Okay, good morning, everyone. My name is Vik Chopra. I work on the Wells Fargo Equity Research team. I am pleased to introduce management from Solventum for this session. Joining us for the company are Bryan Hanson, CEO, and Wayde McMillan, CFO. Thank you both for being here, so maybe just starting off with a few high-level opening remarks. You know, it's been a few months since your spin. You reported your first earnings as a standalone company in August. Bryan, maybe talk about how you frame the opportunity in front of you, what you're excited about, and how you're thinking about the future. Yeah. Yeah. First of all, thanks for having us, Vik. Appreciate it. And I wanna thank you for the most comfortable chairs I think I've ever had at a fireside chat. So I'll try to keep the energy, even though I'm very comfortable here. I think it's good maybe just to take a step back. What I found is that not a lot of people know the story, and bringing people up to speed and getting them the context, I think, is helpful. So maybe I'll just start with why this guy and I are here right now, Wayde and I are here. If you don't know, Wayde and I worked together back at Covidien, and then at Medtronic, and then we went our separate ways. He as a CFO, and me as a CEO with different companies, but we always kept in touch, and we knew for sure that at some point, we would have another opportunity to work together. It was a question of when and what company. Well, the when came, and the company was chosen, and it's Solventum. And the primary reason for going with Solventum was that the setting and really the setup is something that we've directly experienced before and felt that we had a very good playbook for. Three things that really stood out that we liked: first and foremost, was that this feels a lot like what we saw at Covidien, spinning out of Tyco, and that was a great run for us. We loved that part of our career, and the value creation story was very real. We thought we could do it again here. The second is that the businesses that Solventum has are all not necessarily deeply connected, but very strong businesses, great sub-brands, and in very attractive markets. You don't always find that in one place, so that was really nice. And the third is that even though the businesses have been underperforming, they have a pretty steady, steady state cash flow. So when you come into a new business, particularly when you know you're gonna get debt, you wanna make sure that you've got good cash flow creation for the businesses. Now, on the other side of that story, we felt that we would get a lot of debt. Most spins do. We also felt that the primary reason, this is our opinion, not 3M's, for spinning the business was cash for 3M, given some of the liabilities they would have. So we assumed we'd get a lot of debt, but we felt like the scenario for us was a bit different than most spins, in that we had a couple of different areas that we could focus on to delever. The first, as I said, the businesses are creating a lot of cash. That's fantastic. The second is we have portfolio optimization opportunities with very attractive assets that, that we can also use for delevering. So those are two vectors of delevering that a lot of spins don't have the luxury of having. We knew it would be a complex separation, but we have a lot of experience in that area. We hired a lot of people in our Rolodex to come in and help us cross-functionally, and things have gone pretty well. Out of the gate, I look at the primary thing: if separation is going well, business continuity is in check. Our first earnings call showed that. It was the first earnings call as a separate company. We were able to beat and raise, which is a very good start, much better than the opposite of that with your first call, and we're ahead of schedule on our phase I plan, which puts us ahead of schedule on phase II, which means our LRP is coming now in February of 2025 versus mid-2025. So I'd just say that the game plan has shifted a little bit because, you know, no plan survives first contact with the enemy, but the fact is, the plan is in place. We're either on plan or ahead of plan, depending on where you are in that plan. So we're feeling really good about the value creation story that we joined for. That's great to hear, and I think myself and investors are looking forward to your LRP in February, so stay tuned, I guess. Bryan, you know, you were at Zimmer prior to Solventum. Maybe just talk about some of the lessons you learned from your time at Zimmer that you can apply at Solventum. Yeah, you know, you know, it's... They're always different when you look at transformation, but the one consistency in transformation is that there are areas of focus that apply regardless of the circumstances. And so even though Zimmer was different than what we have here, there is definitely things that I garnered from that experience that I'm using here. I would say the first one, and it sounds soft, but it's really important, is that the mission, talent, culture as a foundation is extremely important in a transformation. Transformation is hard work. It's stressful. You're not going to keep people engaged if you don't have their hearts and