Was created in 11 days, which is pretty amazing, and it's emblematic of we do things well, and we do it quickly. Thanks to the team for creating that. Thanks for being here. I'm Jon Pertchik, our CEO, TravelCenters of America, TA on Nasdaq. We have our investor day today, the first time since Peter Crage and I have been here, about 2.5 years. Again, we're really psyched to have so many friends we've met on Zoom. I'm looking at a lot of faces here that I know two-dimensionally. Anyway, happy to have everybody here. We're gonna go through a bunch of really neat things today, tell you some things we haven't told you before, give you some information that might be useful to really help understand us and how to maybe evaluate value and evaluate us. We're gonna get right to it here in a second. A couple things I just wanna leave you with today are. You'll see this in each of our team members' presentations. You'll get a sense of where this all started, this transformation, these changes back in December of 2019. Kind of a quick sense to set the table, how we got started, how then we got from there to here with illustrations, and then most importantly, what's in front of us, what's yet to be harvested. We have a long runway in front of us. We're really in the early innings of this. I'm gonna get right to it here. A couple themes for today. The first thing is, if we do our job well, you're gonna get a sense that it's not just the Peter and Jon show. There are about 10 of our total team members you're gonna hear from, including us, I think about eight more, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. We have many, many more. They're a team of folks who are old and new, meaning people who have been here for almost 40 years and 18 years, and others who are here, you know, as the couple years that Peter and I have been here. The punchline there is it's not just a couple folks in a truck or a truck stop. It's a number of people who are really experts at what they do, are excellent at what they do, and that suggests a repeatability and a sustainability. That's why you're gonna hear from and see our bench strength. You know, another thing you're gonna hear a little bit about, a little bit of a slight repeat, but building is that, you know, there's been transformational value creation, you know, and we want you to have a sense. Some folks are very familiar with this. Again, many of you we've spoken to many, many times, others not so much. I wanna give you a little flavor of the roadmap of how we've gotten here. Third, we're thinking about today as our graduation day. What I mean by that is, you know, we've been in this transformation mode. Transformation implies you're tethered still to a place of risk that needs to be transformed. On the other hand, it implies growth and innovation. We're separating ourselves. We feel like after 10 quarters of really excellent performance, we've earned the right to say we are a resilient, strong and a few other adjectives companies that still has the growth component innovation to it, but an untethering from that place of historical risk. Finally, and maybe as investors and analysts, we wanna give you a little more help in how to evaluate us, how to think about us. Peter's section I'll tease out now for the very end. You're gonna hear a little bit of a long-term outlook and give you some tools by which to really think about where we're heading. First, and sorry to folks who are super familiar with this, I'll do this fairly quickly. Just a quick intro to TA, and I'm not gonna go through all the numbers on the page. You can look at those yourself, obviously, and the questions at the end, that'd be great. Really what I wanna leave you with is we've been around 50 years. We have 276 locations. We're big. We're in almost every state in the contiguous. We're at about $300 million of EBITDA. Our first year here. Well, you'll see. I'm gonna save that for later. You'll see a growth curve in a minute. The main thing I wanna leave you with besides scale and size, lots of amenities, are really a couple things. One, we're really part of the fabric that supports the movement of necessities, medicines to your doorstep, and that's by way of supporting the trucking business. We support motorists. What's fascinating, and you'll see in a little bit, I'll build on this a little bit, is this resilience that comes from serving two very different masters or two different kinds of customers. It's taken Peter and I a while to figure this out, but there's this inherent intrinsic resilience to the business that is the result of some of this. You know, lastly, just bottom right, we're really proud that we're good community members. We're doing a lot of neat things. We're back in the Fortune 500. That's a big deal to us. We're a top gas station brand. We're a top workplace in Northeast Ohio. What's not on here is we're partners with the Cleveland Clinic right now, which is a really big deal, and we're partnered up with an AI firm that we're doing some neat stuff you'll hear about later. Quickly, I'll talk about at a high level. Again, our team members are gonna get into it in detail, but I wanna share a little bit about the transformation, and this is my fourth company with something like this. You know, and you approach a transformation of such a complex company really in phases. You know, phase one, frankly, was year one. I started December sixteenth of 2019, so really basically 2020 was my first year, and our newly reconstituted team, that was our first year. That was really a year of planning and prep. You know, the stock was $8.90 day one. We had $17 million of cash in the bank. You know, EBITDA was hurting. There's no real free cash flow. The first year was just getting our house in order, reorganizing, bringing in some new talent to blend with historical great talent, putting a bit of a plan together. We didn't even have a mission statement, a vision statement, or a set of values. You know, when you're in 40-some-odd states and 18,000 people, what binds you are those simple principles. We didn't have that. We were sort of a meandering herd, and our balance sheet was in bad shape. We weren't growing. We really. The first year was just about getting the right people in the right place, getting the plan together, and getting the purse taken care of. We did a debt and equity raise or equity and then debt raise. You know, boy, as the CEO of a big, you know, public company, you're really. It's painful to think about an equity raise. The shareholders, everybody's. That's a hard choice, but it's one of those hard choices you have to make if we're really to put ourselves in a position to have a strong balance sheet. The most important obligation as head of a big company as a team is to have a safe, secure balance sheet. That's bigger than anything. Growth, other things are on top of that. We needed to really set the foundation and then prepare ourselves to be in a growth mode. That was year one. Year two was starting to shift gears and starting to take that plan we developed and take that balance sheet and started to figure out how we're going to put it to work and actually then in fact started to put it to work. That was this investing in growth, having a really robust capital plan, you know, starting to act on that capital plan by way of improving things that customers would see and notice and starting to improve things that make our team members work more efficiently. IT comes to mind, right? IT is like plumbing. If it's working great, nobody gives a high five, but when it's not, everybody's really upset, you know? Well, it's kind of that foundation that we needed to start to get in place. Of course, building on the team, getting the team to come together through really, really solid, strong visibility and communication and leadership development. That was sort of year two in a nutshell. You're going to see the results of this stuff in a minute. Again, many of you are familiar with it, others may not be. I'm leading up to that punchline. You know, then where we are now, where we find ourselves in sort of the next couple year window of 2022, 2023 is really starting to make the point that I mentioned before, continuing to execute roughly 10 quarters of great performance, continuing to grow EBITDA, now starting to look ahead and share with everybody that further longer-term look ahead. That's, again, sort of teasing out foreshadowing for Peter for later. To really start to build on a solid foundation, a resilient, strong growth company. That's really where we find ourselves this year. To date, how does this translate? You know, if you look at the numbers, obviously, it's a nice aggressive slope upward, which is what you want. 2019, our adjusted EBITDA, as you see there, I won't recite the exact numbers, but 2020, the 146, was actually an EBITDA record in the 14 or so years we've been a public company. We're super proud of that because this little thing called COVID came along the first week that Peter joined us in March of 2020. Things like our full-service restaurants went down 90%. Gasoline volumes went down 45%. Diesel went down 25%. There have been aspects along the way of COVID and secondary to COVID that have created volatility, which in turn has helped us in some ways. Overwhelmingly, COVID was not a good thing for anybody, and certainly hasn't been for us. Yet in that year one of COVID, with all those negatives I just shared, we set an EBITDA record. The best part was I didn't know that until our fourth quarter board meeting, and I learned it from some of our board members. The next year, which was really year two, you know, the big percentage growth there, I don't know, 50%-60%, whatever that is exactly. The 220, I remember July or August of that year going, "Holy cow, we might break 200 this year." We were maybe at the time expecting 167, I think was where we set our sights. We broke, you know, we started to see a couple months ago, a year ago, we started to think, "Geez, we might break 200." You know, we're trailing 12 now is at 296. We're sort of going, "Hmm, you know, where does what does that mean for the rest of this year?" It's a really exciting time. That, yeah, blue light blue box down there just shows you that Q2, which was our last publicly reported period before what we're sharing here today, was about $122 million, which you compare that to 2019. There are elements of that that favored us for sure, but how we're executing within context of market conditions is really the point to take away there. Similarly, another nice arrow pointing upward. Look at our balance sheet, not only safe, again, through times like COVID and supply chain constraints and all that. Having that safety, that fortress is more important than anything. Four companies ago in my career, I was the chief restructuring officer of a company in bankruptcy. This stuff matters a lot, and I very much appreciate that. Look where we've gotten to now. Again, not as much credit as we should get, I think, and Peter will help, again, share some insights. We're not necessarily gonna take a position on what kind of multiple we should trade at. You know, we'll share a little bit about what we have been trading at and judge for yourselves, and if it's compelling, tell your friends. Seriously, you know, it's nice to go. My first day was $8.90. It was $8.89. I remember it was $8.90. I gotta refine that because it's a penny better, I guess, we've done since then. Yesterday, we were over $61, I think we hit. We've been as high as $64 a few months back, and so we're feeling pretty good about where we've achieved and what we've done shareholders. Boy, we're really, A, in the early innings, and B, judge for yourself on what our multiples, our EBITDA multiples are at and what maybe you would conclude they should be. Market cap again, $71 is what I remember. Okay, I have to fix that too. It was one off. Now getting into graduation day. I touched upon it before. I gave you the rationale and the logic behind it. I'll talk about how we conceive of ourselves now. This is more than sort of marketing speak to shareholders. This is how our vernacular internally is changing. Because there are certain things, there's a confidence and a. There's just the psychology behind, look, every action follows thought, right? You start with a thought, you then act on it. Even before the thought, there's a curiosity that leads to a thought that leads to an action. It'd be sort of very, very simple. How we conceive of ourselves will impact the results we ultimately achieve because they will impact how we think, how we act, and what we do. You know, the resilience one is, the two outside ones are maybe the most important, resilience and strength, but they're all important. Resilience and growth. Resilience, I shared a bit. It took Peter and I a while to really sort through this, to really start to understand why, you know, there'd be a quarter where we'd have really low fuel margin, and then a different, you know, the C-store would pick up or truck service would pick up. It took us a long time to start to really make sense of it. We've started to, I think, in this last couple quarters, really this second quarter of this year, we had this tremendous performance. I think it's where we started to figure this out, that there's this intrinsic, a functional hedge almost within the business that when pieces are up, other pieces are down. Once consumers are behaving a certain way, like at the C-store, like a Casey's, trucking may be behaving differently. Even within the movement of trucking measured by diesel and diesel volumes, diesel margin can behave differently because volatility and uncertainty and geopolitical risk and