Presenting next is Myers Industries, a leading manufacturer of plastics and metals, including parts bins, bulk, shipping, containers, OEM parts, and fuel tanks. Myers also has an automotive aftermarket distribution business, distributing tools and equipment supplies for the tire repair industry: 37 million shares at $12,450 million market cap, net debt of $370 million. Speaking with us today are Interim CEO Dave Baska and CFO Grant Fitz. Thank you for being here, gentlemen. Dave, the stage is yours. Thanks, Caroline. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for inviting me to speak at the symposium today. Really honored to be here. I'm Dave Baska, Interim CEO for Myers Industries. This is Grant Fitz, our CFO. I brought Grant to help answer all the hard questions. After the markets closed today, we issued a press release and earnings call outlining our financial results for the third quarter. If you didn't have a chance to join the call, it was webcasted and available under the Investor Relations tab on our website. During our time today, I plan to review the company's highlights, then host a question-and-answer session. Since today's presentation is being recorded, I ask that you hold all questions till the end of the prepared remarks. Please refer to the forward-looking statements before we begin, which is on slide three. Can we get to slide three? There's us. There's the forward-looking statements that you've seen a million times, probably. For those of you who are not familiar with our company, Myers Industries consists of two segments. Our material handling segment is a diversified international plastics manufacturer of returnable packaging, storage, and safety products, and specialty molded products. The distribution segment is the largest tire repair supply distributor of the United States, serving the auto aftermarket with equipment, tools, and supplies for tire repairs. Over the past five years, Myers' revenue has nearly doubled to $824 million for the trailing 12 months. Many of our brands hold the first or second market position in niche markets, and the business is supported by approximately 2,700 employees across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Central America. Our company consists of a portfolio of 10 strong brands. More than 80% of our profits come from four of these brands, which we call power brands. They are Signature Systems, Akro-Mils, Buckhorn, and Scepter. On the left-hand side of the slide there, you can see illustrations which are of our products and our four power brands. We work within two distinct business segments: material handling and distribution. Our material handling segment consists of two portfolios. The first focuses on storage, handling, and protection and has significant growth opportunities. The second, engineering solutions, consists of custom-designed and tailored solutions to meet our customers' unique needs. Let's go to slide five, please. So you can see the material handling segment, which consists of storage, handling, and protection, and engineering solutions. You can see the brands that are incorporated in each of those two portfolios. The distribution segment, or the auto aftermarket portfolio, sells high-quality repair and replacement parts for cars, passenger cars, commercial vehicles, and heavy equipment. Let's go to the next slide, please. Talks about our progress in the third quarter. Slide six summarizes many of the actions that we took during the third quarter, starting with storage, handling, and protection portfolio. Scepter, one of our brands, was well-positioned to rapidly respond to spikes in demand for portable fuel containers in support of hurricane recovery efforts. Scepter is also working on winning new contracts for lightweight military ammunition containers, which continue to see strong acceptance in that market. We also have sales momentum for Signature's MegaDeck ground protection product. We'll show you some examples of that. We are expanding our product offerings through our e-commerce channel, which is growing faster than the industry average. Continued investment in our power brands and the e-commerce channel will fuel our future growth. Across engineering solutions and auto aftermarket portfolios, we continue to focus on improving cash flow as they've been adversely impacted by the macroeconomic conditions. In late September, we appointed a new leadership for the distribution business. The team has significant experience in operational excellence and specifically in cost reduction and revenue growth. In a short amount of time, they've defined a series of positive actions to improve the businesses, focusing on commercial and operational effectiveness. We expect to see the results of these actions in the coming quarters. So we can go to slide seven. This is Signature Systems. You can see here on the bottom right, this is their MegaDeck product. And they put those MegaDecks in and use them in swampy areas to repair power lines. Actually, they can drive forklifts and backhoes on those products. It's pretty cool. Let's review a few examples of our Power Brands and how they're growing. First, Signature Systems is a leading manufacturer of composite ground protection solutions. It's a brand that officially joined our portfolio in the first quarter of this year with an acquisition that we