All right, so I guess we'll continue with the afternoon session. Next up is JBI, Janus International. Very pleased to have with us the CFO, Anselm Wong. Anselm, thanks for being here. Thanks, Brad. Great to be here. Maybe if you could start out with just kind of for some of those that may not be as familiar with Janus, just give us a little bit of background about the company, kind of how the business has evolved to where it is today? Sure. It's glad to talk about it. Janus is the largest full solution self-storage provider in the industry. So what that means is that we provide all the interior items, the doors, the hallways, anything kind of made out of steel for the inside of a self-storage facility. That's two-thirds of our business, and we also have a technology piece called Nokē that actually provides access control so that you can support a solution where a storage operator does not need people to run the facility. So that's a growing part of that business. Another third of our business is our commercial piece, where we also do commercial rolling steel and sheet doors that are similar to our self-storage side, which is a growing piece. So really nice, broad portfolio of business that we have in Janus. Great. Appreciate that. I guess in terms of kind of maybe to level set us, in terms of the state of the industry, you know, maybe how do you see kind of the state of the self-storage industry today from kind of an overall, supply-demand perspective? Sure. Yeah, if you look at our big customers, so the REITs and the institutional guys we call are about 30% of the market, and they're public, yeah, a lot of them, and they actually disclose their occupancy rate, and that's how you tell how healthy the industry is. If you look at it, pretty much most of the guys are printing a low 90% occupancy rate. Just for reference, normal steady state is about 85%, so they're above what we would call steady state occupancy rate. So pretty healthy, a lot of strong demand, and I think if you look at the drivers for self-storage, a lot of them happen regardless of economic environment. We always call it, you know, death, divorce, you know, dislocation, like, stuff like that happens regardless of economic environment. The only one that's really not kind of running on all cylinders is the housing market. Everyone knows the housing market's a bit weaker now. We saw the results today, but that's the only thing. Everything else is running well for the self-storage industry, and the demand is there for it, and I think that's why you see our business supplying, as well as competitors supplying into this industry. Okay, great. That makes sense. And then I guess from a utilization perspective, if we think about kind of bridging the gap between kind of low 90s today to 85%, like, do you think we get down to 85% in the intermediate term, or how do you think about that, and, and what are the implications- Sure ... on the supply side? Yeah, there's a lot of, I think there's still a lot of, drivers of demand for here, so I don't necessarily see it falling that quickly down to the 85%. I think, over time, maybe it'll settle out a bit more. I think for self-storage, what we've seen is that if you look at self-storage, maybe before the pandemic and post-pandemic, two new drivers came out of the pandemic. One was just decluttering. A lot of people work from home. They needed space, so they weren't moving, so they went to self-storage to hold their stuff. The other driver, which was a big one, was- Yeah ... what we call distribution, which is really commercial use of storage. So if you look at, storage, traditionally, you would think of, hey, someone's moving, they need temporary storage, or you had a gardener or a plumber using it for storage. What we saw during the pandemic was an increased usage of storage for commercial warehousing, as well as running a business. So you heard about a lot of these side hustles where people are doing, you know, Amazon Marketplace, eBay, and they're selling business. Well, a lot of these smarter entrepreneurs figured out, hey, storage is actually the cheapest place where I can get warehousing space. And if you think about it, you can get a 10-by-10, depending on the city, maybe it's $120-$150. If you're trying to get commercial retail space or commercial warehouse space, it's a lot more expensive than that. So there's a big driver, and part of the reason why we can see this is that in our sites that we have our Nokē solution installed, we can track the data for usage, how many digital keys, how often the doors open and close. And we've seen that even in the short period of time that I've been here, that we've seen it grow from, call it, mid- to low teens to almost 20% for commercial usage. And you start looking at it and, you know, I've seen it myself and, when I use my storage unit, that you have people literally running their businesses out of self-storage, and I think it's a smart use for them. And they're smart. These guys are very cunning in terms of looking at, hey, what's the cheapest place I can use a facility for? And if you listen to some of our customers, our bigger customers, and they're public or exposed, they're now saying the same thing, that self-storage is the cheapest form of warehousing for these customers. So it's another driver that's just really bolstering. So, you know, to your earlier question, how does that impact it? I think it's gonna help keep the occupancy rates high, and then when, you know, when housing comes back, it's gonna