Aaron, President, and Mark Humphrey, SVP and CFO, and my workout buddy from yesterday. We have Leslie Hunziker here as well. Aaron, Mark, Leslie, thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you, Jerry. Thank you. Aaron is going to spend a few minutes on slides, and then we'll jump into the fireside chat discussion. Aaron, please, the floor is yours. All right. We will just run through a few slides here. Here is our typical safe harbor statement and non-GAAP financial measures. I am going to take you guys through a few slides just to make sure you all know who Herc is, Herc Rentals. This is our vision, mission, and values statement. We pledge, all of our employees pledge to equip our customers and communities to build a brighter future. You may or may not know, but Herc has been around for 60 years. We have been public for a little over 10 years. We have almost 10,000 team members, and we operate out of 600 locations in North America. Our addressable market is almost $90 billion, what is nice about it is that it continuously has growth fundamentals in it. Some good secular tailwinds there. We operate out of a set of core strengths that differentiate us in a highly fragmented industry, which puts us in a really stronger position today. We have technology, we have a diversified fleet, so we execute on all different facets of different end markets in a pretty exciting industry. We have been a market consolidator for five years. We have done over 50 acquisitions in that time, most recently, last year, did a very large acquisition called H&E Equipment Services. They were based in Baton Rouge and had 162 locations. Really fundamentally changed our footprint. Scale is really important in our business, so we picked up 162 new locations, as I mentioned, and about 2,500 team members. We got 30% bigger with the acquisition, so 30% more fleet, 30% more locations. Our Salesforce, which is maturing, got 30% larger as well. We have spent the last half of last year, after the acquisition, just building our foundation, going through exercises to optimize the fleet, integrate our teams, get all of our systems in place. We got that done, as we exited Q1, we were fully integrated. The way we look at 2026 is that we have built this new foundation of a business that is 30% larger, now we are ready to get the flywheel going in the back half of this year. Which also will give us the energy and the flywheel going into 2027. Just a little bit more about Herc here. Our basic fundamentals are about growing the core of the business, especially, which I am sure we will talk about in some Q&A, is really important to this business. Technology is becoming more and more of an important ingredient for success in this industry. I am sure there will be some questions about that. The way we allocate capital, right? We are a growth company. We invest to grow the business, we do it in a disciplined way. We do pay a dividend. We will continue that going for the future is the way we see it. Jerry, with that, I will pass it on to you, thank you. Well, thank you, Aaron. Super. Maybe we'll just pick up where you left off. Looking back at your 2023 Analyst Day, you folks spoke about growing the core, expanding in specialty, driving a bigger mode in tech. Where do we sit today relative to your targets from that time on those three initiatives, and can you talk about any pivot in the strategy from here, given the H&E integration, which obviously wasn't contemplated in 2023? Yeah. I think we've checked the box on all three of those items, right, that we said we were going to do. Maybe not necessarily in the same way we thought it was going to happen because every year the industry's changing a bit. Back in 2023, when we had the Investor Day, we had about 330 locations, and now we have well over 600. We did that through doing greenfield locations, about 20 a year, and then also just our tuck-in M&A strategy. When the H&E acquisition opportunity came in, that really propelled us forward. As we sit here today, we grew the core of the business. Our strategy's always been an urban market strategy to get more dense in the biggest MSAs in North America, so we've done that. From the technology point of view, we've done the same thing. We're continuously investing in our technology. We have a customer-facing tool called ProControl. That is where our customers will go to manage their fleet, manage their purchase orders, see how much utilization they're getting on their assets. It's also the place that our teams work with our customers on helping them be more efficient. We've advanced our technology in the way we sell used equipment. Really important when we brought the H&E team in, and we got 30% bigger with Salesforce. We already had the technology to help them go to market and sell in the way we want to sell, which is through channels, right? We want to sell in the higher proceeds channels of retail and wholesale versus auction as much as possible. We use technology to manage all of our logistics in North America. Very, very important, actually, we're going through another transformation on that now just to take that to the next level. Technology is a key component. The third piece again? Grow the core. Specialty intact. Specialty. Specialty. Oh, specialty. How can I forget about that? When you go to market in the equipment rental industry, and you want to be a premium equipment rental company, you have to have a specialty edge to your business. We've developed that from a new business 10 years ago to a business of scale now. We have over 200 locations that are just specialty businesses. 