minds, so it's a must-have. Learned it at ZB, applying it here. I actually learned at ZB I could have moved faster on talent. We're moving much faster on talent in this situation. The second thing is, you know, end markets really do matter. You know, if you think about end markets, you get almost a negative overhang from investor sentiment if you're in slow growth markets. And so I knew for sure, after leaving ZB, even with all the changes we made and the growth changes and margin profile, you know, the leverage reduction, we just didn't get the traction with investors. So I knew when I was leaving, I was gonna choose a business that had attractive markets. And in each of the segments that we have, we're in attractive markets. That was another big one. Absolutely, was critical to choose in that direction. The other one, and this may be surprising, is compliance and quality. You can't let that slide. You've got to spend right away. You've got to get the right talent in. You've got to make sure you protect the organization. At ZB, we did not do that. When I first came in, we were underspending dramatically in quality and compliance. We paid the price. We had the margin benefit, but we paid the price. We had three warning letters. We had a monitor in-house from the DOJ and SEC. And if you haven't dealt with those in the past, that is a huge amount of bandwidth. It's a huge distraction and hundreds of millions of dollars to unwind. So right away here, I've invested in quality, invested in regulatory, upgraded talent, and we're gonna make sure that we have best practices there. I guess the final one is, in orthopedics, you've got a 1099 commercial structure. I didn't appreciate till I was living in that, how challenging of environment that is. I knew for a fact that my next organization would have a W-2 structure, and that's what we mainly have at Solventum, which gives you all kinds of opportunities. If you think about a 1099 structure, as you grow the business, you're paying a tax on that business growth, 15%-20% directly to the commercial organization. Doesn't matter if it's R&D or an acquisition, you're gonna pay a tax on that. When you have a W-2 organization, you have a fixed expense, space, bonus, that really doesn't change unless you add people. So as you grow the business, you get immediate leverage in that growth. And so again, that was a primary reason for choosing a business and a W-2 sales organization. A whole bunch of other things, obviously, but those are some primary areas. Got it. That's helpful. So, you know, you've talked extensively about your roadmap and the three different phases. Yes. And you said you're sort of ahead of plan, with phase I. What does success look like for you in 12 months? Yeah, I think it's important, when I talk about the phases, first of all, is that they're not serial in nature. Phase I doesn't happen before phase II and phase III. They're concurrent. The difference would be that in phase I, I can immediately get to execution, because that's where you're putting the mission together. You're hiring people, you're driving the culture that's gonna be more intense, it's gonna be more accountable, and you've got to do the separation activity. That's immediate action that can be taken. In phase II and phase III, there's more of a data gathering phase, and then a strategic alignment of that data that then puts you in a position to begin to execute. So I just want to be clear that all of the phases are moving, they're just in different parts of the life cycle. So I'm now moving from phase I, and I'm moving into phase II for true execution. We should be finishing our strat plan by the end of this year. That then gives us the confidence, as we talked about, to do the LRP in February, which should be our fourth quarter call, and we're doing the data analytics and understanding the value of our businesses and markets on the portfolio optimization piece, so for me, you know, success would be in 2025, a year from today, all of those phases are in execution mode. Got it. Wayde, you also recently joined Solventum. I'm sure your answer is similar to Bryan's, but just talk about what attracted you to the company, and what can we expect in the metrics you focus on, like free cash flow, generation, how you report or guide? Yeah, sure. So as Bryan said, very unique opportunity here. For me, personally, you know, I love serving a med tech mission, and my last company was doing just that, and probably could have spent my whole career there. Really great company, great leadership team, great markets. What's unique about this, as Bryan just covered, is a real unique opportunity that we had experience with at Covidien as well, and that catalyst to move a med tech division out from under an industrial conglomerate. And the markets that we're in, as Bryan said, it's a much more low risk opportunity than we had seen in the past. You know, we don't have to take the risk to change the markets we're in. So I think it was a combination of, an opportunity that's really rare, a very large med tech company, and an opportunity to work with Bryan again as well. You know, great cultural leader, strategist, and we had great chemistry working together, so