's clear post Q1 results that there is some local slowing. There is a little bit of a headwind on a company-specific level from greenfields as they ramp and things of that nature. Just at a high level, you mentioned recession resilience. Could you maybe look at a high level and maybe how Herc has changed in the last decade, how the industry has changed? What gives you confidence and the ability to kind of normalize at these higher levels versus kind of seeing the fall that you might have seen in the past? Yeah. No, great question. Thanks for it. I think what you hit on in the second part of your question is more what we're seeing rather than a slowing. We're seeing more of a normalizing of the business. Going back to pre-COVID levels, let's say 2018, 2019 levels is what we're seeing. So we're coming out of that post-COVID, which was high growth and primarily because of a lack of gear. Really, the Big Three were the only ones that were able to respond correctly to that period of rapid growth. But the difference between the company today and what it was maybe 10 years ago or even 5 years ago is we're technology-enabled. We're really at the forefront and leadership level of having all the equipment be telematically enabled. We have all kinds of data now in the business that didn't exist 10 years ago. In fact, Rouse Analytics, which is a key tool that we use to help us price in the marketplace, help us manage a level of fleet that's in the market, understand what competition has. It has over 60% of the market participants now putting data into that. Key analytics, having our systems capability to know where our equipment is. Over 60% of our fleet now is telematically enabled. And it'll be by the end of 2025, we'll be at 100% of our fleet be telematically enabled so you can monitor and measure the performance of that fleet. You can see how that fleet's operating. You can see what's going on, whether it's running hot, whether there's high or low oil pressure, all kinds of capabilities around technical support that'll help us better manage the fleet. Additionally, there's been consolidation in the industry. Consolidation is making it sort of be more around the Big Three, being able to perform very well and to really have an industry-leading position and not necessarily a lot of big regional mom-and-pops that existed prior to five years ago, where most of that's been consolidated. Most of the big regional players have been consolidated. There's very few large regional players left. So with consolidation comes efficiency, comes scale, comes greater capability. And then finally, we've been the business is different from where it was as primarily focused around classic gear five years ago. We've added a whole portfolio of specialty equipment that gives us greater capability, greater penetration into customers and markets, and allow us to improve the overall profitability of the product portfolio. Thank you for that. Looking sort of more at the local markets where there has been maybe a moderation in the rate of growth, I guess when we look at those, what would it take to drive a reacceleration in growth into the H2 of the year of 2025? Is this more tied to interest rates, or is there enough momentum in the economy to kind of see that reaccelerate again? Well, a little bit of both. I think the local markets have certainly normalized. But it's a big part of our business. We like to think, and we're keeping our local to national account business a 60/40 split, 60% local business, 40% national accounts. Most of our acquisitions have been businesses that have been focused in local markets. And then we add in our specialty gear to that to give us greater penetration and greater capability in those local markets. But certainly, to your point, interest rates have been and maybe it goes back to pre-COVID when the local markets around shopping centers, strip malls, other activity in those markets have been affected by interest rates and has slowed that down. I think if interest rates do come down as they're predicted, maybe not in 2024 but 2025 and beyond, there can be an uptick in those local markets that will support an already high level. But we're participating at a pretty significant level today. And anything that comes back, I think, will be added opportunity for us, not necessarily bring it back to any different level. It'll just be added opportunity. Within those local markets, have there been verticals where you've seen more resilience? Is the slowing coming from more specific areas? Well, I think the slowing that we've seen has been around that light commercial, light industrial activity. And certainly, slowing has been in an area that we don't participate anyway has been in housing. But when housing brings other activity, when they're building housing, they have to add schools. They have to add hospitals. They have to add shopping centers. And that's where we would play. We wouldn't necessarily play in housing. Yeah. And And then another big theme, of course, continues to be mega projects. We've heard of some delays, timing shifting here and there. Have you seen any change in your expectation for how these mega projects are coming online? Or do you expect further delays through the year? No. I mean, I think it's sort of behaved the way that we expected it. I think we've said publicly many times that it's back half-loaded for us as we work our way through 2024. And so I think when you're talking about projects and specifically large projects, any project has fits and starts to them, attached to them. And I wouldn't say that mega projects, by and large, are really no different. And so I think because of our strategy where we're out, we've said we're trying to get to sort of a 10%-15% share of these opportunities. And so really, for us, that kind of comes back to 40%-50% of them that we're able to track both relationally as well as sort of progress very, very