all of that, which creates some negatives for consumer behavior, can create a positive environment for fuel margin. Then there's this truck service little tiny bit of our great company that's growing faster than any other piece. All these bits and parts together, like an orchestra, come together to this great place, but they tend to behave differently, and therein lies the resilience. I feel like we've earned the right to say use that word that we wouldn't have necessarily used maybe a year or two ago to describe ourselves and to ask people to think about us around that word. Growth, you see transformation, you're trying to grow. Growth again, we're gonna folks are gonna get into it later as we go through our presentations in more detail. Growth means a couple of things. One, it means that process of pursuit of excellence. We're constantly trying to get better. We have lots and lots of things within the organization just to improve process, to give tools to our teams to better execute and more efficiently execute, to develop people. All of those things will help us just grow sort of organically. Because we're in the early innings of this high value, high growth window, that should continue to outpace what we might otherwise see. We're fortunate whatever comes along macroeconomically, we're in a unique spot because so many things are kind of half-cooked but not quite out of the oven yet that are gonna reap value in the relative near term, a quarter or two out, and you're gonna hear a lot about that today. Separately, that's the first part of growth. The other two parts I would say, we're very focused on acquisitions, and we're just now scaling. You'll hear from somebody in a moment who will talk to us about that and what that means and where we are, adding dots on the map, as well as just growing the P&L through acquisition and through smart capital allocation. Last but not least, franchises really spooling up nicely. You'll hear some numbers that are meaningful next year. Again, same point, these are franchises that have been developed. They're just about to open. It's just an illustration of how when I say something's just about to come out of the oven, that's. You'll hear a little more about that in a minute. Strength and efficiency are sort of just fundamental to really how we're executing and how we're conducting ourselves. The next few years, what should you expect from us? You'll continue to expect an engaged culture, a culture that's focused on the same things we've been focused on. This is nothing new. This is just table stakes. This is why we're executing. It started with an intense focus on cost that has now started to shift toward growth, but now it's a cultural phenomenon, so it doesn't go away. Just because thematically we've changed from cost to growth, culturally, there is a cost discipline which is just awesome that didn't exist a few years ago. We're gonna continue to focus on efficiency, but specifically leveraging technology. Once again, there's sort of like the plumbing, there's a lot of IT stuff happening that you're gonna hear from our head of IT later. There's also leveraging AI and machine learning. You're gonna hear about how we're leveraging technology in different ways. You know, and then this is building on the growth point earlier. You know, continuing to find opportunities of process improvement to find and prioritize really more game-changing opportunities. We still, as much as if we've found a lot of value and really move the EBITDA needle, there's so much more to harvest, some of which is almost coming out of the oven, and others we won't get to until mid and even late next year. There's a lot of runway ahead in our mind. Of course, network growth, I mentioned both capital allocation into acquisition capital and franchise. Finally, you'll hear from our head of sustainability, which is both ESG. We're gonna issue our report coming up real soon, and then also some of the alternative energy and sustainability stuff that's out there that's really gonna change mobility over the next five or 10 years on the light-duty side and 20-25 years starting in the heavy-duty side. Before I wrap, I really wanna just, you know, tease out one more time and kind of the foreshadowing of Peter Crage's presentation. You're gonna hear, and I know people have been hungry for this, and I completely understand it when you're a company like ours that has not given guidance nor a long-term outlook of any kind. When there's no real like kind to us that's public, you know, Pilot and Love's are the closest to us, they're private. Just because Buffett's made a big investment in Pilot, you're not gonna see much of anything there. I understand our shareholders are really hamstrung to try to evaluate value and evaluate us. While we're not gonna necessarily give folks today cells to put numbers in, we're gonna give a long-term perspective of where we believe we're headed. I'm hopeful when you see that arrow forward, and you look at the arrow back, and you consider maybe some credibility that's been created by the team here and others in terms of under-promising and over-delivering, that that is helpful, at least in creating a view on value and where we're going. With that, I am gonna hand it over to ask Dennis King to come up here. Come on up, Dennis. Dennis is our SVP of Corporate Development. This was a department that didn't exist at the company. It's really code for helping carry out the transformation, in the shorter, short run, meaning several years run, and in the long run, to really help us innovate and continue to grow, adapt, and change. We stole him from McKinsey, and he's got an amazing background that didn't exist, not just literally from McKinsey, but that sort of consultative bent that's, you know, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it kind of perspective that he's really helped to change the organization. I'll hand it over to Dennis. Dennis? Hey, everyone. How you doing? I'm very excited to be here today. As Jon mentioned, I lead up the corporate development group. You know, I'm gonna be kinda talking about a few things that the corporate development group has done over the past two years, but really talking about what we're up to right now and what we're driving in the future, which is some exciting things. First off, just what is the corporate development group? Really what Jon alluded to is that we really focus on driving the transformation forward. At this stage, we're really kind of morphing that into more of, you know, a strategic planning group and driving strategic initiatives, but I'll talk a little bit about that in a minute. We also really are tasked with making sure that the company is continuing to innovate and continuing to grow. Those are really two really important things that we keep our eye on so that we're not, you know, we're always pushing the envelope in our industry, and beyond. Kinda tactically, the five areas that the corporate development group cover, and I'll go into these in a bit more detail throughout the presentation, is first off we help drive the transformation, and that's really around, you know, organizing the highest priority strategic initiatives at the company and making sure that there's a process and an accountability to delivering those. We also have the data and analytics team, which really is tasked with making sure that we have a strong foundation from a governance standpoint, as well as we have the analytical capabilities to give our business leaders some of the visibility and the insights to help make some of the best decisions in the industry. The last three are really around driving our network growth, which I'll get into in a bit more detail. That's the partnerships and acquisitions team. We have the franchising team, and then we also have the real estate team. I'll get into the details of those. Before I do, what I wanted to spend a minute doing is really going through our team because I think it's important both for our team and talk about more how that impacts our company. Our team has a really great combination, in my opinion, of folks that have been in the industry for many years. They know travel centers. They know the business, and they know what makes it tick. Combined with folks that are relatively new to the industry, but they bring additional thinking and approaches to the table, and that combination is pretty powerful in my opinion. You'll see here, Kate, the second one in and Dave, the fourth one in here, they lead our data and analytics group and our franchising team respectively. Combined, those two have over 50 years experience at TA and in the travel center industry. They know TravelCenters back and forth, right? You can bounce ideas off of them, and they're really open to thinking through new ideas with you. Combine that with, you know, Andrew, Habib, and David, who have, you know, West Point background. You know, David played for the Red Sox and went to Goldman, and, you know, Habib, you know, comes from Marathon. So it's a really powerful combination of backgrounds that help us do two things really. We get to a better answer, in my opinion. You know, people challenge each other, challenge the thinking, challenge the status quo, and bring new ideas to the table. There's also a really healthy kind of underlying competition in our team. You know, we drive each other to really... You know, if someone is really knocking it out of the park and driving impact, the other folks are really kinda chomping to really deliver as well. I think this is emblematic of both corporate development group but also what we've done recently as a company to help drive our company forward. I'm gonna spend a couple minutes on the transformation itself. The way that I think about the transformation is this is really kind of a set of our top strategic initiatives. We kinda think about it. You'll see the flywheel on the right here. We think about it as a group of initiatives that we bucket into three different groups. One is to drive margin, and so you think about things like, you know, setting up a procurement team or, you know, really rethinking how we approach fuel supply, driving kind of costs and pricing and promotions, things like that, combined with investing in experience. This could be either, like, our loyalty invest in our customer, but we've also done a bunch of initiatives around investing in our team members. You know, Jon mentioned MVV. You know, we think about how we evaluate performance, things that are gonna drive our company forward, and then combine that with driving growth, and that's the typical, you know, network growth, building up our balance sheet, things like that. The combination of these is really powerful to just make sure that we're sustaining that growth flywheel. You know, just one other thing that I'll mention is that in early 2020 when I joined in about May, we had about 60 initiatives that we were driving forward, which is a lot, but there was a lot of work to do. Now we're down to really 20, and you can imagine the mix of expanding margins when in the beginning compared to investing in experience and driving growth has shifted over that time period, which is a really good sign that we're really making progress in our transformation. The last piece I'll talk about on the transformation is around, you know, what is the transformation? I'm not gonna go through each one of these individually, but I think there's two really big points to get from this slide. One is that the breadth of this transformation is really impressive. It spans across the full business, right? There's not, you know, a whole host of initiatives in fuel or they're all coming from truck service. You know, we have a bunch of initiatives going on that gives us the confidence that we can sustain this growth and actually hit it. When we start thinking about, you know, when I talk to Jon about targets in the beginning of the year, we have in our kind of like pool of targets, we have 1.5x-2x that we're working on. Not one of these is going to make or break the company, which is really how we're going to drive this forward. That's a really important thing. You know, a few of these will over deliver, one or two might not. Overall, we're very confident that we're going to kind of deliver the results that we say we're going to deliver. With this, we're also able to really focus on, you know, measurement in specific areas. We're able to pinpoint results by initiatives and hold, you know, team members accountable for delivering. Okay. Now I want to move on to kind of some of the growth aspects of what corporate development does. We've really, you know, in areas where we're trying to drive growth strategically that we don't have the capability in-house. What we've done recently is really partner with external groups to help accelerate that growth versus trying to build it in-house. A couple that I call out, we're, you know, we're in collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic to help focus on driver health, making sure that our kind of end customers are really living a healthy lifestyle and maintaining that moving forward. It's really important to our company and our customers. The next couple in there are, you know, Xendee and Nikola, which are public companies that we're partnering with them. These companies are really in the eTA space, and Dean will talk a little bit more about them when he comes up here. Really, you know, they're in energy management and they're kind of in hydrogen, where our partnering with them accelerates our ability, TA's ability to get into those kind of areas and learn more. Then the last thing that I'll touch on, and I think Brett will touch on a little