50 of those got opened just because of the footprint with the H&E acquisition. We like where we are. If you want to go into the mega project arena, you have to have a specialty component. That's your mission-critical side that allows you to compete at a different level. Whether it's power generation, climate control, industrial pump, these are the components that are really important. I think we checked the box on all three of those. Aaron, can we just double-click on specialty? Can you just talk to us about what proportion of your specialty business is power versus HVAC versus pumps? I want to double-click on the power side specifically, because that's where we're seeing a lot of opportunities for folks. We don't break down publicly what piece goes in each one of those, Jerry, but what I can tell you is that besides power, pump, and climate, the other components we call specialty is our trench business as well as our industrial tool business. Those are our five flagships. When we bought the H&E business, that was about 20% of our fleet. Once we closed that transaction, H&E didn't really have a specialty edge, which was what made them attractive to us because we could bring that into their business, and that's the value proposition, right? That's the revenue synergy. That 20% went down to 16%, and now we're building that back. I think what's interesting about Herc Rentals and specialty is that we're early into it. All these five that I just mentioned, these have a lot more room for us to scale. The rental penetration in our industry in those areas are very low. A lot lower than your core categories of material handling and aerial. A lot of opportunity for us. In terms of thinking back to your prior disclosures before H&E, I think you folks had said that 80% of your specialty business was power and HVAC. Is it fair to say that that proportion's higher now given the shortage of power in the industry? Can you rank order for us out of the product lines where you're seeing the strongest organic growth? The industry trend of power is very in demand. You read that with all types of companies' quarterly reports. It is the same with us. We describe power as anything that's diesel or battery or air that can run manufacturing. The diesel component is very popular because of the demand for AI. Battery has been a bigger position for us. A lot of our capital on the power side's gone to build out our fleet of large megawatt machines and battery power. To shift gears in terms of your first quarter performance, really strong dollar utilization acceleration. You folks were at the high end of the industry range, but everybody had dollar utilization improvement of at least a point versus normalcy. Can you talk about what clicked for the industry in the quarter that drove that inflection? Are we finally seeing pricing power? I think there's a couple of things to unpack there. I think one, the industry has done a tremendous job of sort of fleet in and on, just remaining balanced. I think taking this back to sort of the slowing of the local markets in the middle part of 2024. I think it probably took the better part of three to four quarters to sort of get aligned and sort of being able to process that slowing of the local market. The last 12 months or so, the industry on whole has been extremely disciplined with fleet in and on. I think as you sort of look at time utilization from an industry perspective year-over-year, that has certainly tightened, which I think has sort of driven the dollar utilization. I think for us sort of specifically though, there's a lot of self-help in what transpired in Q1 and what we anticipate to continue through two, three, and four. That was around our fleet optimization as we worked our way through the back half of 2025 with all of this new H&E gear. Getting it right, getting it in the right places, and then layering in synergy fleet, specialty fleet, et cetera, enabled us to better attack 2026. I think as you sort of look at Q1 in particular, some of that self-help is starting to take place. I think that's sort of driving us to this sort of inflection point that we've talked about inside of Q2 where we're going to go from this negative growth pro forma to a positive, and it sort of shoots us into the back half of the year. I think you sort of pull it apart, Jerry, and you've got sort of the industry being disciplined on one hand, and then from us in particular, just the self-help component of this, a more experienced sales force as we enter season, et cetera, will certainly help drive time utilization and ultimately dollar utilization. Mark, our fieldwork on that front, we heard from multiple folks that 2024, exiting the year, time utilization tight for the industry, that continued into 2025. Sure. Pricing we heard really took off in March and April. Going from pretty minimal pricing to up about one point in March, one and a half points in April, and another one point in May. Really good acceleration now that utilization has improved. Is that your take on the way this cycle is playing out? What are your observations? Maybe a little bit different take, Jerry. I think that on one hand, the industry has been quite disciplined in terms of the in and on that we just spoke about. I think that in order to ultimately gain sort of significant pricing lift, I think we need to see sort of a re-emergence of the local market. I think there's still incremental fleet tightening in that local market that needs to take place to sort of drive that sort of really incremental pricing lift. I think that as we sit here today, we, specifically Herc Rentals, has talked about a muted local market. I think that that's sort of the environment that we've been in, and I think it's the environment sort of given the interest rate outlook for the back half of 2026. My take on it would be that