closely. I would say big picture, it sort of behaved exactly the way that we thought it would. You sort of talked about maintaining the 60/40 national-local mix and being. Local-national. Sorry. Yeah. Local-national. And also kind of targeting a 10%-15% call it of these mega projects. So as you're looking at these larger mega projects, what makes a project attractive or unattractive as you look to kind of fill in those gaps? Yeah. Great question. Generally, an attractive project to us is one where we have a contractor that we already have a relationship with that has been named as the primary or one of the primary GCs on a project. So if we have a relationship with that customer we've been doing business with our national accounts for 30 years now. We have 30-year relationships with most of these big contractors that are being named to that. So if we have an existing relationship, we know how to do business with them. They come to rely on us. And they know that we can supply their needs and do that. Secondarily, we look at the market. Do we have enough density around that mega project in that area where we have multiple branches to be able to support that with gear, with technicians, with labor that is required to operate in there? And then we look at what's the type of gear that they need. And is it the mix that is sort of in our sweet spot? And does it have an opportunity for us to not only bid on that bundle of products, but then can we bring our specialty gear in there to make that a more attractive opportunity for us as opposed to just bidding the bread and the milk? We have an opportunity to bring in specialty gear that has a certain amount of engineering capability that allows us to sort of uplift the pricing profile of that job to begin with. Finally, I think what's important is, in an industry that we know, is it an industry that we have capability in that we've done somewhere else? So we're reluctant to sort of go into places that are necessarily outside of our sort of knitting. We like staying within our knitting with the type of projects that we've done over the last 60 years that this company's been in business. You touched on sort of the specialty being able to pull up the rate a bit. As we look at these mega projects, there is this higher volume, lower rate dynamic, as you're putting out the quotations. Could you maybe speak to maybe what the quotation would look like for Cat Class, how the specialty feeds in at those higher rates and kind of brings up that level? Yeah. I mean, good question. I mean, so generally speaking, you could have a bid where they're asking you for 20%, 30%, 40% sort of specific Cat classes of gear. And so that's probably going to be a very competitively bid process with the other two big guys primarily. But I think that when you have sort of the breadth and depth of the fleet that we have and the other two have, you have the opportunity to go in and say, OK, I'm willing to do this because I have the opportunity with my other product offerings and solutions and the engineering solutions and the like that we provide. And so when you ultimately put all that back together and evaluate it, it really doesn't look much different than sort of the dollar utilization you're getting just about anywhere else in your business. And then the upside to that is that you have what we call perma rent. I mean, you ultimately can have gear out on rent for a long period of time. So you've got minimized touches and transportation and those things. And so when you ultimately blend it all back together, it looks a lot like your sort of consolidated dollar utilization looks. As we think about that, is it something where maybe you see the main Cat classes that you initially quote on pulling on site and then the specialties kind of at a different phase of the project? Is it sort of peppered throughout the length of that contract? Yeah. Exactly. That's exactly what happens. Generally, when we get awarded a project and we have an onsite, we'll load that up with the products that we quoted. And then as a project progresses through different stages, first they have to clear the earth. And they have to put in foundations. Then they put up walls. And then once they put up walls, they need to start air conditioning this. So that's specialty gear that we'll bring in. And then they'll have to bring power in. So we'll have to have load banks as specialty gear to help them test the load capability of that facility. And then you'll have different types of mechanical and electrical and plumbing contractors and welding come in. So there'll be different gear that those contractors will need. And that's where specialty products come in. And we'll bring those in as different phases progress. Then we'll move those back out. That's where having facilities in close proximity allows us to manage those projects according to the different phases. Yeah. Exactly. Spot on. You spoke to this earlier, seeing a ramp in the back half on your earnings call. You noted that you expect to end the year with above-average rental revenue growth. What's giving you that confidence into 2025? Do you have better visibility sitting here today on the start of those projects, on maybe the timing of them and how they're landing? Yeah. I would say, look, every day we get better visibility. We, Mark and I and our chief operating officer and a whole team of fleet people meet with our national account people every other week to talk about the status of these 40 or 50 projects. And we look specifically at each project line by line where they are in terms of what they need. So certainly, we have greater visibility today. And from the standpoint of what's given us confidence about the future is all of these projects are multi-year projects that are going to go out 3, 4, 5. And in some cases, like LNG projects or this big dig they're going to do right outside this building here