bit more, is our partnership with Daugherty and DataRobot. This is an exciting area in AI. We have a whole list of, I want to say, 30 or so use cases that we think we can use AI in. You know, I come from. Jon mentioned my experience at McKinsey. We used analytics in pricing, in promotions, in assortment, in inventory. We have a whole list, as we brainstormed at TA of about 30 or so. We've really just launched one so far, and that's in street diesel pricing, and we're having a lot of success there. As we start to think about this partnership and the opportunities that we have outside of this just one use case, it's very exciting to me what we can do there. A couple more things. Network growth for franchise. This is an example of a group that existed before we came, and we made a couple of tweaks to help really accelerate the growth there. We did a bit of a reorganization to help the team, you know, be aligned to the sales team, the development team, the opening team, and then also the ongoing operations. We've had a lot of success here. Since 2020, we've signed 63 new franchises. We have 40 of them operating currently, and 47 of them are not operating because a lot of these are new builds, so they take about 2 years to build and open. This is one of the areas that we've had a lot of success, and the fruits of that success have yet to really kind of run through our results here. In the out years, we're still targeting about 30-35 new signings a year, and eventually that bottom number will be 30-35 signings and catch up with it. Another kind of key to the success is the value prop that TA brings. You know, we bring fleet deals to these independents or new operators. We bring purchasing power, bring the brand as well. What I'll do is I'll have one of our strongest franchisees explain that for himself. If I were an independent and I had Jim's truck stop on the interstate side, nobody knows Jim's truck stop unless they wander in here. When you put a Petro sign up, the truckers know what to expect. They know that they're getting the elite experience of a truck stop, the best of the best, and they know they'll be taken care of and appreciated. I think it was the best decision I could have possibly made as an operator. It's been great. Great people, great company, and it's really worked out well for us. Never looked back. We have a lot of those stories that you know our franchise partners are really excited to join our network. The last thing I'll talk about, and I'm running a little long on time, but this is an exciting piece as well, is our acquisition capability. You know, rewind 12, 18 months ago, this wasn't even in our mindset. As we've spun up this team and this capability, we've had an amazing success here, in my opinion. Year to date in 2022 so far, these numbers, since this is moving so fast, we closed on 2 additional acquisitions yesterday. We have a total year to date of five new travel centers that we acquired, three of them being franchisees, two of them were independents, as well as two truck service locations. We've deployed over $110 million in capital. These are in areas that we're very excited about. You know, we think the returns are strong. We think these locations, like for example, Petro Raphine, this is a massive location, and it's a flagship location. They're not just acquisitions to acquire, they're acquisitions in strategic locations, and they're really strong travel centers. The other important thing to speak about here is that, you know, we've been outperforming our underwriting on all of these acquisitions to date, and it's both outperforming from a fuel perspective and from a non-fuel perspective. We're really confident we're making the right decisions and we're making the right investments through our acquisitions. We have a really healthy pipeline for 2023 as well. We expect to continue to deploy between $75 million and $125 million a year in really strategic acquisitions. With that being said, you know, what's next is we're gonna continue doing what we're doing in this group. We're gonna continue driving the strategic planning and strategic initiatives through the transformation. We're gonna continue with our network growth, and we're gonna continue to innovate. A lot of the actions that we've taken, you know, to date, these are in our kind of like front view mirror, not our rear view mirror. We're very excited about it. With that, I'll pass it back to Jon here. Thanks, Dennis. Yeah, you can hear me great. So Dennis is not only the head of this department, they really are a cultural phenomenon. Sorry to call you that, Dennis, but they really changed the way we think as a team, as a unit. By really focus on accountability and measurement, we can really drive value. I'm really excited to shift gears here and introduce Brett Hecker, who's our SVP of Fuel. A lot of people are very interested in fuel, and there may be questions at the end about this, which is terrific. He's been at the company almost 19 years. You barely look that old. Importantly, he's been in this lead role for 18 months, and if you look at our performance and how it changed in this area 18 months ago, he and his team can take a lot of credit for it, and so happy to introduce Brett Hecker. Yeah. Thank you, Jon. Again, Brett Hecker, Divisional Vice President of our fuel team. I wanna say thank you all for spending the time with us today. It's very exciting. We're all very, very excited to be here with you today. As Jon mentioned, I joined TA about 18 years ago. Been in the fuel department for about 16 years. As he mentioned, I became the leader of the team about 18 months ago. Our fuel team is a group of about 30 team members. We have almost 400 years of supply and logistics experience between the 30 of us. Our team is comprised of some new leaders along with some supply managers that actually maintain the relationships with all of the big oil companies across the country. We've also got a team of logistics coordinators that work with our fuel carriers to make sure that we're keeping our sites supplied throughout the year. This team has been extremely resilient in my time in this role. Giving an example, last year you probably saw on the news, I'm sure, about the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack. That pipeline feeds fuel all the way from Linden, New Jersey, or I'm sorry, Pasadena, Texas, all the way up to Linden, New Jersey. Went about two-week period where no fuel was being put into that pipeline, which really sets all of the markets from Houston all the way up to the Northeast behind on supply. The team extremely resilient, keeping our sites supplied during those difficult times. A little bit more about our team. Our mission is very plain and simple. We try to keep all of our sites supplied with product at all times. It's very important for our customers, obviously, that we have fuel when they show up. It's the first thing that they come to see. Jon's referred to it before as our little toll booth outside of the site. Right behind the supply, though, our team is really focused on buying optimally and at the lowest cost possible. Those are the key focuses of our team. Like I said, supply is number one, but buying at the lowest price possible is definitely right behind it. Some other things our teams do. We actually set the retail prices for all of the bulk liquid fuels that we sell, so that's diesel, gasoline, and DEF. Our team sets and monitors approximately 1,000 prices per day across our network, and that's not even taking into account the fact that we're bringing in thousands of competitor prices that we're comparing against. As Jon mentioned earlier too, we're moving into utilizing AI. We conducted a test at five sites initially. Favorable results. Later rolled that out to an additional 15 sites. We've had 20 sites on the program to this point. Again, favorable results. We're actually right now in the midst of trying to deploy this across a larger group of sites as well. A little more about our fuel team too. About 18 months ago when I moved into this role, one of the very first things we did was get the right team in place and kind of set expectations for the group. I really wanted to invest in our people, make sure they have a firm understanding of what we're trying to do, what our objectives are, and also, you know, just make sure that we have the right team in place for years to come for more growth and more success. An example of how we invest in our team is when they join, we strongly encourage them to attend fuel buying courses. Basically, learn how all the markets work, learn all the ins and outs, so that we can really optimize what we do. You know, another thing we really focused on was execution, the day-to-day, making sure we're following our playbook and doing the right thing. We need to make sure we're efficient in everything we do and we're optimizing, like I mentioned. Give you an example. Earlier this year, when Russia invaded Ukraine, I'm sure you guys have seen the markets were extremely volatile. We saw the market move 40, 50, 60 cents in a day, where it used to be we considered a three-cent change on any given day to be a large move. Our team was prepared and ready to act when that started happening. There was one day where we shifted around enough loads across our network that it actually saved our company a million dollars in one day. While all of that, we were working through that, the leaders on our team were actually starting to set and talk about strategy for the future too. We have some new things we wanna start to work on, whether it's things we haven't tried before historically or some things we might be doing on a lighter scale that we can actually expand upon and do a little bit more. Again, I keep talking about execution. One of the first things we did was we expanded how many logistics coordinators and supply managers we had on our team. Huge that we are able to execute on a daily basis and follow our playbook. Our nation right now is going through a time where distillate inventories are low compared to historical norms. Makes it a little bit harder to find fuel on occasion. We needed to make sure we had all of the right resources in place so that we could act accordingly. Another thing we're going through right now too is our fuel haulers are having issues with a driver shortage. As drivers are getting older, there's not a lot of younger folks that wanna come in and fill their shoes. We needed the extra resources to make sure that we, like I said earlier, keep our site supplied and that we're buying as well as we can. Some of the other things we've done. We've re-implemented structured training that happens weekly. We've also got structured team building and, you know, we've really started recognizing folks on the fuel supply team because we want those folks to realize that when we have success, we're gonna celebrate it together, and we wanna keep them with the team for a long time. One of the key focuses always in any of these meetings is margin improvement. Give you an example. We've tried to find ways that we can continue to blend biodiesel as often as possible. In the winter months, you typically need to reduce bio blends for cold weather. We've been trying to extend the period that we blend just to improve our margins longer into the year. Our bio blending program, as an example, we typically have 100-125 sites blending on our program, and typically that program leads to about $50 million in savings on an annual basis. You'll also see that we have a periodic regional RFP. We typically run our diesel and gasoline supply through an RFP process that allows us to negotiate competitive pricing. Wanna talk a little bit more, a little deeper dive on our purchasing. Our fuel team actually captures or calculates about 12,000 supplier prices on any given day. We then use those prices to make sure that we're sourcing our loads appropriately across the network. We deliver on any given day about 1,000 loads of fuel to all of our sites. Obviously 12,000 prices and 1,000 loads per day is something you can't do manually, so we've got our own internal load management tool called Fuel Shepherd. Fuel Shepherd allows us to optimize all of our fuel purchasing across the network. A few ways we do that, there's timing, source, and regional ways that we can optimize. Timing is simply our teams watching the market. There's obviously been a lot of volatility this year. Any given month, and looking at the example on the slide there. You can see we're buying four loads on a Tuesday as opposed to three on a Monday. Basically what we're trying to do there is if we can buy on a lower cost on Tuesday, we're gonna buy as much fuel as we can on that day and go a little lighter on the days where the cost is a bit higher. In any given month, we typically move about 2,500-3,000 loads of fuel around these timing windows. Annually, that saves us about $5-$7 million. Again, back to the volatility from this year. Year to date, it's actually allowed us to save about $17 million. Another way we're able to optimize is by source. We typically have a large percentage of the volume at our sites on a contract. Contracts do two things for us. Number one, they allow us to have guaranteed supply. When things happen like the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack or other events, we're the first people that our contract suppliers are gonna have product available for. It allows us to get the product into our sites. The other thing it does is it's typically price advantaged compared to other spot prices you may find out in the market. On occasion though, if a market or markets actually become oversupplied or have too much supply, the