we're optimistic about what we can do, with this company. And we've got a really motivated, 22,000 3M employees that moved over that are really excited about a new med tech mission, and that's just really unique catalyst for change. And so it's fun to be in an environment like that, to be able to help put a strategy together and lead a business through such a unique transformation. And as Bryan said, we have a turnaround. We're underperforming our markets today, and so we've got, a playbook. The fact pattern's always different, but we do see opportunities here to turn around the business and get it performing better. So if you put all that together, we see a really unique opportunity to transform a business, turn around a business, great opportunity to work together again and capitalize on that chemistry. You mentioned the metrics that come along with that, and that is really part of that shift from operating under an industrial conglomerate to really a med tech, healthcare-focused company. And our primary focus is revenue growth. We want to drive innovation that brings more product to our customers and really gets that top line moving. We're in 4%-6% growth markets today, and that's our target. We think we should be at least getting our fair share of those markets. It's not to say we won't be focused on margin expansion and free cash flow. Those are also very important metrics for us. So what we laid out in our Investor Day, just a few months ago, was primary metric, revenue growth. But we're also gonna be focused on expanding gross margins, improving our free cash flows, and then optimizing our capital structure as well. Got it. That's helpful. Let's talk about guidance. Q2 came in ahead of expectations. You raised your guidance. You know, by our math, the raise adds about $80 million-$160 million of revenue upside. Are there specific business segments that are driving this guidance raise? Mm-hmm. Yeah, you want- I'd just say, generally speaking, and I think this is really important, even through all of the potential distraction of the separation, every business pretty much delivered what they committed to. Now, I wanna check that, because I'm happy that they did. I'm not satisfied, because we're still below market, but pretty much every business delivered what they committed to, and that's not. That's new. You know, us coming in before, you had a forecast and then a pretty dramatic miss almost every quarter from every business. And we're really happy to see that every business seems to have a better sense for what they're able to do. They committed to something, they delivered that thing, and that was promising, I would say, in the first quarter. First quarter as a separate company. Right. So, you know, the guidance after your Q2 results implies about flattish growth in the back half of the year versus about 1% in the first half. Wait, how should we think about Q3 and Q4 in terms of cadence? And are there any key variables to consider as we look at the back half of the year? Yeah, sure. Yeah, I like the setup, actually, if you think about it sequentially, because there are some dynamics between the first half and the second half. So to cover those, first half, we still had a good amount of price annualizing into the first half of the year, and that was because of the price increases in 2023. Price is certainly leveling out and waning, and we're gonna see a lot less price benefit in the second half of the year. So that's one of the dynamics. We also had a pretty sizable backorder improvement in our MedSurg business in the first half of the year. Mm-hmm. That was a discrete item that we don't expect to continue in the second half. And so as you think about the second half guide at the high end, +1%, low end, -1%, compared to that 1% in the first half, if you normalize the first half for some pricing and that, backorder recovery, you're gonna be closer to the low end of the range. So we if we continue to perform at the level we are, we'll be around the midpoint or slightly below. So we are expecting the business to continue to improve slightly and would have to improve to get to the high end, that +1% implied second half. And then importantly, we shared some information in our Q2 earnings call around the Q3, Q4 dynamics around comparisons. Q3 has a very difficult comp- Mm-hmm. And so we gave some color. We think the business will be flat to down in the third quarter, and then an easing comp in the fourth quarter. So the net of those two is what gets us to that minus one, plus one for the second half. Got it. And what about the cadence in the back half of the year when it comes to your EBIT margins? Yeah. So we haven't provided specific EBIT margins on a quarterly basis, but what we did do is reiterate our 21%-23% for the full year. And so we're gonna see some continued movement in gross margins and operating margins as we stand up our public company. We had a couple items in the first quarter that impacted gross margins unfavorably, and we're curious to see if those continue or if they improve, one around mix that has the potential to improve. And we also have a step-up in cost from 3M that is gonna start to impact us in Q3 and Q4. So a combination of some