from New Jersey to New York, those are 10-year projects. And they're going to go on for a long time. I would say we're still in the early innings. We're in the second, third, fourth inning of a lot of these projects either being let or having shovels in the ground or developing. There are certain projects like EV plants and battery plants that are probably maybe in the fifth or sixth inning. They'll continue to add capacity and capability as the demand so dictates. Obviously, there's been a slowing recently on EV. But I don't think that's over. I think they're just trying to catch up with what the infrastructure is to support the charging. And that'll take a period of time to get done. A lot of these other projects, money is just being let for chip plants, for data centers, for LNG facilities. Infrastructure hasn't even really begun in a big way, whether it's roads, bridges, tunnels, things like that. So we're in the early innings. We're in second, third, fourth inning on par with some being maybe a little ahead of that. It being an election year, we've heard a lot in the news about permitting around LNG projects, for example, or renewables or offshore wind. Are you hearing from your customers that they're maybe delaying some types of projects, pulling others forward? Has this impacted their outlook for any of these types of projects? Well, look, I think the news has had certainly that certain LNG projects have been delayed. I don't know whether it's political or it's just environmental. Or who knows what's driving that, quite frankly. But I was just on probably the biggest LNG project last week. And it's full steam ahead. And it's going to be a 10-year multi-phase project that's going to go on for a long time. So some of their permits are already released. So it really depends on where they are in the permit stage. Had the permits been released, they're going to move ahead. I think the only other thing that I think has sort of seen a pullback recently has been EV and battery. But chip plants are moving forward. All the infrastructure projects are moving forward. Money is being let there. I don't see a lot of slowdown outside of maybe some of the LNG and some of the EV plants. Everything else is sort of tracking and moving ahead pretty aggressively. And I don't think the election process per se has really held up anything. I think there are other political sort of movements, not necessarily the election, that has affected LNG. I think it's more around what are the environmental challenges and permit releases around that. And changing gears a bit, we've seen M&A pick up in the space pretty significantly recently. Have you seen a shift in the multiples that you're paying for your businesses? Are you seeing different competitors when you go into bid on some of these? Yeah. I mean, good question. I would say no. By and large, multiples have remained fairly steady. And I think having said that, you have generally a different multiple profile for a specialty business that's theoretically less capital intensive and the like. Multiples there are generally on the other side of sort of our average multiple. And then the majority of what we have acquired over the last three years has sort of been in this gen rent space. And that's probably on the other end of the multiple spectrum. And then you have some dynamics in there that are dictating. Like if you're going into a market that you literally can't reproduce that piece of property no matter how hard you try, then you're probably going to think about that a little bit differently. Even if it is gen rent and you want it strategically, you're probably willing to pay a little bit more from a multiple perspective. But by and large, multiples have remained fairly steady. And just looking at rental CapEx across the industry, we've seen a little bit of a pullback this year from many of the majors. What's kind of been going on in the mom-and-pop market? How have those companies fared? What's the competition looking like with them? Yeah. I mean, again, it's an interesting dynamic because I'm not sure that I would characterize it as fleet pullback so much so as it's more fleet normalization. 2023 was a very strange year where us and our competitors took on a large amount of fleet, primarily in the front half of the year, and then used Q3 to sort of dispose of all of the gear that they couldn't dispose of over the last 24 months just because of the COVID impact. And so I think what you really see there is, and in our case specifically, you had a lot of gear that you really didn't get to put to work last year because of all of those sort of macro factors that were impacting the business. And so I think we've come out. We really want to see revenue growth at or greater than our fleet growth. That fleet efficiency is really what we were after. I wouldn't necessarily characterize that as a pullback. We just want the returns on that gear that we've invested in in 2023. I think when you take that down to the mom-and-pop local, that's a different dynamic in and of itself. They've got increased inflation times 2%-2.5% to what we've even seen. Then on top of that, they're doing it with an ABL probably that is three times what they remember it being the last time they were able to actually get gear. Then you layer onto that the actuality that these mom-and-pops probably aren't needing to participate or won't participate in this large project activity. I think all of those factors sort of align to you don't have an overfleeting inside of the industry. I think some of it is sort of factored in that local market where if they could get gear, it's 25% more than they remember it being. And then their ABL is through the roof. And so I think all of that has sort of played into we can now get in 2024, we can get the gear that we need to service. But I think the mom-pops, as we look at them, certainly not overfleeted and probably