further push it up as well. So I don't necessarily see it dropping that too quickly back to equilibrium until, you know, we build out a lot more storage. Okay, that makes sense. And then I guess if we think about the 4%-6% kind of long-term growth algorithm, how do you think about pricing as kind of a component of that? And have you seen any signs of price sensitivity amongst your customers? Yeah, sure. It's a great question. So when we thought about the long-term guidance for the growth is that we excluded pricing, so there's no pricing in that number. Just in terms of how pricing is, steel is one of our biggest components, so we really adjust based on that. And if you follow the steel indices, you can see that it actually was coming down the end of last year, and it started spiking up and then came back down. So it's kind of really in a position where it's fluctuating in a tighter band right now. Because of that, we don't see necessarily that big a move on pricing one way or the other right now, if it stays there. Now, elections could change anything, right, in terms of what they decide to do with steel. There's an acquisition out there that is not approved yet, where they're looking at what do you do with that? So I think if steel stays kind of in the tight band there is, I don't necessarily see that there will be a lot of pricing pressure up or down at this point. If the steel price changes, of course, that'll change that dynamic, but right now it seems fairly stable within that tight band. ... Okay, and then maybe on the margin side. So if we look at the midpoint of your 2024 EBITDA margin guidance, it implies just under 27% margins. That's kind of at the high end of your long-term margin targets. So maybe talk about what you see as kind of the biggest levers in margin expansion- Sure. over the year. Yeah, it's pretty exciting to see this business. We've done a lot of productivity in our core businesses, and that's really helped us drive outside of price increases in the past, helped to improve the margin. So if you think about it, we're always looking for opportunities to be more efficient and build. We just had our announcement, we just completed the last piece of equipment in our Poland factory. So lower cost, you know, no Brexit issues, so it'll be cheaper there. We're in the middle of expanding our Arizona factory. We're at capacity now, so we're not as efficient. So that's gonna help improve the long-term margin. I think really long term, also is that, in the past couple of years since I've been here, what we've been doing is really filling up the back office. As we became a public company through our SPAC, we really didn't have the right resources to run it efficiently, so we've been adding certain resources in the back end, in, you know, finance and legal and HR. We're completing IT this year, and after that, I think my expectation is that we get to a more steady state where we'll get, you know, fixed cost leverage for the margin rate. So, I know we're at the high end now, and a lot of analysts, like, are you gonna update that? We'll probably update that a little bit later in the year in terms of. But I think there's opportunity for upside in terms of the margin rate. Okay, great. And then in terms of, this recent acquisition you recently announced on, earlier this week, this TMC acquisition, looks like the purchase price was about $60 million. Maybe if you could just talk about the strategic fit of that business, and how should we think about kind of the annualized revenue and EBITDA contribution? Sure. Yeah, it's an exciting business. I think, if you look at our strategy has been, is that, we've talked about adding service, in our self-storage side of our business. There really is no service provider in self-storage, and a lot of our customers have been asking us, "Hey, we need a provider that's a national provider to provide service so that we can maintain our facilities." That could be as simple as a door replacement or even, like, fixing, painting or stuff like that. There just isn't that national provider right now. So what we've been doing is we have a business called Facilitate that we've been growing organically, but it takes a while, so you're building out relationship with subcontractors in various fields, and it's taking a longer time. One of the options Ramey and I talked about is that, how do we accelerate that? Since there's not a provider in our industry, let's look at adjacent industry. So that's where this company came up, and Ramey has known the company for a while, knew the prior owner, who was the father, who passed away, and the son we bought the company from. Just fit certain things. We looked at it, and it was nice margin for this business, nice growth they've done. They've been in this business 30 years, really big, big customers, and then really a plethora of really subcontractor that really should be built over many years that they have in the Southeast, that we can leverage for our self-storage site. So we looked at it and said, "It's a great business by itself, as well as the opportunity to roll up other similar type of companies across the U.S." And if you think of that industry, the LTL industry, it's a growing industry right now. If you look at all the big players, they all announce, either expansion or actually adding facilities, so there's a big need for service there. So we're really excited about that, and what we think long term is that we're gonna continue to roll up to add to the portfolio, but also leverage