we'll see sort of continued, yes, we've got a really disciplined fleet on whole industry-wise, but I think you're going to need to see a local market sort of resurgence to sort of get that ultimate pricing lift that we've seen historically. in terms of the way the cycle played out last year, we didn't really get to see a normal pickup in rental rates seasonally over the course of construction season. Are we seeing that this year? Not beyond normal seasonality, but at least the half a point to a point a month that you normally see in a construction season, are we back to normal seasonality? Yeah, I don't want to speculate necessarily on what will happen as we work our way through season. I would tell you, though, high level, that where the fleet and the industry is placed sort of heading into season should dictate a better sort of performance year-over-year than 2025. Got it. in terms of the type of equipment that's most in demand, can you spend a minute and unpack that? Where are you seeing the pockets of the most significant opportunity to push pricing? Which products stand out? For us, since we did the acquisition in June, a lot of self-help fleet efficiency type exercises that we went through to get our fleet, post the acquisition, in the right spot. We entered the year of 2026 with fleet efficiency. That's really important for us to have the lens on, hey, where is the pricing opportunities, right? These mega projects drive a certain amount of demand for specific type of products. Whether you're talking power type products, unique aerial equipment with the right safety features that space wants. You're seeing those areas, kind of the tighter supply and demand economics going on right now. The core fleet, aerial, material handling, compact earth, they really look normal. Okay? It's not like there's not enough fleet in the market right now. I think really what's going on is there's just good discipline going on in the industry to kind of make sure that we're supplying the right amount of gear for the right amount of demand that's in the marketplace right now. Were you surprised Caterpillar was able to build dealer inventories for earthmoving as much as they were in the first quarter? Is that concerning to you folks on the supply-demand? It's not something that we look at as an early indicator for our business. Cat's number one primary objective is to sell gear. I know that during the last three years, they had too much inventory, so they're trying to sell it down. Not just them, but I would say anybody that was in the dealership network, that's what they were trying to do. The fact that they have to kind of restock doesn't surprise me. Coming back to the fleet efficiency comments that you made, Aaron, in terms of driving that higher. Before the acquisition, H&E pricing was about at 7 points lower than yours. How long until we harmonize pricing? Where are we in that transition? Great question, Jerry. I think if you think about that in a couple of different buckets, they had contract customers, which was probably about a 1/3 of the revenue base, and 2/3 of it was in the spot market, really not too terribly different than the way that Herc Rentals looks on a day-to-day basis. I think that given sort of where we are today, sort of the dyssynergies that we took on early, I think this is a three-year sort of lift. I think that the contract piece, we renegotiated all the contracts straight away, got some pricing lift there. I think that there's an element of showing our value, the Herc Rentals value, to those contract customers over a period of time and sort of lifting those rates up over that period of time. I think on the local side, the spot market side, if you will, they're now in our technology stack, they're using our Optimus price tool. Those guardrails that Herc Rentals has sort of always operated with, our new sales folks are operating with those same guardrails today. I think that back to my earlier commentary, I think that you're going to need to see sort of a lift and a resurgence in the local market to sort of drive that pricing lift in totality. I think as you're thinking about this, I think it's a three-year accomplishment as opposed to something of a shorter duration. I think it sort of happens naturally over the three-year period. When does the clock start? First quarter of 2026 or May of 2025? We obviously recognized approximately $40 million of rev synergies in totality in 2025. In fairness, that was really one quarter under a consolidated roof. In my view, it's sort of 2026, 2027, 2028, is sort of the three-year run. Mark, you've spoken about dollar utilization trends improving over the course of a year. Can you talk about how much of a contribution you're expecting from time utilization? Because now that the business is integrated, you folks have a lot of fleet that you can put to work. I think that it's a great question. We certainly are anticipating, expecting dollar utilization improvement as we work our way through from one into two and three and four. Those generally, you can sort of flip a coin as to which one has the higher dollar utilization, generally speaking. I think that should be the year that we experience this year. I think that the components of that are absolutely time utilization lift, year-over-year. That comp gets a bit easier, quite honestly, as you sort of work your way through the back half of the year. Not to be understated though, the specialty piece of this and the investments on the specialty side, which sort of add 800- 1,000 basis points of dollar utilization improvement, with these new 50 branches that we layered in in the back half of 4Q and into Q1. As those begin to mature and ramp, seasonally, we'll get some