headwinds and tailwinds there, and we're gonna see how those play out. And then we're also managing our operating expenses very closely because we're separating, obviously, and then we're adding stand-up public company expenses. So we think that those will incrementally grow our operating expenses in the second half. But maybe just to make sure everybody has it from our Q2 earnings, we had a few discrete items in our operating expenses in Q2 for about $30 million. So when we talk about our operating expenses stepping up again in Q3 and Q4, it's off that reduced Q2 number. So take the discrete $30 million out, gets you a base of approximately $700 million for Q2, and then we see our operating expenses continue to grow somewhat over that in Q3 and Q4. And so the net of those will put us at operating margins for the year at 21%-23%. Got it. That's helpful. Let's switch gears to your SKU rationalization program. I think it's a topic of interest for a lot of investors. Can you just provide an update on kinda where you are now with your initiatives? And are there specific segments in which the SKU rationalization program is concentrated? Maybe I'll start with just, are there specific segments? And I would say it's across the board. We wanted to give every business an opportunity to clean up their SKUs. Wayde, you're gonna talk in a second about kind of the phase I versus phase II of that, but that was an opportunity for everybody. And the whole concept behind it, as one would expect, is to remove SKUs that are either slow growth or low margin. A perfect world is slow growth and low margin, so that you can get rid of those and benefit the top line growth and the margin profile of the business. But maybe I'll pass it to you to talk about where we are from a phase perspective. Yeah, sounds good, so we were very happy with the wave one, which we announced in our Q2 call. We were able to get out about 5% or 3,500 SKUs, significant amount of SKUs, without really impacting revenue, which is, we think, quite rare, so there was an opportunity to really get some low-hanging fruit, per se. It's a lot of SKUs that will save us rebranding dollars, but will also simplify the supply chain as we really simplify the number of SKUs that we're dealing with, and as Bryan mentioned, wave two is important. You know, we've got three of our four businesses. So HIS, as a software business, is not part of the product SKU rationalization, but the other three segments are rolling up their strategies for wave two. Bryan and I will be reviewing those over the next few months and decide to what extent we wanna rationalize SKUs in this wave two. It could be a small impact, medium, or maybe even large, depending on what the businesses roll up for us. We do just see it as a really unique opportunity to take a look across the whole business, and if we see an opportunity to take SKUs that are not benefiting the business, whether it be volume or margin, and clean those up at this time. And so we're frankly curious to see what comes up, bottoms up through those three product segments. Got it. So wave one was initially supposed to have an impact in the back half of 2024. Can you help us understand why you pushed it out and now you expect to benefit in 2025 instead? Sure. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. And really, it's just on the back of the answer that we just gave, which is we were surprised to see we could get that many SKUs out without having to have it either impact revenue or margins. And so that's a... Again, we're very happy with that efficiency, and so we don't have to take any headwind in our numbers here in 2024. The extent of the headwind in 2025 will be, you know, how much SKU rationalization is in wave two. Could be small, medium, or maybe more impactful. And then the timing of it, whenever we stop selling those SKUs in 2025, there will be an annualization effect into 2026. I think it's important to reference that we didn't slow the project down at all. We're full steam ahead. It's just that the early phase of it didn't derive what we expected. That's all. So we're still on track. We're still on plan. We just don't know the value of phase II, and it was important to keep the pedal down on this, because what we don't want to do is rebrand all these and then reduce them later. And so it gives us the perfect opportunity, because we've got rebranding on the horizon, to do this now before the rebranding starts. Got it. So, you know, the one question I get from investors is, given this rationalization program, how do we think about 2025 revenues? I'm not asking for guidance for 2025, but just, you know, I mean, you would think that if there's a SKU rationalization program going on, you would expect revenues to step down. So how do we think about that, given sort of, you know, improving end markets, the transformation that you're doing, and then balancing that with this program? So, thanks for saying you're not asking for guidance, because- Always. Because we wouldn't give it. But, but I can give you some color. I mean, so if I think about some of the vectors of improving the business from a growth perspective, some of them are pretty quick, right? You can get traction with