Okay, we'll move right along to our next company. We've got Quest Resource. Today with us we have, Mr. Ray Hatch, the CEO, and Mr. Brett Johnston. Quest is headquartered in The Colony, Texas, and offers recycling disposal services for various waste streams in the United States. Ray joined Quest in 2016 as President and CEO, and Brett joined in 2022. Had previously been at Arcosa for 20 years running a Construction Products Group. Quest has 20 million shares outstanding, trades around $8.60 for a $180 million market cap, $65 million of net debt. I'd like to introduce Ray and Brett up here, and I think they'll give a quick presentation and we'll sit down for a Q&A. Thanks, gents. Thanks. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for the interest in Quest. I always want to start by saying that, you know, I get to talk to you about a company that's full of great people who are doing great things. I'm just the one that gets to be in front of you, so it's a great part of the job. And I'm really proud of where this company's come from, especially when I first met you, Tony, I guess, what was our market cap? $20 million, right? Or am I being generous? All right. And by the way, you're a little up. We're up to $195 million as of yesterday, so just wanted to update everybody. So, again, I, a lot of some of you I know, a lot of you I don't, so I look forward to hopefully that you understand what we are and what we do, how you do it, by the time we get done. So a little bit, I'll start. Where's the button, so? You think I would have already done that, wouldn't you? Okay. I'm pushing the green one, right? Here we go. Okay, let's talk about who we are. Quest, we're a national provider of waste and recycling solutions to large businesses. We actually like to think of ourselves as a problem solver for large businesses, and we do it by helping them address something that none of them want to deal with, waste and recycling. If you're a manufacturer, a restaurant, whatever you happen to be, you're in the something else business. So our goal is to take that problem away from you, do it in an effective way, a sustainable way, a cost-effective way, to allow you to focus on the front of the house, but making better widgets, whatever it happens to be. We're based in Dallas, Texas. Tony already gave that intro there about our size and our symbol. We're serving about an industry that's really doesn't have an addressable market issue. It's $200+ billion, so I don't think I'm going to be around long enough to see us capture all of that. But I think it's important to note that it is a huge addressable market, so that's not a limitation for us in any way and form and fashion, as opposed to maybe some other businesses. Another big differentiator of ours is we handle over 100 waste streams, and many of our competitors that are very good at handling waste and recycling, they manage waste streams at 20 or less. We do industrial, we do automotive, along with the basic recycling. People think of basic recycling as plastics and cardboard, which, of course, it is. But there's numerous other things that we do as well, solvents, used motor oil. We'll talk, here we go right here. You got the basics on the left, but then the automotive piece is really where we differentiate ourselves. You won't see a Waste Management report talk about this column at all. UMO, used motor oil is huge for us, used oil filters, tires, excuse me, aerosol cans, solvents, paint waste. And when you think about, like, one of our, one of our clients is a chain of national chain of body shop repair. They need somebody like us that can bring all of those solutions to the table with one phone call. And also help them with regulatory compliance. We actually, one of the reasons we got one of these chains is their locations in California apparently weren't aware they couldn't be throwing paint solvents in the, just in the trash to go to the landfill. Yeah, they didn't, they didn't know that. So, and I think the big giveaway to the inspector was the red paint that was dripping on the side of the container. So we make sure and not take anything for granted relative to make sure our clients understand what they can and cannot do in their local jurisdiction, which does change, by the way, by state, by county. The haz waste is really a lot of the crosses and the solvents I was talking about, compressed gases. And we do a construction service as well, which is really a lot different because it's more on call. You know, the job sites, when you go by the job sites, you see all those open-top containers. I will tell you, it's really a big deal to have high service levels because if those containers are full, they have to stop building, you know, because it and that's a real problem, very expensive problem if they don't have good service. So let's talk about, we talked about what we do. Let's talk a minute about who we do it for. This is obviously no, by no way all of our clients. We have a great profile of clients I'm really proud of, but it's a few that we pulled together. And the reason I wanted to, these particular clients are on here, is I wanted to show not only these are great brands, you know them all, I'm sure. Very solid clients. They're not going anywhere, and they really need a partner like Quest, and it's working out great. But also, look at the diversity of the type of clients you have. You got Hendrick Automotive in the top right. You've got a Sonic Drive-In on the bottom there. You've got AT&T, Mister Car Wash, Aramark. We service some of the customers. Julia was talking about it a minute ago that she's working with Kroger. So this is really an indicator of the fact that we can serve and do almost every end market that's out there. That's another thing that limits companies' growth a lot of time, besides addressable market, is which end markets can they serve? Are we limited by