lift there too. I think it's really a combination of time utilization and mix from the incremental specialty that we layer into the business. You gentlemen spoke about the bifurcation between data center power versus local markets. One interesting mega project vertical that's now inflecting is semiconductors and electronics. Can you talk about, do you have visibility on how much your fleet deployed towards that end market is down versus the 2024 peak? Thanks to work from our tech team, it looks like we're on our way back for CapEx back to 2024 peak, as early as next year. If that happens, trying to frame how much of a drawdown we've seen and what that move could mean. Yeah. The chip manufacturing has been something we've been watching for 15, 20 years, because typically when they build a chip plant, they don't usually stop, right? There's another phase, and they continuously are doing improvements in those plants. When the CHIP Act came out, what was it? 2020, end of 2020 or 2021, several chip manufacturing plants popped up pretty quickly. Those are large projects. You're talking a $10 billion project. Throw on a couple more phases, it's a $20 billion-$25 billion project. The only thing that has that type of scale is like an LNG plant. That early wave after the CHIP Act, there was a lot of chip activity, a lot of growth, a lot of fleet went into those projects. As you illustrated, Jerry, they kind of came down. Never completely came off. As I said, there's always works going on on those projects. It came down, and that fleet went into other opportunities that allowed us to really grow our urban market strategy in places like Phoenix, and other places. You see the next wave of chip manufacturing coming out, like in New York and another phase in Idaho, another one in Arizona. I think it's probably going to peak higher for Herc than it did the first time. You're already starting to see that? Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. The starts have just started to accelerate as well. Yeah. In terms of the type of equipment or the equipment intensity when we're talking about building out more data centers, less warehouse, what does that mean for Herc? What do the data centers mean for Herc? Relative. For a dollar in data center investment, it feels like there's more equipment intensity, based on what we're seeing on sites, versus if we're standing up a box for a warehouse with lower content. I'm curious how you folks think about it. We use a metric. We use it across the board, 2% of the project value will be addressable to the rental market, and we kind of use that as our proxy to measure, okay, how much fleet's going to be deployed at that project, et cetera. A standard warehouse, like a distribution center, will be probably on the higher end. A data center, a lot of that capital that they're deploying to the project's going to the gear that's going on inside. There's also a lot of pressure on a data center project to get it done and get it fast and do it safely. There's a lot of people watching those projects as opposed to just a standard distribution center. Things happen quickly. I think there's a lot of money at play to get that thing up and running. In my experience, the pressure on a data center build has been greater than a distribution center build. The equipment intensity is greater on a data center project. Per dollar? Yeah. Because there's more mission-critical equipment going into there because of the speed they want to go to market. If I told you we're going to have 30% growth in semis investment 2027 versus 2026, 30% growth in data center demand, and 10%-20% in power, and local markets flat, you'd be okay with that from a Herc standpoint? Local market is the biggest part of the business. We'd like to see that cycle kick in. We'd like those tailwinds. I think a premium equipment rental company can grow in the current environment. Yes. Then in terms of the type of equipment on sites, I'm curious what you make of this. We heard from the channel that there's a growing premium for late-model year equipment and new equipment versus older because nobody wants a five-year-old boom on the data center side. Is that happening? Is that having an impact on used values? I'll tell you, if there's 10 situations like that, maybe a third of them have that type of stringent demand. It really doesn't have as much to do with the age of the equipment, it's the, t hey want the most current safety features available on the equipment. That's what it's about, safety. Got it. To shift gears, just given the post-COVID undersupply then oversupply, it's taken the industry longer to drive dollar yield higher. There's concerns about competitive discipline market, EquipmentShare, Caterpillar. You folks have been in the industry for a long time, not to age you. Can you talk about how you view competitive intensity today, especially given the Rouse data and consolidation on the one hand versus the accelerating penetration by EquipmentShare and what Cat might do in this market? Well, what we've seen over the last five to seven years is just more consolidation of the industry. It's still highly fragmented. The top three equipment rental players, us being the third largest, control about 35% of the market, so it's still highly fragmented. Because of that, the professionalism, the discipline has increased. That's a good thing. There's always new entrants into this space, and the companies you mentioned, they've been around for doing this for a number of years, too. I think they both have ambitious goals. We haven't seen much change. Where you see sometimes there's strengths to certain regional areas, and they were always stronger, and they continue to be, and vice