made. In the past quarter, we experienced strong interest in Signature's products by customers who are using them in storm restoration efforts related to the hurricanes. Also, their customer base is growing. Over 20% of their customers' 2024 revenue will come from new customers. If we look at slide eight, we anticipate slide eight on the left-hand side, you see that's the growth of Scepter. You can see one of our Scepter products on the shoulder of the soldier there, which is an ammunition container. We're going to sell $25 million worth of those this year and $40 million next year. Let's see. We're on track to exceed those forecasts. The Scepter team was also awarded the Pro Tool Innovation Award for the powered fueling station. This award highlights growing the groundbreaking tools and fasteners, and we were the 2024 award winner. Let's go to slide nine. Before I took the role of Interim CEO, I served as a business vice president for Injection Molding and Myers. In this role, I became familiar with our expertise in material substitution. We help customers switch from disposable materials to durable plastics. These products have characteristics of recyclability, improved functionality, and cost-effectiveness. I'd like to spend some time highlighting this part of Myers as it is a significant driver of our earnings profile. Let's show some examples. Let's move to slide 10, please. Okay. Slide 10, starting with food conversion. Many food processing plants are using corrugated and pallets in their processing of things like various spices. Actually, tomato paste producers use wood and pallets, wood boxes and pallets, and what we're doing is we're converting them to plastics, so this is an Intrepid IBC. We have another product line called Caliber. Basically, these products are reusable. They have a 10-year lifetime. They're easy to clean. They're FDA compliant. Usually, when we convert a plant, they have about an 18-month payback for our products. The products are safer, simpler, and a smarter solution for food processing. This is a growing part and a high-value part of our portfolio. Let's go to slide 11. Another example is in the chemical conversion space. As you can see on the left, that's a bottle and cage, which is used to transport chemicals. These are typically not recycled. Those bottles are entered the waste stream. Our solution is a Tuff Stack IBC, which is on the right, which is recyclable, cleanable, usable, reusable. It's a waste reduction solution for our customers, and they're DOT compliant. It helps our customers move from a one-and-done to a circular solution, which for many of our chemical processing customers is very important to them. Let's go to slide 12 for another example. This is a stockroom. Our Akro-Mils product line is a material substitution for order fulfillment companies. The cardboard bins are being replaced by our plastic reusable bins. They reduce stockouts, increase inventory turns, and are used by customers as they implement lean manufacturing concepts to more effectively manage their inventory levels. We also have a software solution that helps our customers design their stockrooms. So we have kind of a we aid our distributors in converting customers from the traditional cardboard solution to our Akro-Mils solution. Let's go to number 13 now, please. On this slide, you'll see another innovative product we developed for the military. This is a plastic container that's used to transport ammunition on and off the battlefield. It's replacing metal and wood, which is a current one-time use solution. These plastic containers are approximately 30% lighter than the metal and wood alternative. They're also reusable and both weather and impact-resistant. We're developing and implementing solutions for our customers that bring advantages such as lower cost and lighter weight. This is we're going to sell $25 million worth of these this year and $40 million next year. And then slide 14, you can see this is our Connect-A- Dock. In the marine space, we're driving material substitution in docks. On the left, you can see a wood dock on a lake. They're often made of aluminum or wood. We have a product called Connect-A- Dock, which is a modular solution. Our connected docks are customizable, lighter than the alternatives, and easier for removal from seasonal lakes. And we're ramping up our sales and promotional activities on the connected dock product. Slide 15 talks about our fueling station. We're being recognized. As I mentioned earlier, we're being recognized for our innovative solutions and product development. In the second quarter of this year, we launched our Flo n' Go, which is this fueling station. It's a power fueling station with a 14-gallon capacity and a battery-powered pump. It can be wheeled out to your boat or other power equipment. The target audience includes landscape companies, do-it-yourselfers, and sports enthusiasts. Okay. Then let's go to slides, the next slide here. So those are some examples of our power brands and our innovative products that are driving the value creation for Myers. On this slide, turning to slide 16, during our third quarter conference call, we acknowledged that the results were not in line with expectations. Our third quarter results were significantly impacted by unfavorable macroeconomic conditions affecting some of our end