that subcontracting, labor force that they've built out to accelerate our Facilitate initiative on the self-storage side. So it's a, it's a win-win from all sides for this acquisition for us. And then anything you can say about kind of the revenue contribution or- Sure. We haven't actually announced anything public. We're going to update our guidance later on this year. But I think if you look at the EBITDA, the EBITDA margins are in line with our core business, which is one of the things we were looking for. You wouldn't normally think that with a service business, but because they offer a solution that is very specific and into an industry that is really looking for someone to collapse all the different contractors they use, so that there's, you know, one throat to choke, that's the value that they provide. So if you think about a typical site that they get, I need to fix the door that's broken, or I got to fix the dock that's broken. Well, what they do is that they go there, they take a look at what is broken and needs fixed, but then they look at everything else around there. So you might need concrete work, you might need painting, you might need plumbing, electric. They have all those contractors, and what they do is they give an updated proposal with all those extra things on their proposal, and they're able to actually charge a premium for that. And as the customer, if you think of your customer, these items need to be fixed sooner or later. If you actually do the other way, they would have the individual contract, so they make it easy for the customer to say, "Hey, look, I contract you, you bring the contractor, you get it all fixed in one shot." So I think that's their secret sauce and why they've been successful. Okay, great. And then maybe just kind of stepping back, kind of higher level, curious what you're seeing in terms of the M&A environment, kind of what are the focus areas, what are the key hurdles that have to be met? And then also, what's kind of the mix of deals between self-storage and commercial? Sure. Yeah, we're obviously have a big share in self-storage. There's still definitely deals there. There's no more national competitors, but there's a lot of regional players, regional door manufacturers, that are available there. There's BETCO, which is our build business that does the full build, not just the doors and hallways; they actually build the building. There's competitors in that area that are, you know, out there that are available. If you look at the commercial side of thing, this deal we just made was commercial, but we were looking at expanding in geographic. We don't have really commercial or geographic or international business, so there's opportunity there to grow, as well as to add to the portfolio. If you look at a commercial space, there might be some big players out there, but there's a lot of niche type of doors are out there that are available, that are really good margin, that are fragmented, that we would like to add to the portfolio to, you know, broaden our line as well, and continue that growth there. So I think it's a balance, and I think the biggest thing that's for us, that we're trying to balance with all the M&As out there, is paying the right price. I think we're still in a part of the economy where people are still expecting some really high multiples for what they're looking for. We're obviously not gonna overpay for anything. We're gonna pay a fair price for it. So what we've just seen is just really high prices for a lot of the deals out there. They're still on the plate. What we've seen is more actionable, what we've just actioned, is that if it's a founder-led company where there's a driver for them to exit, then you're gonna get a more reasonable price, and that's where the targets we've been focused on to get, you know, completion on some of these. I think we'll always continue to look at the other ones that are higher multiples right now, but I just don't think they're actionable right now in terms of the prices that they want. Okay. I guess from a leverage perspective, I think you guys exited Q1 around 1.5x net leverage. Mm-hmm. Your long-term target is 2-3 times, so you have some capacity on the balance sheet. How do you think about kind of the trade-off between M&A versus buybacks from here? Sure. Yeah, I think priority, we've always said, and I don't think we're changing, is it's M&A is still a priority. We do also understand that there's some part of our investor set that looks at our stock, and it's undervalued. We, well, agree it's undervalued right now, so we'll pull that lever if there's timing there. But I think priority that we've been looking at is that there's enough M&A targets that we would like to allocate more of our capital to that versus a buyback at this point. But would it be fair to assume that, you know, maybe there could be some base level of buybacks as sort of a- Yeah, we're looking at it right now. I think if the... Let's just say there's a couple of other targets on the plate right now that we're looking at. Depending on timing of those ones, we could get to that point where we get to base level. But at this point, we said, "Let's just make sure we get through integration of this target, as well as the ones that are on the plate right now, see if those come out as well. Okay. Makes sense. And I guess maybe zooming into the self-storage side of the business, so at the total company level, you guys guided about 4% growth for the year. Maybe within self-storage, how