hiring great people, changing the rigor in an organization, changing compensation plans so that you get better focus, and even just taking up the data usage on where you direct traffic with your commercial organization. Those are really fast ways to get there. And even restructuring the commercial organization for specialization, that can be pretty fast. So we would expect those things to be able to begin to help the underlying business performance in 2025. The offset to that would be the SKU rationalization. If we have SKU rationalization that we determine that we're going to move forward with, that would put some pressure on the overall growth rate in 2025, but the underlying business, we expect to improve in 2025. Got it. You know, you said about 3,500 products in phase I. How should we think about phase II, either in percentage or number of SKUs, and what percentage of total SKUs will that represent? Yeah, we don't have the answer yet, unfortunately. We haven't assessed it. The teams are still working pretty diligently on this, but at the end of the day, what we have to see in these, and I would say 3M's done a pretty good job in this area in the past. There's not a whole bunch of low-hanging fruit beyond the phase I that we saw, but the goal is gonna be, hey, if you got a real opportunity to be able to clean the portfolio, and that helps future revenue growth or margin profile, we're gonna pay attention to it, and so we just don't have an answer yet to tell you, to be honest. Okay, got it. You know, as we think about 2025, I'm sure you guys are planning for next year and doing your budgeting. Are there any potential headwinds and tailwinds to keep an eye out for in 2025 as you think about next year? You wanna walk through this? Yeah. Yeah, sure. So I think we've covered pretty well our revenue as we talked about the SKU project and as Bryan talked about the underlying business, momentum building, and we just have to keep an eye on that as we think about revenue growth for next year. If you drop down into gross margins, the biggest thing that we wanna make sure people understand is that as we separated on April 1st, 3M stepped up cost per product that they supply to us, and that started to build higher product cost in our inventory, and we're gonna start to have that clear inventory here in Q3. So in 2025, we'll have the second half annualization of that 3M step-up in cost. We also have, in operating expenses, the stand-up public company expenses that are ramping throughout this year, so those will put some headwinds in operating expenses next year as we annualize that. On the other side, we are also working on a lot of efficiency programs that we think we can start to provide improved operating expenses, gross margin to a certain extent, and more operating expenses efficiency programs. It'll be toggling those two things with the headwinds to decide where 2025 lands from a margin perspective. Then below operating margins, certainly, the annualization of interest expense is a big one. We started interest expense a little bit in Q1, but the first full quarter of interest expense in Q2, which means we'll pick up another full quarter of interest expense next year. And then there's been a few tax rate things, too, that have given us a fairly low tax rate here in the first couple quarters. We would expect that to normalize next year as well. So between operating margins and earnings, there'll be a couple headwinds, annualization of headwinds for interest expense, primarily, and then certain tax rate things as well. Now, that we have to keep an eye on. These are pretty typical of a separation, given that we're just separating as of April first. But having said all that, we've got a lot of work to do between now and February to finalize the strategic plan Bryan mentioned, and then present our guidance for 2025 at that time. Got it. So interest expense steps up from the $400 million to account for the full quarter. Exactly. And then on the tax rate, what's a durable tax rate? Can you share that? Yeah, we haven't put guidance out there yet. And I would say this relates to our previous experience with the spin as well. It takes a little more time for the tax team to settle in what they think the long-term tax rate and guidance will be for the company, 'cause there's a lot of activity, as you can imagine, separating the companies and then establishing your tax strategy for a new stand-up public company. And so that'll come again with the LRP in February. Got it. Let's talk about pricing. Can you talk about your expectations of price, and tell us about your pricing strategies as you've separated? ... Yeah, maybe I'll start. You know, what I liked a lot about this opportunity, and then Wayde, I'll get you, bring you in for the details, just so it stays consistent. Mm-hmm. But what we liked a lot about this opportunity is that, even though you always see pricing pressure in med tech land, I would say that these businesses, just given the overall scale of the subparts of the businesses, don't get nearly as much attention. And so there's price pressure for sure, but probably not the level of price pressure that I'm used to, say, in orthopedics. Orthopedics is a big