product becomes discounted, and that's when the spot prices can actually fall below our contract. When that happens, we're ready to pounce on that opportunity as well, and we're buying as much spot as we can in those situations. Then the last one I'll speak to is some regional opportunities that we have. There are times when certain markets will actually become what we call depressed compared to other markets, so we can actually pay a little bit extra in freight costs to deliver fuel from one market to another. It can sometimes come with substantial savings even with that additional freight cost. Wanna talk a little bit about more future value creation, some of the things we're really excited about moving forward. We talked about AI earlier with our street diesel pricing initiative. We're also looking at inventory level and load management, utilizing AI for those as well. We're really digging in and figuring out where our opportunities may be. One thing that really has me excited is getting deeper in the supply chain. There's some things we've done historically, like I said, some things we haven't done at all. Some examples, Dennis mentioned earlier that we acquired our Lexington and Raphine franchise locations. That acquisition came with some trucks, where they were hauling their own fuel. We've acquired those trucks. We've been operating those for several months. It's been very successful, so we're in the process of evaluating, "Hey, do we wanna put more trucks across our network to haul our own fuel?" Helps with the driver issues, helps with supply issues. We have a bit more control on where the drivers are gonna go. Rail is another opportunity. You could actually rail product from one part of the country to another. With that, also ensures that you've got supply reliability because you can actually deliver product into a market that's constrained. It also, when you do that, it typically comes with a price advantage as well. I'll finish up by talking about another, the last thing we do on a limited scale today. We actually ship some of our own product on pipelines today. It's very limited, more so on the West Coast. Recently, though, we got our new shipper status on the Colonial Pipeline that I mentioned earlier. We would actually have the ability to ship our own product from Pasadena, Texas, all the way up to Linden, New Jersey, hit any of those markets along the way. Again, security of supply gives us more optionality and flexibility and allows us to purchase more optimally for the network. With that, I'll hand it back over to you, Jon. Thanks. Thanks, Brett. The takeaway from my standpoint with Brett, who's done an amazing job, is, you know, old-fashioned just excellent management, weekly trainings, weekly meetings, weekly recognition, those traditional old-fashioned concepts never really grow old. They really work, and that's how he's extracted value, so much value, I think, from the department. Anyway, thanks, Brett. Thank you. I want to introduce Lloyd Sanford. Lloyd's been in the business now and in the company approaching 40 years. He's gonna cover his ears. He's an industry veteran, really well-respected, really well-known, and that's why we do business with more than 90% of the largest fleets in America. He's head of our fleet sales and fleet business. Here's Lloyd Sanford. I knew you were gonna make the comment on the 37 years. He failed to mention I started when I was 10, so anyway. Anyway, I appreciate the opportunity to speak with everybody today predominantly about our fuel business. I'll just jump right into things. As far as our team, it's interesting 'cause listening to Dennis and Brett, we have a team of about 50 people on the sales side, but it's a really good mix of TA experience, industry experience, as well as new talent from outside the business. As you would expect sales team, we got a little bit over half the team is directly involved with customer-facing direct sales. Then we have a lot of sales support, customer service, analytics, which obviously helps manage our deals, evaluate deals, track discounts, margins, things like that. Then the other part of the business that's interesting, our team spends a lot of time on the truck service side. Actually, we have a whole group of people that acts as liaisons between our sites, between our sales team, and between customers as it relates to the maintenance side of the business. That's kinda the different way we break it up. The pieces of the business that we focus on is diesel fuel, DEF, and truck service is the main areas that we focus on. Now, as far as a little bit about our customer, 30,000 customers, and I got that number, it could change from time to time, but that's year to date so far this year, that we've transacted with, over 30,000 customers on fuel or maintenance, so a really large customer base. Fleets, we deal with over 90% of the top 100 trucking companies in the United States. We deal with all the, predominantly all the large trucking fleets. Gallons, we'll do about 2 billion in diesel gallons, and we'll impact a little over $7 billion in revenue. Again, that will come from diesel, DEF, and maintenance as well. A lot going on. I think next up, I got just a few words. Our largest customer, which is NASTC, their owner, David Owen. You can't hear me real good in the back? Okay, sorry about that. Their owner took the time to talk a little bit about his relationship. What we really like about TA is the fact that it's a safety factor. Driver amenities, I mean, if your fuel buying philosophy is about nothing more than buying the cheapest fuel you can find across the country, then you're gonna end up in pumper locations, places where there's no pull-through parking, no security, no safe haven for a truck, no hot showers, no hot food, none of the amenities that larger carriers enjoy, either in a truck stop chain or at their terminal sites. Really like the way they think. I really like the way they handle our customers. We're only as good as our vendor partners, and they're one of our best. He's a great guy. We have a great relationship with that company, so appreciate him taking the time to do that for us. This slide really, I think, tells a great story. We've been growing our diesel business over the last three or four years. What this slide does is illustrates kind of that growth over time. The blue bars represent our diesel volume as a percent of total diesel volume consumed in the trucking industry, and that's Class 3 [through 8] trucks, so that's predominantly all the trucks out there. The shaded area underneath that is the overall demand for that same business. You can see where we've gone from underperforming the market three or four years ago with about 5% market share to outperforming the market with 6.5% and growing market share. To me, this is a really, really compelling story, and it really just shows how we've grown the business and how we've gone from underperforming to overperforming over the last three years or so. This I want to spend just a couple minutes on it because it really kind of deconstructs our diesel business a little bit to hopefully help you guys understand that a little bit better. As I mentioned, you know, we do business with all shapes and sizes of fleets in North America. We do about 2 billion gallons of diesel. Brett touched on the section over to the right, fleet business. That's what you or I would pay if we drove in to buy fuel. No discounts, pump price, et cetera. That's only about 10% of our business. Very profitable, but only about 10%. The other 90% is we categorize as fleet, meaning we have a relationship, we have a contract, we have a program with those customers. We divide that up the way we manage the business into three buckets, large fleets, non-traditional business, and small fleets. Large fleets, it's pretty self-explanatory. It's over 100 trucks. It's the J.B. Hunt, the Schneider, the Werner, all the trucking companies you might be familiar with. That's a little bit less than 40% of our gallons, but the margin for that business is less, as you might expect. It's large companies. They demand better pricing, lower cents per gallon. The middle section, non-traditional, that's a much higher percentage of our business. In fact, it's approaching 60% of our business, and really that's fueled a lot of our growth over the last two, three, four years. You can kind of put that into two buckets. We have what we call aggregators, which are kind of a buying group. Third party puts together a value proposition, like NASTC, for example. They, they're an aggregator. That's been a huge part of the business. The other part of that non-traditional is brokers. That's the large trucking fleets. They use independent contractors and owner-operators to kind of, whenever they need extra capacity or flexibility, they bring them on. We partner with them to put together fuel programs, so we can leverage that business as well. If you take those two pieces of the business, we're doing—we've been averaging over $200 million a year in margin within non-traditional business, and we've been growing at about 20% a year the last three or four years. Even if we only grow that 5% the next three years, that's still an extra, an incremental, I think $30 million by year three. We see a ton of opportunity, a lot of business in the pipeline still there. The last section is the small fleets. Today, that's a fairly small percentage, less than 10% of the gallons, less than 10% of the margin, but huge opportunity. When you're looking at small fleets, there's one, there's a statistic that I think really kind of identifies the opportunity. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, there's 1.8 million registered carriers. 91% of those have six trucks or less. 97% have 20 trucks or less. It's a huge part of the business. Obviously, the challenge is getting to all those people 'cause there's so many of them out there. The small fleet program today for us, it generates around $20 million a year, but we've got a lot of emphasis, a lot of focus on that moving forward. We, I think very modestly we could grow at 20%. Just for example, if we were to do that, by year three, that's gonna deliver an incremental $15 million in margin as well. We see those both as huge opportunities moving forward. Couple other initiatives. Couple things that we've been working on or have worked on, one of which is our compensation. Fourth quarter of 2020, we took the sales team, and we put them on more of an incentive-based compensation program. They were just paid like everybody else before, but we've aligned how we compensate them with driving margin dollars and individual performance. We recognize the top performers, very margin-focused, and I think that's really helped keep them focused on delivering cents per gallon margin. C-suite, peer-to-peer, and Jon's done a lot to help with this. We've really spent a lot of time the last couple years building relationships, spending time with CEOs, presidents, senior level people at all of our major customers. That bodes very well for the future, and it's been very well-received. The inside sales team, which affects that small fleet business, we've doubled the size of that staff, and I'm gonna come back, spend just a couple more minutes on that. Yet to be harvested, two things I think that I just wanna touch on real quick. The first is, and I don't think Sandy's gonna get into this, but we have a very large scale IT project that we're kinda, I'm gonna say, hopefully halfway through, and it really impacts two or three different areas. We're replacing our legacy billing system, so the replacement of that's gonna be very, very much a tremendous improvement for the customer. We're also updating our sales process, and the sales process. It's kind of there's a lot of steps. I'm not gonna go through all those steps, but it has to do with evaluating deals, tracking deals, post-auditing deals, holding customers accountable to delivering the gallons we negotiate. That whole process is being updated, and I think there's huge opportunity for us moving forward. That's gonna help the business in the years ahead. Then the private label card, and I'm gonna finish up on that topic. We talked about the small fleet and how we go to market. One of the big things we think that'll help us go to market there, we launched our own private label billing card. It's called TA Fleet Universal. Whenever you launch a private label card, there's kind of three things that are a priority. You have to have a strong brand, you have to have the ability to extend credit to customers, and you have to have a value proposition. I think what we've put together, we did a ton of research in the market. We did as far as what's going on in the industry, and I think we have a solution that's as good or better than anybody else out there. Just, I won't go through each and every one of the benefits, but for drivers, we have legacy billing system. Those are gonna go away, be replaced with the new system, which is a much with the new program, which is a much better option. One card solution, which is huge for small fleets. They can use it for diesel. They can use it for maintenance. They can use it for gas, whatever they need. Extending credit loyalty perks, so not only we give them fuel incentives and maintenance incentives, but they also get loyalty benefits. Again, great value proposition. One of the other things that really makes this card really marketable, we partnered with WEX EFS, and they're the largest billing card company in our industry, and they do this program for most of the major oil companies as well. So they have a ton of experience doing it, and working with these guys on the launch