do you think about that growth outlook shaping out between new construction versus R3? Yeah, it's been surprising that the new construction has held up as strong as it has. We could see it in obviously our backlog and our pipeline, but what we've seen is really our customers are deciding to meet demand through new construction. If you look at our R3, our R3 has a component which is conversions, and that's just basically taking, like, a Toys "R" Us that went out of business and turning it to self-storage. There hasn't been a lot of opportunities for that in recent times. If you look at the news, there's not been, you know, a bunch of bankruptcies, so there's not been a lot of properties that you can convert to storage. So I think the demand is still there. So our customers have decided to say, "Look, if there's that opportunity's not there, which is a quicker way to get supply, we, we've got to go to the traditional way, which is new construction." That's why we've seen that shift to maintain the strength on new construction. I think R3 eventually will come back, but it's just that there's, that conversion opportunities are not there, right now, versus just going into a new construction opportunity to meet demand. Okay. I guess on the new construction side of things, when we hear, you know, maybe some of the public REITs are talking about expectations for lower new construction, you know, how does that kind of line up with what you guys are seeing? Sure. Yeah, I think there's a balance of what they're trying to do in terms from a new construction. To us, again, we don't have a bias in either one. We make the same margin, R3 or new construction. I think, you know, a lot of them are still playing new construction. I think they're kind of trying to be conservative in what they've said. If you look at, you know, one of our bigger customers, U-Haul, Joe Shoen, he puts it the best way. He looks at storage as a long game. It's not a short game. So you can't just stop building. You have to make sure that you're continuing to meet demand, because demand moves all over the place. There's a heat map where they, we watch, where you can see where people are moving. And obviously, from their business, they actually own the trucks, so they can see where people rent the trucks and where they're going. So you can see that there's definitely storage demand moving to different areas. So you can't really just say I'm going to stop building, because then you're gonna be, you know, no supply. And you think about it, it takes usually, for new construction, the planning side takes 2-3 years, and then when we get on, it's that last piece, but that's another 9-12 months. So you got a 3-4-year time period that it takes. If you stop, then you'll see that impact. I think that's what happened during the GFC, and that's why I think all of them, all the REITs, like, that was probably the mistake they did in the GFC, is that they stopped building, because they had strong balance sheet. All their big, you know, institutional and REIT customers all had a strong balance sheet. So I think they've all said that they're gonna leverage their balance sheet and flex it in times like this. Okay. And I'm curious what you're seeing on the non-institutional side of self-storage. What does your visibility look like there, and how does that compare to the institutional side? Yeah, our visibility is similar to the on the non-institutional side, and what we're seeing is interest rates definitely have had an impact to some of those customers. I would say on the lower end of the storage segment, where you have a bit more price-sensitive customer, because we're a premium product, you see those customers having a smaller impact for the interest. But I think even the small mom and pops, they're taking advantage of technology. So they've taken our Nokē solution and said, "Hey, look, yes, interest rates might be a bit higher, but if I can reduce my running costs, I can still make the math work." And if you think about a facility, the costs that can really impact the highest dollars, you can't... The highest cost they have is property tax, can't really do anything about. Facility costs, can't do much. Labor is the third, and it's up there. So that's the one thing they can control. So what they've been doing, the smarter ones have said, "Hey, look, if I can eliminate the labor, I can actually reduce my running costs," which then helps them with their financial model, to make it work. And, we've seen a lot of our customers in that smaller space, smaller customer site, taking advantage of Nokē and installing it to get that benefit. And then curious what you're seeing on the institutional, on the, sorry, international side of things. Just kind of how you see the phasing of demand throughout the year. I mean, do you think that segment could get back to growth in the back half of the year? Yeah, it's been interesting. I think, you know, when the U.K. went into recession, or official recession, our customers kind of took that and did a pause, and basically, you know, didn't cancel them, but put a lot of stuff on hold, which was interesting. We had never seen anything like that before. I think, the good thing is they didn't cancel the project, and we're seeing them start opening back, but I think there was just a cautious by them to say, "Hey, look, let's see what's gonna happen out there, you know, you know, in the next few months." So I-- our hope is that that changes, you know, it starts opening back up, and then there's