the growth of the end markets we serve? In our case, the answer is obviously no. Let's talk a little bit about the history that I referenced a while ago. It's, it's been a great transformation. I'll just summarize. We've got a 20% CAGR in GP dollars from 2016 to today, or to last year. 40% in rev. We, what we did was we cut a lot of revenue out, that when we first started, we were losing money. We had nice revenue growth. We had really poor gross profit dollar performance, and G&A was just way too high. So we took a really good hard look at the company. Which ones of these customers slash service lines are contributing the least amount of gross profit and, and costing us the most in SG&A to serve? Those obviously were at the top of the list to rationalize. We actually got our revenue from a run rate initially around $160 million down to about $85 million, which isn't something you're going to hear anybody else brag about on the podium today, but we did cut our revenue in half. But we grew our gross profit dollars at the same time. And so we started that path of profitability, which has continued today and continues to grow. Yeah, and the diverse economic conditions, it's really the thing I wanted to mention here is that when in COVID, when we all panicked, including myself, we didn't know what this was going to be like, and we really, really pulled back on expenses and people and everything else. And some of our sectors did get hit hard, like automotive. People weren't driving, if you'll recall, in 2020 or 2021. If you're not driving, you're not changing your oil, you're not getting new tires. So that hurt, but at the same time, we had grocers that did very, very well during that time. We had multifamily apartment complex groups that did very, very well during that time. So the diversity of the end markets we serve really makes us stronger through any type of storm that can come at us. So we're really proud about that. So some of the problems that we solved, excuse me, go to that one, that we focus on is we improved sustainability, and that's more important than ever. And I know there's varying opinions of whether it's losing its momentum or not. Maybe in public discussion, sometimes it is, but I will tell you that good companies are trying to become more sustainable every day, not necessarily just because they, they think their shareholders want to see it. They're doing it because those are good business practices. We found that our large customers that were shown a while ago, many of them are driving sustainable programs, not because they have to, because they want to and they feel like it makes the company stronger in the long run. And those are the kind of customers that you want. Another tailwind we have, I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think landfills have decreased the number of landfills by 20%-30% in the last 10 years. I have no reason to think that trend isn't going to continue. Permitting for new landfills is just short of impossible. There's no municipalities that are really approving new landfills out there. And so you have less landfills. So the material going into it is going to be less and less of it. And so that makes us, Quest, I think, a much more viable alternative than maybe we were a few years ago. Plus, as with any short commodity, the prices are going up on landfills. And the more prices go up on landfills, the better a sustainable practice looks economically besides just on the appearance. Regulation, city, state, local, continues to grow. That regulation is typically geared around what goes into a landfill, becoming more and more and more restrictive. Businesses are being held more and more accountable, and fines are getting larger when they violate it. I mentioned that, that one with the paint a while ago, but there's a lot more than that. There's a lot of communities now, and it's growing, that are not allowing organic waste from certain types of businesses to be entered in. Over half of the tonnage in landfills being generated is organic waste. It's a huge opportunity, and something's going to have to be done. And luckily, we have what I believe is a great solution for that. Tracking for compliance is a pain also. I'll talk about it again a little bit later. But the data reporting is a huge differentiator for us. No matter how sustainable your practice is as a business, if you don't track it and you can't show it, it's a wasted exercise. You've got to be able to do that. So what our data warehouse does is every time a material is picked up at one of your locations, we know when, where, how much of, which material was it, how much was there, and where is it going? So our customers can see trends by material, by location, by region, however they want to look at it, and really ask some great questions. Why is location A doing some, so much more waste or so much more food waste, for example, with Quest than location B, which has the same footprint, roughly the same volume? So why is that? Well, like with most BI tools, it really doesn't answer the question, but it tells you what questions to ask. And so we're able to provide that data. And that visibility is very, very unique, for companies to be able to see, and they place a considerable value on it. I think, I know that some of our more recent signings this past year or so, that's one of the key reasons why, because we can provide that: the decentralized, inconsistent waste and recycling services and data reporting. One of the reasons our data reporting is so valuable is that we go across the whole platform. You don't have to have, if you've got 500 locations, you don't have to have 100 different vendors to pick it up. You don't have to have different vendors for each material that you're having picked up. You have one, and that's Quest. You don't even know who's picking up the materials. Again, I don't think I mentioned