have been strained a little bit in trying to get new gear on. And they're probably doing that much more responsibly than they ever have just given the macro factors that are at play too. I think all that translates into a more disciplined market, either because of cost, ability to get gear. Certainly, the bigger players understand that and have the data, the resources, the technology to continue to be somewhat stable in how we go to market. Do you see all those operating difficulties for the smaller players driving consolidation, feeding into your M&A funnel at all? I don't know that it's necessary. I think a lot of it has to do with the lifecycle of a mom-and-pop player where the owner either doesn't have the stomach to continue to invest and refresh his fleet because it's a big commitment in terms of capital. And knowing that there's been consolidation around them, is the next five years going to look like the last five years? A lot of it also has to do with do they have a succession plan in their business? We've seen more consolidation or M&A opportunities around lack of a succession plan rather than as any outside forces driving them to want to sell. So that's really what happens in those markets. And certainly, they feel the pressure of the larger players getting larger and us having more capability. Part of it is around can they invest in technology to compete in the future? Can they do the type of things that the bigger players are doing every day to sort of outpace the market? That's what's driving it more so than I think the cost of or the logistics or anything like that. I think it's more around the other things that I've stated that are driving the M&A opportunities. Shifting over to used equipment, we've seen used values moderating a little bit as we look through the data. You've been able to realize really high used values as a% of OEC. What's feeding into that? Do you expect that to moderate very significantly over the coming year? You know, I think there's a couple of things at play there. For the last 7+ years, we were really sort of dependent on the auction market to dispose of our gear. And I think as we rolled through 2023, we have a stated goal now of sort of getting 70%-80% of our dispositions through the retail and wholesale channel. So I don't think that there's any mistake in that the auction prices are sort of moderating back to that 2018, 2019 level. But I think the flip side of that is, for us, there's upside in us being able to shift the mix of our sales out of the auction channel and into this retail wholesale channel with upside opportunity there as we sort of continue to get to that 70%-80% activity level in the retail and wholesale marketplace. Yeah. And the reason we're able to make that channel shift now is because the gear that we inherited at Spin was gear that I wouldn't necessarily say was premium quality or product that we specced or even product that we bought. It was part of inheriting that from the prior company. Everything that we're selling now is reaching that 7-, 8-, 9-year-old age to where it's product that we bought, we specced. We know it's only premium quality gear. And we feel comfortable about now selling that on a retail wholesale level. Whereas previously, we didn't want to have anything to do with that. So once you sell it in auction channel, it's as is, where is. Caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. But now we're selling gear that we have confidence in. We know we have spare parts. We know we can help maintain it. We know we can provide service to that next channel of owner of that equipment. Looking at the specialty business, putting the Cinelease divestment aside, with the change in maybe the mix of projects that you're servicing, are you seeing a shift in the strategy you've taken with regards to specialty, different demands for different areas? Are there any areas that you're targeting to expand into specifically? Yeah. Well, we are focused on what I would call adjacencies to our core business from a specialty movement. So recently, we've added trench shoring in the last two years, growing that out because that's a natural adjacency to our earth-moving product portfolio. We've expanded our capabilities around power generation to include load banks and other things that give us a natural expansion capability around portable generators or temporary generators. We've expanded our capabilities in the pumping area to have greater capability and do different types of pumping activity. We've expanded our HVAC specialty area to not only go from small gear but to much larger gear where we can provide backup cooling to large buildings, large facilities, or temporary cooldown to brand new facilities. So we've added sort of capability in areas that we already had some expertise or that were natural adjacencies in a product portfolio range. We're just about out of time. I just wanted to touch through a few questions on the coming quarters. Just as we sit here halfway through the Q2, has it largely trended in line with your expectations? Have you seen a shift in any of the underlying sentiment or data these last few weeks? Yeah. I mean, we can't really speak to Q2. I think that everything that we've spoken about from a fleet investment sort of returning to normal, meaning Q2 and 3, fleet dispositions in 1 and 4, is sort of driving the expectations. And we mentioned this in our Q1 call. Just given sort of the difference in fleet investment Q1 to Q1, we're anticipating moderating growth through Q2 just because of the normalization that has taken place. And then we would expect sort of the back half, 3 and 4, to hook up and be greater than the average rental revenue growth that we will have for the entire year. Thank you. With that, I think we're just out of time. Thank you so much for joining us today. Perfect. Thank you, Sherif. Thank you, everybody, for joining us this morning.