the demand to back in. And, you know, the good thing is that there is a number of projects that we're working on already from a Nokē side internationally. That gives us, you know, the confidence that there is, it's just a matter of timing, is that they've already seen Green Storage, who's the leading Nokē customer in our EMEA business. They've seen all the benefits they've got, so a lot of the other customers are looking and saying, "We need to do something similar to get that same benefit they've got. How should we think about the ramp-up of operations at the new Poland facility and kind of how that drives margin improvement? Oh, it's great. It's like it's finally we have a site within central Europe that, you know, solves the issue, 'cause I think you wouldn't have thought it was a big issue, but we built all our products in the U.K., and we shipped them in, and when Brexit happened, there's a lot of issues in terms of importing product, and that caused a lot of friction for them. This site actually resolved it 'cause in within the EU, but from a cost point of view, we got lower labor costs there than our U.K. site, and we actually built a more efficient, automated site in that Poland site. It's taking a bit long to get up to speed because just like anything else, the equipment we bought had lead times, and the lead times got delayed a bit, so we didn't get all the equipment until April implemented, but we should be fully functioning now with all the equipment that's been put in place now. So, you know, the way I look at it for long term, maybe not right away, but there's probably somewhere around 5-10 basis points that you can easily see from a cost reduction point of view for the automated line of products. And just to be clear, right, Europe uses two types of doors. They use a swing door as well as the traditional Europe, America's sheet door. The swing door is what the doors that we've automated there, so there's no people involved. It's a full automated line that actually builds a door from, you know, input all the way to the end, so that's where we see the benefit from. Sorry, just to clarify, the 5 to 10- Yeah. Was that 5-10 percentage points? Yeah, on the swing door type of product that we sell, so it's about half the business. Okay. Makes sense. And then maybe switching over to the commercial side, just curious if you could talk about kind of what you're seeing there and what the latest trends are? Yeah, commercial is, was a bit surprise for us for Q1. I think what we saw is we, we saw the normalization of the carports and shed segment of the business. So that normalized, and even more than we thought, we lost a bit of share there. And what we saw there is that that carport and shed biz got even more competitive than it has ever been. We used to be able to ship... So we don't have a site there, we usually ship into that location, and we could get away with, say, 2-3-day shipping time to get product there. As the markets got more competitive there, we talked to a few of our big customers there, and one of the feedback was, "You need to be here, have physical stock inventory, in Mount Airy, North Carolina," that's where they are, so that we can actually pull on it right away instead of waiting for it. So they've, you know, reduced sales to us because we weren't there. So what we've done already is that we found a warehouse that we're gonna stock certain product there, as well as add some other components around the door, that we can sell them right away, and we'll be physically up there. So that'll help, improve the carport shed piece. I think in the other parts of the commercial business, it's been fairly stable. Our sheet door, commercial sheet door that we sell through our partners there, it seems pretty stable, and then our commercial rolling steel doors, that piece has been continuing to be stable as well. So I think what we saw was just a small temporary share loss because of specific need of having inventory in that location that we've resolved now. So we think that that'll be up and running probably sometime by Q3, so we'll probably get back to growth in the back half, or most likely somewhere around end of Q3 to Q4, that we'd see commercial. But I think it was just this one-off thing that we saw that we weren't sure that we ever had to have a physical location there. Okay, I guess we'll pause for a moment and see if there's any questions in the audience. I had one. You were talking earlier about M&A, and it sounded like you were very focused on doing, doing that moving forward, but most of the deals you were kind of talking about seemed a little more bolt on. Would you guys ever consider doing a larger, more, you know- Oh, yes, definitely. I think everything's on the plate for us. I think Ramey is very inquisitive, so everything we've looked at is small and large. I think the bigger ones have the same issue that I pointed out before, is that the expectation on price has been there. I don't know if you guys have seen it, but I don't think it's changed so far. We've looked at a number of deals, even some transformational ones, and the price point has been still very high. I think everyone's still coming off the pandemic kind of volumes and expecting to be paid on those type of numbers, when even I can tell you one deal we looked at where the numbers dropped 20% in the current forecast, and they wanted the price to be back on the prior year's number. I said, "That doesn't make sense for us to pay," but that's what they wanted. ... It It