we're an asset-light company, and we use several thousand vendors to perform the physical picking up of the material. But to the customer, we are the vendor, period. We do the quarterly business reviews. If there's an issue, you call us. If one of your stores needs an extra pickup or something, you call our call center, not whoever that we're farming that business out to at the local level. The measurements are complicated. We toss ESG around a lot. And by the way, we don't affect the SG, just the E. And very few companies can affect all of those things. But it's not as simple as it sounds. The measurements are quite complicated, and we've got to, you've got to have somebody that provides the expertise about what that data is. And how does it need to be uploaded so you can report to whatever your reporting factor that you're looking for is? And we provide that. All right, let's keep going here. So what do we do? And then we talked about that a lot. The clients that we have are the waste stream generators. You know, these are some typical end markets for us. You know, manufacturing industrial has grown to be possibly our largest segment at this time, which is fantastic for us. Retail grocers, automotive, automotive fleets, transports. We do fleets for large companies and distribution companies. Restaurant and hospitality has been a great sector for us. Property management when we get into the multifamily living thing. We have a lot more than that, but that's kind of where most of our end market opportunities exist. Our clients get, and I think I've already shared that really, matter of fact, I already have, enhanced sustainability compliance data. And that's what we're able to deliver to them. So here's our—we probably should have put that at the beginning—our national asset-light model since now I explain what we do. And now this is like really important, I'll tell you. Our subcontractors, we don't own those things on the bottom, the 1,000 recycling facilities, 30,000 people, 25,000 trucks. Overall, there's several thousand companies that we utilize. And an important thing to understand is these companies, these service providers, they're contracted to us. Not, it doesn't have anything to do with the customers that we deploy them to go serve. Their contract is tied to us, not, it's not tied to anything with the customer. So there's a total separation there. They don't have visibility, and that's by design. We want to continue to keep it pure and keep it really clean. The relationships with our customers, so there's no confusion as to who is responsible for their service levels. It's us. It's not these guys. And if these guys aren't getting the job done, we get somebody else in there. Luckily, it doesn't happen very often. We're performing over 1.2 million services a year. A service is defined as we went to a location and we picked up material and we took it to wherever its end game is. That's a staggering number. I had them check it when they did it to make sure it was right because I, I thought that sounded quite high. But that enables us to leverage our portfolio of waste and everything that we're doing, no matter how big a customer is that we're talking to, no matter how big they are, we're bigger when it comes to procuring waste services. And that's all we're bringing to the table. So we're able to leverage our whole portfolio of customers and tons and locations and service profiles to be able to create what we believe is a really significant value proposition from across numerous fronts. So we want to differentiate. I want to spend a minute talking about the difference between the, we call it asset-heavy, vertically integrated waste companies, and you know who they are. They're the big guys. And when people think of waste companies, that's what they think of naturally. And there's nothing wrong with that entity, but I think it's important to draw a distinction as to why we exist versus them. They're vertically integrated. Their economics are driven by landfill utilization. The most profitable from an EBITDA standpoint, dollar of revenue, if you're one of these big vertically integrated haulers, is a landfill dollar. So I would ask you how much, if that was your most profitable line of business, how much time, energy, and resources are you going to dedicate to pushing tonnage away from that? Probably not a lot. You know, you're going to push it where you make the most money. I surely would. So since we don't own any of those end games, the landfills or plants, we're the term we use is we're agnostic as to the means of disposal. Why does that matter? It matters because we can have 100% customer alignment. We have no economic incentive to suggest a different means of disposal or push their, their feedstock, their tonnage anywhere other than what meets their goals and what's best for their overall plan. That's very, very important. And we can stand there. Our competitors can't really say that. So it's a big deal. And these other guys, over 50% or give or take half of their revenue and, and EBITDA is driven by residential contracts. Which is a whole different game. It's not something we're remotely interested in. We're totally on the B2B side. What it takes to serve businesses is considerably different than what it takes to serve a municipality. So we don't invest time, energy, and resources in doing that. These guys do quite well with that and more power to them. That's not something we're really interested in. They may have national scale, but they do have limited scope. They can't service all the waste streams that we were talking about earlier. They don't want to. If you're Waste Management or Republic, any of those big guys, you can do whatever you want to do. I'm not going to sit here and say they don't have the capabilities. I'm saying they don't have the desire to because it doesn't make a lot of sense. It doesn't