and putting this program together, they said it's been probably the most successful launch of a private label card that they've ever had. I won't go through all the numbers, again, but we just launched it in May, and if you look at the activity so far, we've had it through August, over 1,500 applications, 1,700 new cards distributed. Again, this represents almost all new business, essentially. Almost 600 new accounts, new companies set up. If you look at the gallons, it's every month it has ramped up significantly. We're gonna do about 150,000 gallons this month. One of the other bright spots with that is that's at a margin. Right now we're at about $0.70. That's, you know, whether that's sustainable, but it is very good margin business, and this should continue to trend upwards. We're really excited about this. I think just to wrap up, I think two or three things, and then I'll hand it back to Jon. We've grown our diesel business. We've taken market share, gone from underperforming to overperforming. I think the big things moving forward that'll help us to continue to do that, the relationship with the big fleets, the small fleet business, which I talked about, two things, the aggregator or non-traditional programs, and our new small fleet private label card program, and then I think I'm really bullish on the new technology that we're gonna be launching first quarter next year. With that, I think I'm more than out of time, so I'll hand it back to you, Jon. Thank you. Thanks, Lloyd. Again, Lloyd Sanford has been really an important part of our growth in taking market share from our competitors. We're very proud of that. I'm really excited to introduce Homer Hogg. Not only does he have the coolest name in the company, he's got a glowing positive energy that if you don't like Homer, something's really wrong with that person. I think you'll see for yourself here in a second. He's VP of Truck Service. He's on a bunch of boards. I mean, all sorts of the major OEMs and otherwise pull him in to so many things. He's the Vice Chair of ASE, which is the group that certifies techs. He's really a recognized leader and just all-time great guy. With that, Homer Hogg, VP of Truck Service. Thank you very much, Jon. We appreciate it. As you can tell, I tend to be loud, so you know, I don't know if that's the diesel fumes growing up on a farm or that's raising four daughters, but it is what it is. Good to see everyone. Thank you very much for taking time and your interest in our company. I wanna talk about one of my favorite subjects and that's truck service. We're gonna spend a little time on that today. I first wanna start by saying, you know, I am one member of a team that in my view, dynamite team. I wanna certainly acknowledge the team back. They make me look good, right? And that's hard to do, to tell you the truth. We appreciate a team that's just awesome. Thank you, team, for a job well done. Some of you may be very fluent with truck service. Some of you may be not so much. I kinda wanna start on one end of the spectrum and work my way forward. A little intro to truck service. I'll say this. The truck service side of the business is not really like your typical convenience store, right? It's more than gas and candy bars, and that's all good business, right? I like that business. Really, it brings an element that allows us to really connect at a different level with our customers, right? It gives us that ability that you just can't get from a convenience store. Let's dig into my favorite topic, truck service. We divide truck service, as you can see on this slide, into three segments. The first segment is in-bay business. That's traditional brick and mortar. That's where a customer's en route, probably has freight in that vehicle. They're trying to get from point A to point B, and they need some repair. That could be a tire repair, replacement, all the way up to a advanced diagnostic repair. So we fulfill both ends of that spectrum, right? It's not just a tire and lube center. We can take it all the way up to where we will not pull the engine out. We don't remove the transmission. All the peripheral stuff to keep that vehicle going up and down the road, we do in our network, and we're honored to do that. Next, if you look at the next box, you'll see mobile maintenance. That's where we take 90% of what we do in our bay to a customer's facility. Just go to any industrial park pretty much around the country, and you see all those trailers parked around the building and scattered all over the place, that's our target, right? We wanna go and take what we do in the bay to the customer and perform those services at their location. One of the benefits of that is obviously there's a lot of pressure on drivers today. Customers cannot put a driver in a truck, especially hook it to an empty trailer and drag it to your facility. You really have to go to them and perform that repair, so they can load that equipment and get it back on the highway. Last but not least, we have our emergency roadside assistance. We call that sometimes RoadSquad. That's simply where a customer breaks down, we show up. That is where a vehicle's on the side of the road, customer needs help, and we dispatch a technician and a vehicle, and we go out and get that customer back up and running. That's 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That's really a call center concept. We make that available to the general public and to our national accounts as well. Within these three segments, and you can read the numbers, but you know, for those that might not be that familiar with truck service, we have about 250 sites plus where we provide truck service. We have about 1,100 bays. We have about 1,000 service trucks and 3,000 technicians. Within those segments, what we do is we generate two million, actually greater than two million work orders. We install over 500,000 tires, 2,000 road calls a year, 500,000 oil changes, and greater than 160,000 diagnostic services. That's kind of an idea or scope of what we do in truck service. The chart to the right gives you an idea of really how mobile maintenance as a% of truck service revenue is growing since 2019. You can see it started at about 4%. Today, we're at 15%, and we think there's a lot more opportunity in that bucket. You'll hear me talk a little more about that as we go, as we move forward. On this next slide, it really talks to where did we start about two and a half years ago, and where are we today and how did we get there? We had some opportunities. Obviously, everything was not perfect, and one of the things was we had siloed pricing. Just really didn't make sense to the market, so we had to go to work on that. We had a lack of focus on technician efficiency. You've got to squeeze, you know, every hour you can, and it has to be productive. We just probably didn't have the focus that we needed in that area. We were lagging behind the industry slightly on technology, both in-bay technology and customer-facing technology. We had a culture of them versus us, kinda, between the corporate side of the operation and the field operation. It was like this. We went to work on that, and we'll talk to you about some of the guiding principles that we used. At the end of the day, we just lacked a good strategy to grow truck service business and kinda that's what was in front of us. No matter which business segment that we reference in truck service, one of the keys is being able to recruit technicians and retain those technicians. That's where you're gonna win or lose in that business. A key guiding principle for us to maintain is a culture that cares about people, and I've said this for years. It's not always just how much you know. Equally as important is how much you care. We just had to go to work on our culture. You know, I'd never heard of whirlyball, Jon, until recently. You know, we were at a whirlyball court, which can you imagine bumper cars with a racket, you know, and basketball goal, and turn a bunch of adults loose in that environment. It's kinda crazy, but you know, the benefit of that is just building a cohesive team that becomes more productive, and we're clearly seeing the benefits of that. You know, trucks are like cars in this regard. They continue to grow in technical complexity. It's happening to us. Those that have kinda looked at the car market over the last, you know, 40, 50 years, you've seen that transition. We're right in the middle of it on the truck side of the business. It is very complicated. We've got to ensure that we have the right technology solutions to be able to adapt to that changing environment. A key guiding principle for us to maintain is certainly technology. There's no doubt about it. We've got to adapt with the technology. Strategic acquisitions and really achieving more dots on the map, that's where we're headed. This next slide really talks to some of the accomplishments and, you know, I let other people read the press and not really do that ourselves, but I'm gonna take a moment just to highlight some keys 'cause our team has worked extremely hard. Here's what I wanna do. The path towards success began for us with some reorganization. I am the beneficiary of that, right? Our leadership team reached into the organization and found individuals that could move the organization forward, right? High energy, right? Willing to really go in and roll our sleeves up and put our hands in the business and evolve the business really to where we are reactive to the demand in the market. We had an organization that was really pretty efficient with what it did, but didn't necessarily align with what the market was demanding. We had to go to work on some of that, right? Since 2019, the team has improved technician efficiency by 14 percentage points. That's huge, because really you have to maximize your time with your technicians. Centralized training centers. 100 of our graduates have competed in state and national competitions, and we have won 266 industry awards. That is awesome. We're trying to get better at what we do. Piece by piece, day by day, hour by hour, we're just getting better. Pricing structures. Obviously, with all the supply chain pressures, there's a tremendous focus on pricing. We kinda rolled our sleeves up and went to work on some of our pricing models, and we've seen much better margins year over year, as a result of that and being able to sustain that and really stay competitive while we have to raise our pricing based on cost. We're seeing really good results of that. Certainly, at the end of the day, it's about growth. We've done something kinda crazy, right? We've added heavy-duty trailer repair into a travel plaza. It would be unheard of, but that business segment is growing, and there's plenty of opportunity and obviously mobile maintenance. Mobile maintenance, as I wrap up here later on, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that. As I get to future creation, right? Really, how are we gonna expand our footprint? Certainly one of the things we're gonna do is leverage technology. There's still much to do in that particular category for us. Expanding heavy-duty trailer repair, we're all about it, right? We've got to do that strategically. We have to be smart where we're gonna make investments, but the market is saying to us, "We want more of that." We're going to wisely expand and do more of that type of work. Growing standalone mobile maintenance, adding trucks to our current locations. Just think about it. We have mobile maintenance trucks out there right now. It's pretty easy to grow it. You can put another tech in the truck, or you can put another truck in there, or you can run another shift. There are plenty of opportunity to grow that business, and the equipment is sitting there, and it's waiting on somebody to repair it. Hey, we think it might as well be us, and so we're gonna go after that business. Adding standalone truck service locations. That's where we pull mobile maintenance out of an existing location, and we run it as its own operating unit. We're finding tremendous value as we make that transition. Certainly growing technicians. Again, we're gonna focus on technicians. We're working on comp and benefit models. We're tweaking those. We're making adjustments. We're gonna stay competitive in that space because we want technicians to consider us before they consider anybody else, and we wanna make sure we have the right value proposition in that space. Certainly leveraging technology, you know, improving customer support technology, those tools that interface with a driver and a customer, right? You know, just think about some kinda app if you're gonna go on Uber, and probably a lot of us are gonna do this for the end of the week, right? We're looking for those kind of apps and those kind of tools that can help customers access really what we offer in the market and do that in a painless way. We also wanna take advantage of that technology and the information that we're able to get back from those transactions. A lot of great days ahead. You know, I'll close out like this and say here's really my pitch to you. Mobile maintenance and heavy duty trailer collision repair, it is front and center in our mind each and every day, and we certainly intend to go out and harvest additional opportunities that are in the market, even in a little travel plaza called TA. Thank you very much for your time and your attention and for your interest in our company. Thanks, Jon. Thanks, Homer. Everyone can skip the afternoon coffee. Homer brings a lot of energy to everything he does. Really, Homer's area is truly even before getting here was probably the thing that we have done the best and