target. It's one of the biggest spends in a hospital system. When they go to reduce costs, they go to those big spend areas, and they really put a lot of pressure on manufacturers to lower cost. You don't see that same level of attention with these businesses just 'cause of the scale differences and how fragmented they are. So that's a positive for us, and that sets up an environment where we could be looking pretty good when it comes to pricing, actually, potentially even getting benefits from pricing. So maybe I'll pass it to you on the way we're thinking about it from there. Yeah. Sounds good, Bryan. I think you covered it well. I would just say, historically, over the last couple of years, the business has benefited a lot from price, and we mentioned in 2023, more than all of our growth was price related, and we're seeing that normalize now with a more typical pricing strategy. And so as Bryan said, you know, going forward, we think we'll be more in a price neutral to slightly favorable or maybe even slightly unfavorable, as is typical in med devices. You know, if we're slightly favorable, we'll be happy across the multiple product lines that we have. If we're slightly unfavorable, obviously, we're not gonna be happy. So normalized pricing means neutral for you? Yeah, neutral with some- Right ... slight benefits. With some plus, minus. Slight unfavorable. That's typically what we've seen over our, you know, couple decades in the market. Okay, and are you getting more price in certain segments than others? I don't know that we've said specifically so. Yeah, we haven't shared specific details on that. You know, I think maybe just one way to think about it would be, given the price benefits that the business has had over the prior two years, it was pretty broad-based. But it was really related to the hyperinflationary period, where there was a lot of cost as well for manufacturers. And so I think there was a market reset with higher cost, higher prices, and now that we're not seeing the hyperinflationary cost anymore, we're reflecting that in our pricing strategies, which are becoming more neutral. Okay, got it. I'll just only add to it to say that every business took advantage of or leveraged the high inflationary period for the right reasons. I mean, costs were going up, and some of that needed to be passed on to customers. I think here, probably the team focused too much on price, maybe took more than they should have, and that cost us some volume. I think in a normal environment, you wouldn't have pushed so hard, and you would have focused more on volume because that's sustainable. So to give up volume for aggressiveness in price in any circumstance is not necessarily a good, sustainable thing to do. Got it. Let's talk about capital allocation. This is another question I get all the time. I'm sure you do as well. Mm-hmm. Just remind us of your capital allocation priorities. Yeah, I can start that one, Bryan, if you want. So as with most separations, we had a good amount of debt that we inherited as part of the new stand-up public company, and so our capital allocation policy is primarily focused on paying down that debt over the first 24 months. And we've got a nice update here. We actually just made our first debt payment. So we've paid down $200 million of our outstanding debt and following through on that commitment to focus our free cash flow generation on our primary capital objective, which is paying down debt over the next 24 months. So we have a term loan at the front end of our debt stack for $1.5 billion, and that was fully prepayable, so the target $200 million went against that term loan. So with that, you know, we're continuing to invest in the business, obviously, as a high priority as well. We're gonna support the growth areas with capital expansion and R&D as well. We certainly have some capital expenditures to invest as part of the separation as well, in systems and manufacturing, so those will also remain high priorities for us. And at this stage, we've decided not to do a dividend at this point or share repurchases, but those are always options for us as we continue to evolve our capital strategy over time. Okay. You know, the other question I get a lot is: Can you do divestitures? You know, when can you spin off or sell segments or businesses, given that it's a tax-free spin? Yeah. Any non-core assets that you can divest? What's your comment on that? Yeah, so, so I think maybe just taking a step back, that, from the very beginning, we talked about in phase III, which again, is a concurrent process that we're running, we're looking at the, portfolio optimization opportunities of this business. Anybody would coming in to have these disparate businesses, you would look at that. What we're doing in that process now is to run the value analysis to determine how much they're going to apply to the strategic intent of the business and/or the, you know, the aspirations we have, financially speaking, including deleveraging. So, so that's, you know, what's running today. But in concurrent to that, because we're so new from a spin perspective, there are other considerations. I'm not gonna call them barriers, but other considerations that we have