enhance their profitability. It complicates their business. People like us are able to do that. And we really don't get a lot of pushback from those guys. I want to talk about data real quick. I got to keep moving, don't I, Tony? I talked about data a moment ago. Our platform is scalable. We transitioned to the cloud in 2019 with this. And again, our data warehouse, we've totally rebuilt to make it much more effective and useful. So this platform is for our customers. We have a customer or two that's actually paying us separately for it, but mostly what we do is we provide it. And it's a great retention tool. And it enables us ultimately to get a nicer gross margin because of that differentiation. So we get paid for it directly or indirectly. And it, the quarterly reviews it talks about here. But this really, the important thing is the visibility, the levels of detail, and the certification, the validation of what you as a company are doing with your waste. Some of these guys are spending $40-$50 million a year on waste programs. It's important that they understand what's happening. They're getting pressure from their shareholders, which they've been getting for a long time. Excuse me, their customers, which they've been getting for a long time. But let's face it, customers, fragmented group of customers that are mad about your sustainability programs don't really impact if you're a huge company, their bottom line. But I'll tell you what it does. Is the investment community, you guys. When the investment community is putting standards on sustainable performance and reporting, that's when these companies listen. The only way they can report back to that investment community to show them what they're doing is to have verifiable data that's easy to understand and shows what they've been doing consistently. Established growth program. Here's the old phrase, land and expand. We got a growing pipeline of new client opportunities. We had our earnings call, I guess, three weeks ago. We announced six new companies that signed on with us. That's the most we've ever had at one time. We're really excited about these folks as they ramp in and we continue to grow on that side. We've been expanding with our existing client base. It's been a real success story of our client services team. About 5% a year, I think, give or take. So there's always more and more room to grow within your existing client base, either more lines of business, more geography, one of those two or a combination of those two. And again, I, I'm really proud of that. I always mention it because I do believe this, that companies do not turn around and grow and add more responsibility to a supplier that's not doing a great job for them. You know, that's, those are the guys they're trying to push out the door. They're giving us more business. So I think that's a real tribute to what the team does. And, we're going to continue to opportunistically pursue M&A. It's got to be, something that really makes a ton of sense. And it's a very, very fragmented space that's out there. You've got these. I don't want to call them mom-and-pops; that's insulting. But typically found founder-owned businesses that grow to a certain level. Well done, great customer relationships. But at that level, there's probably outside of their expertise. They raised it. It doesn't matter if it's $20 million, $40 million, $50 million, whatever size they, they run out of comfort. As far as their background, they become a great opportunity for us as an exit for them. So we're, we're going to continue to be looking at those things. And I basically just covered the focused M&A aspect, I think. So the summary is, we believe we're stable and scalable. We've got a great industry with great dynamics and financial characteristics. So waste is not going to go away. The desire to have more sustainable recycling practices are not going to go away. We're sitting right in the middle of that. We're well positioned for all these industry tailwinds we talked about a while ago. The stable client relationships, that's another thing that's important. All of our revenue is through contracts with companies, typically larger ones. These contracts are typically three-year agreements. But an important distinction is the churn is very, very low. It's an operational risk for these customers to shift their waste providers when you have hundreds or thousands of locations. So the churn is very low. So where the contracts are three-five years, it really doesn't have a lot of financial impact. They're long term. And we hang on to our customers. And again, I think that's a real tribute to the team. We talked about the scalable platform. We're investing over the last couple of years, and it's coming to fruition now. Brett came on with us about a year and a half ago and took over a program that we already had going. It's about driving internal efficiencies through processes and technology. Because companies like ours, our spend is in the SG&A category. That's the difference between gross profit and EBITDA typically for us since we don't have capital assets. So focusing on no-touch environments relative to automated invoice processing because that's the biggest thing we do. That's where we spend the most money is having people process invoices and pay, excuse me, pay these 3,000 haulers bills. So the more we automate that, the more we're going to be able to drive flow through and increase EBITDA margins. I'm really excited about where we are today. So our gross margin is more than doubled since we started this odyssey. As a percent and gross profit dollars are exponentially more. We're leveraging our SG&A costs down. We're in a market that's extremely receptive to what we do. And we feel great about where we're headed into the future. So I think with that, Tony, I'll go ahead and hang it up. Ray, that was a great overview. You always do