arguably are the most famous for and just building on it and improving upon it. The team with Homer and other people's leadership are really focused on those couple of key areas he mentioned, which is partly why we're continuing to see double-digit growth over an amazingly lapped year. We'll continue to see that, and thanks, Homer. Kevin Kelly's our SVP of Hospitality. Kevin came along about 2.5 years ago, thereabout. It's almost just shortly after I did. He really led the consolidation of the different parts of what we now call hospitality, retail, food, and I'll hand it over to Kevin Kelly. Thanks, Kevin. Thanks, Jon. It's always fun to follow Homer. Whirly ball, right? Jon's vision was to combine what we call hospitality under one team, and it's the non-fuel, non-truck service offering at our Travel Centers. It's the food service. It's retail. It's site amenities. When you look at food service, it's made up of 150 proprietary and national branded full-service restaurants, which are the Iron Skillet, Country Pride. It's also the IHOP we're installing and the Black Bear Diner. We also have 450+ quick service restaurants, including 70 Popeyes, 33 Burger King, and 26 Taco Bell, just to give you a sense of those national brands. Then we also have 60+ proprietary delis, which is a scoop and serve fast casual that we offer out on the fuel islands for the professional drivers. Retail's made up of over 330 stores, 28 being gas-centric C-stores and 60 being fuel island diesel stores out on the diesel islands for the professional drivers. The rest of the stores sit in our travel locations right in the main part of the travel center. Our site amenities are our differentiator. Given our site size, we are able to offer more than our competitive set. Just on trailing twelve months, we've sold over six million showers. We manage on a daily basis 40,000 truck parking spots, and we monetize this through a program called Reserve-It. We offer other business services like check cashing, ATMs, fax, CAT Scale, and Western Union, and we also offer lifestyle amenities like TV lounges, fitness centers, laundry facilities, pet areas. We reviewed what we saw as opportunities in hospitality, and we created guiding principles for our transformation. Customer centric, we wanted clear data on who our customer is and leverage that data to guide our decision-making, products, price, national brands. Operational excellence, we needed to document our standards. It's brand standards, design standards, product, merchandising, workflow. All of this needed to be repeatable and scalable. Simplify our processes for our team members, so they can focus on the guest. We set priorities. It's really around service, convenience, and value. Over the last two years, while managing the impact of supply chain inflation and labor shortages, our transformation started with organizational design. We leveraged our site GMs with total site P&L responsibility, including hospitality. We consolidated hospitality functions, like Jon mentioned, like culinary and business systems. We aligned retail and food service field specialists to HQ, improving efficiencies and improving the two-way communication with the field. With customer segmentation, we engaged the firm dunnhumby, who's a leader in customer data and analytics. We reviewed qualitative, quantitative analysis and benchmarking to understand the customer. It really came down to motorist, which is gas, and professional driver, which is diesel. As a result, we generated insight to what mission drivers are the greatest demand from our customers. The most common are clean, safe, well-maintained, and a variety of offer. That's what our customer is looking for at our travel centers. With insight of what drives our customer, we improved our offer of national food brands, we improved merchandising, we reflowed our store layouts, and we invested in restrooms, showers, and parking lots. Operational excellence, we reviewed and updated menus, pricing, day parts, production, and scheduling. We improved brand training. We introduced a continuous improvement approach. We also leveraged our new consolidated procurement function to help drive margin, and this was very helpful, given the supply challenges we had over the last couple of years. In technology, we have tested self-checkout at 13 locations and are ready to deploy it at another 50. We updated the handheld technology in our stores to improve ordering, receiving, and product management. We invested in the next generation of kiosks to improve the customer experience, engage in our loyalty systems and our shower systems. We have more customer-centric technology in the works. We will deploy in the first quarter a new loyalty program integrated to our various POS systems and delivered through a new mobile app. The benefits will include driving visits to our sites and increased transactions per visit. The customer will have the ability to earn and redeem points across all of our businesses at the travel center, and we'll be able to deliver member communications with highly targeted content across multiple channels. We're also deploying technology, the newest version of Blue Yonder, driving space allocation and margin improvement while simplifying planograms for the field to deploy. Our improved offerings include renewed proprietary food service offerings in full service and fast casual, improved center-of-store offerings on beverage and grab-and-go, along with introduction of a private label to drive value and margin. We will nurture a new relationship with the Cleveland Clinic, driving healthy menus, healthy habits, and promoting wellness. Finally, operational excellence. We'll continue to take friction out of our customers' journey with additional touchless technologies. We'll improve store merchandising, testing new cash wraps and to-go bars. We'll introduce demand scheduling tool for retail, improving communications with our team, adding flexibility to their schedules, and optimizing product, productivity and customer service. Thanks, Jon. Thanks, Kevin. Yeah, this is an area, obviously, hospitality, the retail side of the business has been under the greatest pressure from supply chain and inflation, of course. The team's done a really nice job within that context of executing it. Again, we're fortunate to have this intrinsic resilience, which allows us to have this great overall performance. There are so many things that have been, again, about to come out of the oven, so to speak, like the loyalty program, which is really foundational. It's fundamental in terms of how we incent certain customer behaviors, and really excited for that to roll out next year. Sandy Rapp is our Chief Information Officer. She has a... How I think about Sandy is, you know, our... The infrastructure of the company. Part of the foundation is IT and technology, and we really were behind a few years ago, and she has the most amazing blend of the right sort of calm demeanor along with a sense of urgency. I don't have that first part so much, so that's why I particularly respect hers. She has that exact balance that we need in this part of the house because it does take a level of patience because you're really taking apart to build back. With that, I'll hand it over to our CIO, Sandy Rapp. Thanks, Jon. You're gonna make me blush. I'm glad that Kevin had to follow Homer instead of me. When I joined the company a little over two years ago, we did an assessment of the technology, and what we found was that there was a lot of this highly customized technology that had been built up over decades. Instead of refreshing it, we were extending it. What we were finding is that complexity and the age was resulting in outages, extended outages at our sites, as well as a poor guest experience. In fact, on average, when I started, two sites were down per day for over 20 hours. The kiosks that Kevin said that we've been replacing looked like old Pac-Man machines, and they were frequently down. The reporting, we did not have a single source reporting that we could reliably use, and we were very slow to be able to respond to the changing business needs. We came together, putting together these guiding principles and objectives, and they were to provide us with direction to create the foundation, the infrastructure to really foster growth and stability. We need solutions that are up and running 24/7, and we need solutions that are simple and yet standardized so that we can quickly respond to changing business demands. We need mobile apps that we've been talking about, and everything that we do needs to be secure. We need to be able to be fast to market, and in order to do that, our systems have got to be adaptable. Today, we're focusing on strengthening our core systems that are used across the entire organization, improving our guest experience. We need to be easy to visit and to also interact across our site. We need tools that will help our employees across to get their work done, and that means putting tools in front of them that will help with that single source of data to make faster, more informed decisions, and we're creating that foundation for growth and scale. We have over 180 initiatives on our technology roadmap, and they cross every single department within the organization. Initially, what we did is we sought those initiatives that were really gonna focus in on those outages that we were seeing at the sites, as well as improving the guest experience. I'm gonna highlight just a few of those and the results. Our shift from a 1980s Lotus Notes app, email system, which was just about a 1.5 year a go, to Microsoft Office 365, not only moved us into the 21st century, but even things like that Teams functionality was really, really helpful when we were working remote. At the onset of the pandemic, we were looking for alternatives for our guests to be able to check out. We started using the same technology that the store clerks use to check people out. We turned those into self-checkouts, keeping the environment super simple. We're finding that adoption is growing. We're up to 10% of those stores where we've got them are checking out using self-checkout. Instead of having to print off coupons at those old broken-down Pac-Man machines, we now have a mobile app where the loyalty users can redeem their points on that mobile app. 51% of those point redemptions are now through our mobile app. We're wrapping up the replacement of our infrastructure technology at our sites. In fact, I didn't point out on one slide here. Oops. I was trying to go backwards. On this site, this picture here is what the store clerks would have to deal with when that site was down. Now with the advancement of our technologies, we are looking like this. This is what the store clerks now have to deal with. We've made huge improvements just with that technology update. Again, we're really strengthening our core systems, improving that guest experience, increasing that, the employee efficiency. We've got one version of truth, so we've got a single source of data that we're using for more informed decisions. When I wanted to swing back around here is on that reduction of the downtime. We're now down to under 50% of that downtime that we had before, so huge improvement. We've also implemented tools to help with that analyzing of the data. We have a daily dashboard that the executives can use to drill down into the performance of the sites to make faster real-time decisions. Wait, there's more. We've got multi-year initiatives still crossing the entire organization. We have a few of them noted here. In all cases, we're shifting from those really customized solutions to more enterprise-based cloud solutions that we are delivering using an iterative approach so that we can get those solutions delivered faster, and we're continuing on with ongoing innovation cycles. To hit a couple highlights, we're not just refreshing technology, we're reimagining it. In the truck services area, with our truck inventory, we're working to make sure we have the right parts at the right site at the right time. Our fleet sales team is moving off of very complex spreadsheets that Lloyd was mentioning to an integrated platform to really help manage the fleets from prospect all the way through deals. Kevin mentioned the new rewards program that we're using and the mobile app that we're going to be delivering, and we're providing the team members an e-procurement solution that is really gonna automate that whole procurement environment, really enabling vendor consolidation, negotiations, and contract management. Across those initiatives, when Dennis was mentioning the one version of the truth, looking at just these examples, thinking about truck services, we're gonna be able to track when we need to replenish a part in truck inventory. We're gonna be using that e-procurement system to ensure that we can have a seamless replenishment process, and we've got promotional capabilities through our loyalty program to drive those drivers to our sites. As we're replacing and reimagining these systems, security access and data protection is being strengthened throughout all of our applications. In addition, we're investing heavily into our cybersecurity tools that will help us to monitor, test, and to also be prepared in the event of an incident. We're following the U.S. Department of Commerce NIST standards. We have tight governance in place with quarterly C-suite committee meetings, as well as a growing dedicated security team, quarterly team meeting, quarterly employee training sessions on security, as well as annual tabletop tech exercises. I'm really proud of how much we've been able to accomplish over this past couple years