markets, specifically, high interest rates were affecting capital purchases. We're looking forward to the future and remain committed to executing our strategic priorities to drive growth across the industries. We're executing on our long-term strategy. Over $350 million investment in Signature is delivering strong results. We completed that at the end of January. We're positioned to acquire additional businesses with strong brands and hold top positions in profitable niche markets. And we're also implementing some cost control and efficiency initiatives. We have announced today $15 million in new annualized cost savings. These actions will help mitigate the pressures from end market headwinds, enabling us to remain competitive. An important priority is improving our distribution business. We put new leadership in place literally less than two months ago. They're already identifying positive actions to improve the performance of the business. They're here at the SEMA show this week. And finally, we're increasing our participation in high-growth end markets, including sectors such as military and infrastructure, and expanding our e-commerce channel to capitalize on new sources of demand. These steps will improve our cost position and our competitiveness. So those are my prepared remarks today. So at this point, we can open it up to some questions. Perfect. Yeah, we can start. I'll start with some questions. Just, I think very early, Dave, you started at Myers in 2020 focusing on the material handling segment. And then I think it also in your bio says acquisition integration. Kind of given the history of acquisitions, Trilogy Plastics, Mohawk, and now Signature, can you kind of discuss what you've learned from the previous acquisitions and how you can apply them to Signature? Yes. We did several small, I think four small acquisitions, three of which in the roto space, which is roto-molding plastics, and one which was the Mohawk acquisition in the distribution space. All four of those were small family-owned companies. I think we gained a lot of experience and muscle as a company, Myers, to be able to do and implement acquisitions with those. We also learned the importance of pre-planning, especially on the IT and the system side. And we've, I think, really our Signature, the results so far of our Signature acquisition illustrate the muscle that we've built in our experience with those four. Also, there's a big stark difference between those four and Signature. And that is that Signature has branded products with competitive advantage built around manufacturing capabilities and also product development that the others didn't have. They were more custom molding, if you will, so that the margins in those types of products were lower. And they were also more susceptible to supply and demand and macroeconomic headwinds. So they didn't have the moat that's protecting the margins that Signature has. Perfect. And then just because we brought up Signature, I think you acquired it for about $350 million. Can you further discuss the margins that you touched on and then how it fits into your core competency and expectations for growth going forward? It fits into our core competencies very well because we have several of these types of Power Brands where we're converting customers from traditional materials to a better material, a high-tech material. And in the case of Signature, we're converting customers from basically plywood that they would go out and put on a, for example, on a football field to have a concert. Now they're buying the Signature product, which is a reusable product and has much better life and utility than the plywood, or the MegaDeck product, which can literally, they can do those two or three deep and do a big backhoe on those. And so we're converting. That's within our skill sets, these conversions. Grant could talk to the margin profile. Yeah. Can you turn this on? I'm just bringing it closer. Okay. All right. Yeah. The Signature acquisition has been a really good acquisition for us. Essentially, it's in a market that we really look at our lines in terms of it's a high-growth market with all the infrastructure projects that are going on. It's also very much a market that Signature has some significant competitive advantages. The compression molding that's done to create these big MegaDeck type of products is very specialized, and it's not something that can easily be done. It requires a significant amount of investment. And so with that, we've been able to acquire a company that has very high margins. We essentially said we were able to buy this company, which they had projected to have double-digit growth over the next several years, and also to have margins that would be well over 25% EBITDA margin. We were able to essentially acquire it for an eight-times multiple. So really good acquisition for us. What's also been helpful for us is that when we acquire a company that has composites or plastic products, we can also get some significant synergies by just getting more purchasing power through all of the different products that we manufacture. And so we identified on top of that, we had roughly about $8 million of synergies that we identified that were well underway to be implementing. So we're really excited about that product. Fits in well with kind of this niche market, number