versa. Not a ton of significant change in the landscape. It's just, I think the professionalism and the discipline continues to improve. Would that view change if Cat were to buy Genie? Well, today, we don't buy product from Cat, so that would be something that could change. Yeah. We'll see. Okay. In terms of capital allocation, you've been very clear, Mark, the focus is to get leverage back down. Sure. Once you're back in that 2x- 3x of leverage, what's the Herc capital deployment playbook? Any different from what we've seen before the H&E deal? I don't think so. I think you said it right. Our focus today is to get back inside of that 2x- 3x leverage ratio, upper end by the end of 2027. I think from there, it'll probably look very similar to the way that it used to look. I think that we'll turn back on greenfields, tuck-in M&A. Again, I think we've said all along that we'll evaluate any and all deal. I don't think any of that changes. I think that what we acquired in June of 2025 deserves requisite attention from us at this point in time. I think as we sort of execute in and through that acquisition, we'll probably turn back on those same faucets that were on before, greenfields and tuck-in M&A, and continuing to do that in a manner that sort of continues to build scale inside of the top 100 markets. I would add that we're obviously a growth company, so the way we deploy our capital first and foremost is into our fleet to grow the business. With the H&E acquisition, we have a whole new platform to build diversification and drive our synergies as well as our specialty business. The first place we'll go is investing with fleet. For sure. In a reasonable, disciplined way. In terms of on the technology side, you folks have had really strong logistics performance. Obviously, H&E throws that off over the past year and a half. Your fleet unavailable performance has been really good. Are you folks doing anything interesting with the growing set of data from telematics? Any AI initiatives to allow you to drive time utilization, maybe even higher than you have historically? Yeah. We have a great IT team. We're always focused on driving efficiency through technology. We got great business intelligence tools that all of our sales professionals and our management teams utilize to do a better job every single day. Along comes some opportunities. We got a lot bigger with the H&E business, and we had some quick synergy wins with bringing them in with our logistics because our markets got denser. We could drive and utilize the assets, the trucks that we use to deliver gear much more efficiently, but also got a lot more complex. The dynamics of raising fuel prices and how that impacts a bigger entity, these are the things that get a little bit more complex and dynamic. We're embarking on a whole new logistics transformation to drive more and more efficiencies in our larger scaled business. Along comes AI, the way we're using AI today opens up a lot more opportunities for a lot of things. I'll name a few. One would be, when equipment goes on rent and it comes back, you have to know what kind of condition it went in. We're now deploying AI to measure any change in that, so that it takes some of the human factor out, and we can be more efficient with making sure equipment stays to the standards we expect w ith the quality equipment. We're using AI in safety already. We've deployed 7,000 two-way facing cameras on all of our vehicles on the road that our employees drive every day. AI is helping our drivers be more safe, so we're a safer operator on the road. One of the things I'm most excited about is the way our team is deploying AI. We're now deploying it, the tools across the organization, but in the way that Herc feels is responsible. Our IT team has created our own HercGPT, our team members across the network are using it in ways to make their jobs more efficiently. One thing I'm excited about is what it can do for predictive fleet demand and help our fleet planning processes across our organization. I think that's something that over the next 30 days, we'll get deeper into and be able to have something workable as we go into 2027. HercGPT has a nice ring to it. I'm assuming you're using ChatGPT for the back end, or are you using Claude? It's designed kind of proprietary with our own IT team. It's not just the ChatGPT. It's not that, it's just a kind of play on words. Combination, actually. Yeah. Got it. ChatGPT tech with your reams of data. It allows our teams to go use whatever AI tool they need to use that fits best to what function they're operating in. To do it also in an economical way. A secure way. I think that's the other piece here, too, is that, publicly facing data, we have to ensure is safe. We've sort of designed this in a manner that allows our employees to be secure while also being more efficient. In terms of monitoring conditions, really interesting. How much of an improvement are you seeing in labor hours? How much of improvement are you seeing in terms of days reduction to turn equipment in the pilots that you run? What's that look like? One of the pilots I'd mention is the photo compliance with the damages. Incredible. When we started it, the compliance was 10%. You bring this AI tool in, and you get the organization kind of rallying around it in the pilots, we got to 90%. Now it's at the point where we could start to deploy it across the regionals and then across the organization. There's a financial implication to that. That benefits your P&L when you can control those kind of costs better. Super. That's all the time we have. Please join me in thanking Aaron, Mark, and Leslie for supporting our conference. Thank you very much. Thanks, Jerry. Thanks, Jerry.