here, and I'm hoping that this at least highlights for you some of the things that we were dealing with and yet are on the horizon yet for us. Thank you. Thanks, Sandy. Again, this is a heavy lift, as you can imagine. We're a complex, large company. Most of the value in IT and the improvements we're making to engage with our customers and to make our teams and teammates perform better, most of the value is still in front of us, a lot of which is really gonna be game-changing in my view. I'm about to introduce Dean Bushey, who's our Senior Vice President of Sustainability. He is the person. While this is a subject, it's a small part of our business, it's becoming an ever-increasingly important part of our business, and folks tend to have a lot of questions about this, which is pretty exciting, the future of mobility and e-mobility on both the truck and passenger side. Dean is a retired full Air Force colonel, and I'll hand it over to Dean Bushey. Thanks, Dean. Jon, thank you very much. First of all, you get to see the exciting leadership, the amazing leadership we have at the company and some of the amazing people I get to work with. In this technology, I do bound out of bed every morning and say, "All right, what's gonna happen today?" It's really exciting. The company is committed to sustainability. One of the ways we develop strategy and sustainability, specifically in e-mobility, EVs, and other forms of energy, is to understand your competitive advantage. That helps us develop and execute our strategy. One, of course, you've heard about our large sites, 20-25 acres versus 8-10 for our competitors. Well, what does that allow us to do? First of all, you've heard about all the amazing amenities that we have at these sites. Well, it also allows us the ability to deploy or at least plan to deploy alternative energies, whether that's passenger EV, high speed or ultra high speed passenger EV charging, medium duty, heavy duty charging at the 500-MW or 500-kW or 1-MW level as it develops, or hydrogen or even possibly putting solar panels on top of our truck canopies and deploying microgrids at our sites. We have that space. The second one is key to passenger EV and to truckers is we are close along the highway. Most of our 275-276 sites are within 1 mile of the exit, which is key. As we all know, range anxiety is a real thing when you transition to EVs. Well, if we're along those major highways, and we are within 1 mile of the exits, we can ease that range anxiety. Also, as the truckers move to EVs, those sites are along those major trucking routes. We are where people normally fuel. The last one is we're adaptable, and nimble would be the way I put it, meaning we do not have a large capital investment into carbon burning fuel supply lines, which means, and you heard that from Brett, which means that we can invest or explore the deployment of these alternative energies. We have the ability, the space, and the capacity, and the willingness to deploy alternative fuels. The first stop is passenger EV market. Why is that the first stop? I think that's as we transition to EVs, we'll talk about passenger EV, then truck EVs. First of all, passenger EV, a lot of excitement in the marketplace right now, a lot of words. Obviously, and I think it's important to understand that there's good reason for that, but it's not new. I mean, Clara Ford, Henry Ford's wife, her favorite vehicle was a 1914 Detroit Electric that had 80-mile range. That's 1914. Zoom ahead over 100 years, why do I think we may be at the precipice of moving forward? Well, there's lots of changes in technology, obviously. Battery technology, whether it's chemistry or energy density. We obviously have the public committed to buying EVs. We have private industries committed to doing innovations. We have pushes from government, both from the mandates and from the incentives. We have $7.5 billion coming from the federal government down to the states. We may be at that change. Well, first of all, the public sector, is it committed? Yes, it's committed, but in varying degrees. One, as I talked about from the mandates, the California mandates, I'm sure you've all heard about, 17 different states have signed up to follow the California mandates. Those laws will start to enable or to encourage the transition to EVs. Secondly, with incentives, $7.5 billion coming down to the states. We need to be able to capture that and work with the public sector. Utilities, there are major regional differences, and we need to understand that. They have their own challenges. I think from a passenger perspective, they're okay as far as the grid, but as we start to move into higher capacity grid requirements, the grid needs to be renewed. The grid also needs to be green. We, as a fuel reseller, want to work with the utility companies. The private sector is committed at varying degrees. Obviously, the private sector spans from the OEMs as they produce cars that are not just so overpriced. The cars come down in prices where the normal consumer can consume it. Battery technologies come along. Fuel retailers are committed to deploying these battery rechargers, and the rechargers themselves are developing new innovative technologies. Obviously, you want high-speed charging from our perspective. You wanna be able to charge in 20 to 30 minutes, maybe less. That requires at least 350 kW. That may require 500 kW. They may require more. We want you to be able to get there, get your electrons, maybe get some gas at one of Kevin's fuel stores, and then get back on the road. Then the consumer, obviously, there is a rise in demand, though we need to be careful, though. I understand 5% of the EV or 5% of the vehicles registered in the second quarter were EVs. Still, less than 1% of the 250 million cars on the road right now are EVs. It needs to be a measured, slow rollout. What is our targeted rollout? As I said, strategic and measured. We need to make sure we do it very data-driven. That data is, where is the EV registrations going to be? What is the expected utilization? What is the expected construction cost that you're gonna have to employ? What does utility cost mean, and what does that do to our margin? And what is the rise gonna be? And how do you get that? You partner with really, really smart companies to deploy your technology. We're gonna start in California or like-minded states where we think the utilization rate's gonna be high. It's going to be measured and strategic based on finance and income. The trucking strategy is a little bit more of a marathon. It's not a sprint. I think the trucking strategy is going to be a longer-term horizon, but we need to plan. There's lots of uncertainty in the market that hinges on truck alternative energies. Is it going to be hydrogen? Is it going to be EVs? Is it going to be another fuel that comes along? It's uncertain, but we need to plan. There's limited grid capacity. If you look at that eCascadia that you see on the screen, that's a 440 kWh battery. Well, if you wanna charge that in 30 minutes, you would require a 1 MW charger. That's like plugging in a Super Walmart instantaneously on the grid or powering 1-2,000 houses instantaneously. We need to solve that issue. There's also, as we move forward with this technology, we need to use a test and compare with our strategic partners. We make a strategic investment. We talked about Xendee, we talked about Nikola, we talked about some others that we can move forward with slowly in these alternative fuel areas in medium-duty, heavy-duty truck. We'll actively engage with the government, and we'll continue to be thought leaders in this space. Again, it's super exciting, great company. Thank you, Jon, for the opportunity, and I'm excited to be here today. Thanks, Dean. Again, this is an area that's getting a lot of attention in the media and otherwise. On the passenger side, we probably are at a tipping point, but that doesn't mean we don't act cautiously. We will roll out cautiously and very carefully and intelligently in places where the data is there that supports an actual creation of a pro forma. The truck side, this is decades away for all the reasons noted by Dean and then some. I'm really excited to introduce Tina Arundel, our Senior Director of Communications, and Karen Kaminski, our Senior Vice President of Human Resources. They're gonna talk to us about ESG and some exciting news around the corner. Great. Thanks, Jon. Really appreciate being here this afternoon. I'm Karen Kaminski, the Senior Vice President of Human Resources. I've been here at TravelCenters for about seven years, and I'm really excited to tell you a little bit about what's going on in the world of team member engagement, diversity and inclusion, and also the interactions that we're having with our community partners. You know, how we become better stewards for all of our stakeholders can really be seen in our approach to, first, the environment. Here we're reducing our environmental footprint and protecting our communities. Our social approach with our team members, our guests, and our communities, we're prioritizing well-being, and we're also working very hard to create and maintain an inclusive environment for them. Finally with our governance approach, this is where we're combining ethical practices with the appropriate controls. As Jon mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, we're launching our first ESG report by the end of the month, so that's really exciting. Now we'll give you an overview of some of the items that we're really excited about that show that we encourage responsible practices in all areas of our business. Let's go ahead and start with environmental. First I wanna call out our business model. We're not in the business of fuel refining. We're a retailer. We have fuel inventory, and we have best-in-class technology when it comes to spill prevention. For example, our underground storage tanks that have diesel and gasoline, we have systems in place that monitor that inventory, and that helps us in turn mitigate leaks. Also, I wanna call out the picture here, this is an EV charging station that we installed at our headquarters in Westlake, Ohio. It's for our team members and their families. This is just another example of things that we're doing to encourage greener lifestyles. Great. Thanks, Tina. To continue talking about and reviewing things that we're very, very proud of, Jon had mentioned our mission, vision, and values. Back in 2020, we refreshed our MVV, and it really serves as the foundation of our culture. It's reinforced in every aspect of the team member experience, and you can see it in our training and development programs, recognition, and also all of our communication channels. With our MVV, our mission, vision, values, we also published our diversity statement. With our diversity statement, we really furthered our commitment to ensuring that our team reflects the makeup of the communities in which we operate. We talked about team member engagement, and it's a top priority for us, making sure that the experience and the engagement level is first and foremost. By taking good care of our team, we are hopefully encouraging our team to take very good care of our guests. We've built resources around the engagement experience. We've made some really great investments. When it comes to well-being for our team members, we really approach this by looking at four pillars of wellness, and that's physical, financial, social, and mental. One of the resources that comes to mind that we've gotten really good reviews on, it's a partnership with a company called Quantum Health. Quantum Health serves as basically an advocate, or a concierge that helps the team sort of navigate their way through the healthcare system that can be a little confusing at times. That's gotten really good response. On the engagement front, we're really proud of the number of communication channels that we've grown with the team so that the team always knows what's going on within the company. For example, we have town halls with Jon and other senior leaders. We have those quite frequently, at least every one to two months. We also have CEO audio recordings, again, so we know what the priorities are, we know what's going on. We have a weekly newsletter called The Weekly Wrap-Up that always starts off with the CEO Corner. We know what's priority and what's going on. With our recognition programs, two that come to mind, we have a quarterly CEO award for leadership and innovation, so we're encouraging those right, the right competencies there, and also a Daymaker award. This is where we celebrate, we recognize the team members who outwardly demonstrate our values. Also charitable giving and making a difference are really important to the company. I'll call out one organization in particular. It's called Truckers Against Trafficking. Human trafficking is just a horrific crime that happens predominantly along the nation's interstates. That's where our travel centers are located. We recognized our team members really have a unique role and frankly, a responsibility. They're the eyes and the ears of the highway. We do not take this responsibility lightly. We provide mandatory annual training for our team members on what to watch for, for human trafficking awareness. We're proud to say we have heard of many situations where we've potentially saved some lives. Right. You know, we mentioned before how the diversity statement has become part of the foundation of our culture, and there are several things that we do regularly to reinforce the importance of the diversity statement and how we bring those words to life so that they're coming off the page. We do an annual review of our