one or number two in the marketplace, and essentially has a very good competitive advantage for quite some time to come with very strong growth potential. All right. And you've talked about those four products within the four brands within the different portfolios, Signature, Akro-Mils, Buckhorn, and Scepter, maybe driving some of the higher margin growth. Can you talk about those brands, the margin kind of relative to the rest of the portfolio? What are the growth opportunities? Yeah. Well, I'll go through at a high level, and then Grant can provide some additional color. I mean, Buckhorn, we supply large format boxes to the seed industry, so our corn and soybeans, all the corn and soybeans that are sold in the United States are sold in these plastic boxes, and we have like a 90% market share there, and that's good business for us. Akro-Mils, we supply the plastic bins that I showed, so we're one of the leading producers of those bins. Actually, we invented the Akro bin, and our competitors sometimes call their bins Akro bins. We go after them for that. Scepter is the branded choice for fuel storage and transportation. And then we also have the military component that we discussed a little bit. The military application has the advantage where we're converting from higher weight wood and metal to our plastic solution, which is weight means a lot in a military application. And then finally, Signature Systems, where we're converting, as I said earlier, from plywood to plastic. Grant, could you talk a little bit toward the margins on this? Again, all four of these brands have a very good earnings profile that are in markets that typically will grow over an extended period of time. There is some cyclicality with some of the products, but nothing compared to some of our other end markets that we operate in. And so all those in total, we talked about it in our investor day in February, but those are basically markets that are growing. We're number one or number two in the marketplace, and they typically will have a very strong margin, well over 20% EBITDA margin. And so we look at that as really being an area of future investment for the company, whether it would be through acquisition or other innovative product development. But I would say that the profile, just from an earnings capability and growth standpoint, is really quite attractive. Perfect. And then, of course, we did have some industry headwinds for some of the segments, including RV, marine, maybe some of the larger ticket discretionary. I believe you've quantified that to a certain extent in the past. Can you kind of talk about that? And when we see inflection, what's the opportunity there? You want to cover that? Yeah. I'm here for moral support. Thanks. But no, so going into the year, we were really feeling that potentially our engineered solutions product lines, which Dave talked about, we were hoping to see the RV market and the marine markets, which we serve as a big portion of that engineered solution portfolio. We were hoping to see those start to pick up and recover after some of the COVID boost that we saw or post-COVID boost. That hasn't happened. Basically, we've continued to see significant headwinds in those end markets, really driven more by, again, the interest rates that Dave talked about, driving to higher discretionary type purchases, help people holding off on buying RVs and boats and things of that nature. So we are continuing to see that headwind right now. We expect that's going to continue through the start of 2025. Some good news is if you look at RV shipments this last couple of quarters, they are up, but the channel is fairly full right now, so it's going to take some time to work through the channel for us with that. Our automotive distribution business has been another headwind that we've had, some of which has been due to the acquisition that we've talked about in the past, where we acquired a company called Mohawk, and subsequently, after acquiring that company, some of the sellers left and they took a fairly large book of business with them, and so we've been working on recovering with that, and then here, more recently, in the last couple of quarters, we have seen some more headwinds, which I'm sure many other companies have talked about within the automotive aftermarket, where things do look like they've slowed down a little bit. What we've done is we've put in place a new leadership team for the distribution business. They have been there for, as Dave mentioned, a little bit under two months, but have identified what I would say is a very good strategy to address some of the sales gap coverage issues. And we'd like to see that business start to work towards getting towards growth in 2025, given the point that we're at today. Additionally, we're working across the board on cost initiatives to drive out cost to help improve the margin profile for that business. But those businesses have all been headwinds for us. And then just more recently, for the Buckhorn business, the large capital purchases for seed boxes and IBC paste containers, that has slowed down some. And so we've been monitoring that and just trying to see how that market is going to be developing. Perfect. Then, Grant, your net leverage ratio is probably about 2.6 times now. Can you discuss capital allocation preferences going