a great job articulating the business and I think, you know, how you performed is, you know, it's just evidence that it's the market's going that way and you're right in the center of it. But maybe switching over to Brett, I'd love just to, maybe, you know, ask you, you know, you joined a couple of years ago. You know, you haven't participated in this event before with us. You know, what attracted you from Arcosa to Quest Resource? In your experience, you know, the skill set that you thought was such a good fit. Yeah, first and foremost, obviously I did a lot of work on just understanding the value proposition of Quest and that was first and foremost. What really excites me is just the opportunity to grow this business, which was pretty apparent to me. I really like the model that Ray and I talked about. So that was first and foremost and then secondly was the M&A. M&A has been a part of our growth story and will continue to be. That's a real strong point of my background. When I was with Arcosa Trinity for 20 years over the last four, we spun off and did $1.5 billion of acquisitions over a four-year period. So I was on the operational side of that. So understanding how to run due diligence, integrate companies, that stuff ran through me. So I felt like that was something I could immediately come in and add value to. And then just ramping up a business and scaling a business too. We were at about $200 million when we spun off from Arcosa, my segment, and we ran that up to about $1 billion. So, you know, right at where Quest, pretty close to where Quest was when I came. So it was a real natural area. I knew how to scale that. And that's exciting. Ray talked about the data side. We've got tremendous opportunity to really build a scalable platform and that excited me a lot as well. That's, I think, a great segue back to you, Ray. You sort of mentioned the growth, and maybe you could articulate a little more about the near-term growth outlook and, you know, the potential opportunities that you see where you can outperform expectations. Am I on. Okay, great. Outforming expectations is exactly what we expect to do. The market is becoming more and more receptive. We talked about the headwinds, our tailwinds, excuse me, that we have. Which some of our customers and competitors view those as headwinds, frankly, if their offering isn't there. So, I've always thought the biggest challenge for Quest from a sales and the market standpoint was its paradigm shift because we represent, we're not the easy button, our competitors that everybody knows about. There, there's an old joke that we have that none of these procurement guys at these big companies have ever been fired for hiring WM, right? I mean, it's not a risk. It's just when, but when you're going to do something different, you know, which is what we represent, it's a little bit slower, but we're definitely conquering that. We've had some great wins with customers over the last couple of quarters. We had, like I said, we announced a few of them in the last call, and most of them are, we started servicing them. Actually, Monday, you know, April 1st, you know, starting a Q2. And I'm really excited about getting new accounts on, and I think the market's really receptive, but there's some of these. If you roll out a customer that has 1,000 locations, for example, that's not easy. And so we've invested and, and we're getting a lot better at it. We actually have an implementation team now that tells you how confident I am about growth, that, that we have people on board now. They do nothing but implement and make sure that our customers have an absolutely wonderful, seamless—I hate to use that word, because, you know, experience on these, because these, these transitions scare customers a lot. You just imagine if you had 1,000 stores and somebody screws up, the equipment's not back there and you got trash piling up in the back, everybody calling. It's, that's the kind of thing they worry about. So we're focused on never letting that happen. Anybody from the audience like to have a, sir, why could you wait for the microphone? Thank you. Measure your churn in contract non-renewals and or vendor non-renewals. Yeah, sure. There's two ways to measure, of course, in dollars and in the number of customers. And I think the number of customers is the best way to measure it because whether you're a $1 million customer or a $10 million customer, if you lose one, that's an issue. I can count on one hand the customers we've lost in the past 5 years. It's just, it just doesn't happen a lot. You know, and, and one of those was for bankruptcy. I think one or two of them were because they were acquired by a larger company that had a different program, you know. The stickiness is really, really strong. And it's one of the things I love about this business. What was your other question? I'm sorry. Yeah, the supplier side. That's a little higher, because we choose to have some pretty high standards on that. But it's still, we've had the same suppliers predominantly. We keep adding suppliers as we add lines of business. We've added things in the last few years like more automotive stuff like on industrial accounts. We're now doing like tank cleanouts and the retention pond cleanouts. I mean, it's a whole lot more complex than just picking up trash at the back of a restaurant. And so as we add these lines of business, we're adding lots of new subcontractors as well. And that churn's pretty low, but we maintain the contractual ability to change somebody out if they're not meeting the standards that are required. Well, Ray, you've done a great job. I remember you were essentially a single source almost customer when I first met you in 2016 and diversified and grown it and evolved immensely and done a great job. Hope to have you back here next year and well done. Thank you. Thank you guys. Thank you very much.