seems like Nokē's a no-brainer. Seems like a win-win. So what are the barriers to faster adoption, and how aggressively are you marketing this to your customers? Great question. So, Nokē Ion, the new product we just announced, addresses a lot of that. So it is a no-brainer, but we also saw that, there's a different customer set that doesn't. It's not that the price doesn't make sense. In their application, it didn't make sense 'cause what our Nokē ONE, which is our current product, is like a Cadillac, full feature, has every feature in it. Some of our customers want a less specced product, so that's why we came back and said, "Look, we hear you. We're gonna come back with a lower spec one, so your entry point is lower. You want all the full features, you can get them. It's optional now." So that lowers the entry point for it, so that's gonna, you know, help a lot. It also is more stable. It's, there's no battery in it. It's a hardwired product, so you don't have to worry about changing the batteries, and then just stability. So when you're working inside a storage facility, it's all steel, so wireless technology doesn't necessarily go the best. What we've built with this product, because we don't have a space limitation now, you can change the antenna on it, so you can make it much longer if you need to get the better reception. So we hit a lot of things that our customers saying why they were not adopting it as fast. So we're beta testing it now, so hopefully we'll have the launch. Timing is about Q3, end of Q3, we'll have the production. That should actually improve a lot of it, 'cause we've shown it to big REITs, small customers, and everyone's agreed that they really like this new product 'cause it hits what they were, you know, complaining about with the old product. Old product's good, it's just that it's a Cadillac, and this allows them to get... The guys who say, "I just want basic access control," you can have it now. If you want the full, you know, motion sensor, temp sensor, all these other sensors, you can have that too. So I think it really helped us understand, just doing a lot of voice of the customer and just matured the product line to, to grow there. So I think, you know, I wish I could predict it perfectly, but I think this will hit a lot of the right buttons that a lot of customers are looking for. So we should see much improved adoption, 'cause if you think about it from a price point, we haven't announced price, but it, our cost from cost side is meaningfully lower, so we can go down a lot lower, to actually still make the same margin rates, to get it out there. So we're excited about it, and a lot of our customers are as well. Great. Thank you. Thanks. I guess maybe just one last one on the commercial side. So on our earnings call, you talked about some initiatives for geographic expansion and product enhancements. Just curious if you could elaborate more on that and kind of where you see the biggest opportunities there? Sure, yeah. I think, for geographic expansion for us is that we have the factory that we started in ASTA in the Georgia area, so we can deliver to the Southeast area. We just put a factory a couple of years ago in the Dallas area for the West Coast. What we don't have is the central, so we've been doing milk runs to establish a business there, so there's opportunity there to grow. What I'm excited about some of the new product launches that we're launching in commercial, if you look at commercial and self-storage, we have a certain amount of product line. You need a complete product line to really get customers to really switch and say, "Hey, look, you have a rolling steel type of door. You have a wind-rated one. You have this fire door." So we're launching a new fire door that helps quickly align, and we're launching another, what I would call as not a high-speed door, but something in the middle. If you look at the market for commercial doors, you have. You really only have two choices. You have this super high-speed door that probably $60,000-$70,000 that a car dealership has, or you have the traditional one that is like a garage door speed that opens. We've worked with an opener provider that provides something in the middle that actually is much lower than $60,000-$70,000, let's say, not anywhere close to that, but offers much quicker and has the commercial reliability, so we've been testing in our factory with the cycle. So adding just innovative technology as well as adding to the completing the line is gonna help us grow there. I think that's not the only thing. There, we're working on a number of other ones. I think what we've seen is just the commercial industry just has not innovated as much. So what we said, "Let's actually innovate." We have our doors that sell there that are easy to install, quicker to install. Let's add technology innovation to actually help our customers, you know, meet certain requirements that they don't have. Like, I can tell you, we had a number of customers talking about the high-speed doors, that we would like that, can't pay that kind of price for that kind of door. So even it started from a storage customer. Our storage customer uses those, those doors. Now, this is an alternative offering that is much lower cost for them, that gets them pretty much most of the speed they need. So really excited about the new products that we're launching there. Great. Thanks, Anselm. I know we're at time, so I think we'll draw the line there. All right, thanks. Thanks for coming. Thanks, Brad.