forward? And then I know that you've talked about some CapEx investment in Signature historically, if that's still on the table. Yeah, definitely. So essentially, we started out close to three times net leverage with the Signature acquisition. And our objective has been that we would like to get to a two times or under net leverage ratio within two years of acquisition. And so we still see that as being the target that we want to continue to focus on. And so we talked in our earnings today that we were looking at getting to that two times level approximately by the end of next year. So we see that continuing on. The way that we view that is that we'd like to continue to pay down debt to get to that lower level of leverage ratio. And I think to some degree, thinking about it too, does that help us to reload for more meaningful acquisition in the future? Something that would be Signature-like, I think, is certainly what we would like to continue to look at in terms of the pipeline for acquisitions. In the meantime, if something came along that was interesting, maybe a smaller nature, we have capacity to be able to do that. And so we'll continue to look for those types of opportunities as well too. But once we get in that position where we are at a lower leverage ratio, we do look at trying to get additional acquisition opportunities. If we weren't able to do that, we would certainly look at potentially what are some other uses of that cash, whether it would be stock buybacks or not, or other opportunities. But within all of that, we would need to continue to invest in the business. We put in additional capacity for Signature, Caroline, which you referred to. That's going to be behind us by mid-next year. And then additionally, we continue to pay a dividend that we'll continue to do, and that will be something that we don't anticipate doing anything other than continue with our current dividend policy. Question back here. Yeah. From one Akronite to another, how are you leveraging the tremendous research that's going on in Akron, and specifically in polymers, to possibly open up new markets available for you down the road? That's a good question. So we've really, quite frankly, been focused on leveraging our current businesses, right? So we've been focused on running our current businesses better. That's been the majority, the bulk of our effort over the past few years. Frankly, if you go back three or four years, the businesses were starved for capital. Operational effectiveness was poor. So that's where we've been putting the majority of our effort into two things. One, developing our differentiated power brands. So marketing, sales, implementing at the customer. And then two, getting our production right. So the blocking and tackling part. We've recently hired and started an effort into new business development, which is going to be more in line with what you're talking about, looking at new products or product line extensions into extended markets. So I think we have to earn the right to do that. I mean, we have to get better at the basics to earn the right to get to being able to leverage into new applications. Great. Oh, and we have one last question over here. Yeah. The interest expense on the debt eats up quite a lot of your free cashflow here. Yeah. The interest expense on your debt eats up quite a lot of your free cashflow here. If you could talk about the pathway to paying down that debt balance over time. Yeah. So we, in general, the business generates a fairly good operating free cashflow type of profile. We took on $400 million of debt, as you're aware. It was a Term Loan A debt. So we were fortunate at the time, I think, to be able to secure a Term Loan A. We have since also put on a swap that essentially mitigates half of the interest rate risk that we have. Our profile today, even with this quarter, we paid down about $13 million of debt for the quarter. $5 million of that was with the amortization that we have with the Term Loan A. Then another $8 million was for the revolver that we have, which you have additional capacity if there was an acquisition or just liquidity need that did come up. We see us, again, we basically have mapped that out where we would see with some organic growth in the company that we can continue to pay down the debt on a meaningful basis. We're looking at trying to get to approximately two times Net Leverage Ratio by the end of next year. I would say that from what we've seen, we haven't provided guidance yet on 2025, but we feel that that's something that is certainly within reach of our business and the cash flow generation that comes with that. But roughly, it's about $30 million of interest that we're paying right now, which will go down over time as we pay down that debt. Perfect. Grant, Dave, thank you so much for being here. We're running up against the hour, a very important hour for everybody. Thank you so much for having us. Mario, thank you for having us. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for joining today. We do have refreshments in Brahms I from 5:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M. Yep. Great. Tomorrow, we're kicking off at 8:20 A.M. with some opening comments. We've got another great day, so thank you very much. To those who have joined on the livestream, if you're still around, thank you as well.