to manage. And we're spending time right now. Some of those have to do with our relationship with 3M. We're working on those and trying to determine what would be the timing available to us if, in fact, we decided to move down that path of divestiture. So at the right time, given that as a backdrop, once we've had the data collection, put the strategy in place, and we've understood those potential I'd again just say considerations, then we'll come back to you and let you know what the portfolio optimization is gonna look like. ... I'm gonna ask this question, I don't know if you'll answer it, but are there specific businesses or segments that you think are better candidates for divestitures? No. So you'd be surprised if I answered that, I know for sure. But, I think we're treating them all equally right now. The only one I would say is, you know, the center of gravity is MedSurg, obviously. Right. You look at MedSurg, it's 60% of our business. It's a great area to be able to do bolt-on acquisitions, a W-2 sales organization. It's really. I just call it a, you know, an area that we wanna concentrate, but you know, for every other business, including subparts of those businesses, we have to consider the value to us as an organization and the potential value external to us, and how much that will help us drive our strategy forward, and again, drive our financial aspirations. That's a normal process that you would go through as a publicly traded company, and that's exactly what we're doing. Got it. So obviously, the focus is on debt paydown over the next twenty-four months, but when do you think you'll be in a position to start looking at deals to improve your WAMGR? It depends on the deleveraging. As Wayde said, the capital allocation strategy is very clear. We are committed to delevering. We've got a long way to go. We gotta make sure that we get that accomplished, but when that deleveraging occurs, and we feel like we're in a good place to be able to hold on to our investment-grade rating, then absolutely, part of the playbook here is to bring in small acquisitions, tuck-in acquisitions, in that W-2 sales organization, where you can get leverage right away. The beauty of this is, and Wayde mentioned it, is we're not. We don't have to have a big beachhead acquisition, a big transformational acquisition to get into fast growth markets. We're already in fast growth markets. We just need to add little acquisitions to be able to build scale in the fastest growth submarkets of those markets. So, so I feel like we're in a pretty good position when the leverage ratio comes down. Have you shared your leverage ratio that you're targeting or what investment-grade rating you're comfortable with? So we haven't shared a target leverage ratio yet, but we are focused on maintaining an investment-grade credit rating. That's very important for us. And the other thing that we've done is, I mentioned earlier, but we have a fully prepayable $1.5 billion term loan at the front end of our debt stack. So you can think about that as the area that we're targeting first. Got it. You know, just another, broader question: with all the recent concerns around the macro weakness and talk about potential recession, have you seen any impact to your end market demand? You know, that's one of the benefits of the diversity of the business. We haven't seen as much of an impact, I think, as others. You know, the areas that we are feeling some would be in Dental. Yeah. You know, that's an area that I think is pretty widely known, it's been a bit pressured. I still think we're in some of the safer zones of dental because it's, you know, composites, it's adhesives, it's, you know, the things you need to do to fix your teeth when they're broken, right? Right. So you gotta get in and get that accomplished. And the other part would be our drinking water. That's a consumer business, and there has been a little pressure there. But that's all captured in our guide for the year, and we feel pretty comfortable with the guide, even with the macro pressures. Okay, got it. You know, I just want to turn it over to you. This is. I know you guys are new to the company, and this is probably, I think, your second fireside chat at a healthcare conference. But any closing remarks or anything you'd like to tell investors about? I think you've hit all the high points. And I think the most important thing is we came in with a plan. This is not new to us. This is a very similar environment to where we saw significant value creation together with other folks as well. And we see that opportunity here again, and there's nothing that we've seen so far in the first four or five months as a separate company, that would indicate that we were wrong in that assumption. As a matter of fact, because we're ahead on phase I and phase II, we actually believe that we're in a better position than we thought from the beginning. So, a lot of opportunity ahead of us for sure. It's not without risk as we move forward. We'd be naive to think that there's... Still things couldn't go wrong, but we're feeling really good about the control we have over things right now. Got it. I think that's a good place to end. Thank you very much. Thanks, Vik.