equal employment opportunity policy, and we also work with an outside diversity consultant. What those two things do is help to ensure that the team understands what their role is in creating and maintaining an inclusive environment. Diversity and recruitment. There are a couple things that we're doing proactively. One of the things there on the screen I wanna call out, it's an AI tool called Textio. What Textio does is it scans our job descriptions and our job postings and identifies where we could use different language to attract a more diverse applicant pool. Finally, on the veteran recruiting and support front, this is a high priority for us. We partner with some really great firms, including RecruitMilitary, the Transition Assistance Program on military bases, and more recently, the Special Operators Transition Foundation to help folks coming out of the military find a home, either in a corporate position or in the field. There in the circles there, it shows you some recent scores from a team member engagement survey. We're really proud of how our team views our progress in this area. For example, 88% of the team agrees that TA hires people from different backgrounds, and 81% agree that everyone at TA has an equal opportunity to succeed. I'll close out quickly touching on governance. The heart of this is ethics and integrity. As Karen's PowerPoint showed, we have a diverse board. We have three board committees, audit, compensation, and nominating, and also governance. We have, we're members of several industry organizations that promote highway safety and environmental sustainability. For example, Jon is on the board of NATSO. It's the National Association of Truck Stop Operators. Again, promoting and advocating for highway safety. Also, when it comes to, business conduct and ethics, we have an annual code of business conduct and ethics training. We also have a confidential whistleblower system. That's something we take extremely seriously. As Sandy mentioned, when it comes to data privacy and security, we've invested heavily in cybersecurity programs, and we've adopted an industry-recognized framework that's been adopted by many Fortune 500 companies. We provide mandatory cybersecurity training from our frontline team members all the way over to executive leadership. Thank you. Back to you, Jon. Thanks, Karen. Thanks, Tina. They played crucial roles in the development of our ESG report, they lead two very different and really important parts of the company and do an amazing job for us. Gonna introduce Peter Crage, our CFO. Peter was really the first move I made in terms of bringing on a new team member back in the week before COVID. I'm not sure he brought us COVID, but the timing was kind of close. We go back a number of years. We'd never worked together before this company, but we've known each other for many years and had a lot of respect for Peter over the years. He's led, as in the F seat, the CFO, a number of public companies, some of which had many challenges like the ones we face. He's been a great partner in this, and I'm gonna hand it over to Peter to get to some of, what maybe you're most interested in terms of, outlook and look ahead, and maybe a little bit about how to think about us differently. Peter. Thank you, Jon. And thank you for calling me on that snowy day in December to ask me to come on board. I've absolutely had a blast. You know, I'm thrilled to be here. This has been a long time in coming to get together and engage like this about things that are really important to you. But before I begin with the numbers. Our important culture, I just wanna touch on the culture that I think you've seen today. I've worked in a number of cultures, successful cultures, great teams, but this team, I will tell you at an emotional level and a professional level, they motivate each other, they challenge each other. We have a culture of accountability and deep mutual respect. I will tell you that I don't think that's a small part of why we've been successful. With that, I'll get going. I have to bring it all together now. We've talked about a strong financial profile. We've talked about a great foundation, and we believe this suggests a really interesting opportunity. There are two things I'd like to cover today that Jon already referenced. Number one, how we view our financial future over a three-five year horizon. Number two, how our strong performance to date, and as we see it in the future, supports a higher earned valuation. Jon talked about this, but let's level set just for a moment. Two, I think, important things I'd like to say here. Number one, Investors, analysts have yearned for more information, but we've taken a very measured approach in executing and communicating on those successes, number one. Number two, credibility, personally, professional, and I think I can speak for Jon that building that base of credibility was really important in these first two or three years. We hopefully have done that as well. What we talk about in the future, although there may be zigs and zags to that future, that at least you can believe we're telling you what we believe to be the facts and work hard at it. Now moving to our long-term view. What will we look like in three-five years? We have some strategic financial targets here. We plan to communicate on them periodically to see where our progress is, and we really believe this is a better path than the inch-by-inch tactical guidance that has been, historically Wall Street, what Wall Street has wanted to see. I wanna be clear, though, here. These are targets. They're not guidance. I know I say targets, you may hear guidance, but these are really targets as we think about the future. We fashioned them in a way as we built the model to allow us the flexibility to take advantage of the resilience that Jon has talked about. We wouldn't offer them unless we believed they were both achievable, real, and executable. Three key components of this. I think of it as the stability of a stool. Number one, you heard this from Dennis King, acquisition growth. I'm sorry, let me start with core business. Core business growth, initiatives, AI. Number two, acquisition growth. Number three, franchise growth. Those are the three legs, as I see it, of the stool. We have some areas of focus, and those are on the slide. Growing fuel volume, non-fuel revenue, expanding fuel and non-fuel gross margin, and optimizing costs. Let me just touch on a couple of these. Dennis mentioned $75 million-$125 million annually average over the next five years in acquisitions. Also wanted to mention, 'cause Homer just does a great presentation, and he has a really interesting plan for truck service, mid- to high-single-digit truck service growth. The rest of the goals there you can see are CAGRs over this period of time. Again, to give us the flexibility to achieve these over a longer haul. Non-fuel and gross margin, fuel and non-fuel gross margin, our target over the term, again, this is not guidance, our target over the term is to improve our range of CPG to $0.17-$0.19. Lastly, on optimizing costs, we have to take advantage of our operating margin leverage, and we believe we can do that, both with 100-150 basis points in OpEx and labor improvement and taking our guidance on SG&A down to between 6.5% and 7% from the 6.75% and 7%-7.25% we are right now. The punchline. Mid-$400 million targeted adjusted EBITDA, with an opportunity to $500 million over the next three-five years. Two important points. Number one, this path will not be linear. I do not believe it will be linear. We'll take advantage of opportunities when we can. We'll maximize some. We'll have to work a little harder on others. Number two, each of these is really strategically synergistic. Wow, that's quite a mouthful. We have to achieve some level of success in each of these in order to be successful to achieve these levels of adjusted EBITDA over the next three to five years. Moving to valuation. Of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't posit that we think our current valuation has some upside. As Jon said, we're not going to tell you what that upside is. That's for you to determine. You're the brains that can go through this and understand what we've got and make your own decisions without question. Wanted to provide two EBITDA multiple valuation constructs here for you. Plain, straight up multiple of EBITDA, 2.8x based on our market value on Friday. On a lease-adjusted basis, you'll notice in our filings, those of you who are familiar with the company, we provide the EBITDAR. We don't provide it as a performance metric. We provide it as a valuation metric. On a lease-adjusted basis, 4.7x. The reason why we wanna provide this is because we have operating leases. Those of you that know the accounting rules that changed a number of years ago, we hang those up on the balance sheet. Some analysts may take that fact set, drop it in there, and say, "That's a stack of TEV. That's a stack of enterprise value. They're operating leases, so we have a deduct from EBITDA, right? Which is our R. We add that back to create a level playing field with companies that take capital leases, which doesn't affect EBITDA, or they finance their assets with debt. We believe this provides a comparable as you think about similar companies or companies in any one of our verticals. The other valuation, we've talked about this with some investors, sort of hinted to it in the past, a valuation based on steady-state free cash flow yield. We believe this business has great potential to deliver strong free cash flow on a steady-state basis into the future. As we grow the business, as we take a look at costs and optimize costs. I'll run through this calculation very quickly, what we're assuming here. We're looking at our trailing twelve-month June EBITDA of $296 million, saying if that just stayed steady state for the next three to five years, what are the calls on cash? What are the calls on cash over the long term that would deliver a free cash flow metric? Interest expense right now, without even affecting our debt, our debt that we currently have on the books is $46 million. Cash taxes, we'll be utilizing NOLs and credits that we have over the next three to five years. Cash taxes will be in the $10 million range. Maintenance CapEx, we've talked about this in the past, about $100 million a year. Granted, the transformation and the growth will be deploying a lot of CapEx, but once you get to that steady-state range, we believe $100 million in CapEx is appropriate. It delivers free cash flow of $140 million on a market cap of $876 million, or about 16%. Lastly, touching on capital allocation. Clearly a critical component of our success. Jon talked about the fortress balance sheet. We have this balance sheet so that we can flex our muscle. We have elbow room. We can do, whether it's acquisitions or make investments in the core business or even something more strategic. We try to provide guiding principles here when we think about capital allocation. Maximum flexibility. One thing I've learned over the years, flexibility in being able to put your capital wherever you choose to put it. Strength and liquidity. Clearly, we have a lot of liquidity right now. Whether we face a recession or not, our liquidity is a strength. Key considerations, maintain the business, CapEx to maintain the business, maintain the customer experience, high return growth, for example, through acquisitions, and then optimal capital resource stewardship. What do we do with the rest? I will say evaluating opportunities to deal with our debt will be interesting. We have a Term Loan B that at the end of this year is repayable at par. We get through the make-whole period. We have the Baby Bonds, we call them the Baby Bonds, that are prepayable at par, and they're long-dated. We have a fairly quiet capital structure right now which we enjoy, plus a lot of liquidity. In closing, when you consider a resilient business model and the growth that we've talked about today, when you think about our current valuation, when you think about the potential for strong free cash flow into the future and a flexible capital allocation, we believe this represents a pretty unique opportunity. Rest assured, this management team, including myself, are committed to unlocking that for you. Thanks for your time today. I appreciate it, Jon. Back to you. Thanks. Certainly. Thanks, Peter. Well, a couple other things. Let me see. Hold on. There we go. I'm hopeful that most agree when I look at the multiples we're trading on. I'm not gonna suggest what you conclude, but I know what I conclude at 2.5x-4.5x. Particularly when you look at the track record we've developed over the last couple of years, it's. I, again, humbly from me, but on behalf of the team, it's pretty impressive. I think we have a really good plan, a really good story and a look ahead with a lot of momentum of things that are, again, about to come out of the oven that don't take a hope and a prayer to sort of believe in. I hope you agree with me on that. Ending before we go to Q&A, just on a couple of reminders, really, frankly, who we conceive of ourselves now as is no longer that transformational company. We certainly, within this, expect to continue to innovate and grow and change and find abilities to adapt and improve. Now we're really a resilient company that the inherent model, business model itself has a resilience. I think we're proven through all sorts of thick and thin. I mean, picture in your mind the sort of economic circumstance we've all found ourselves in the last three years and how we've performed, and take in the kinds of things we're working on and hearing a little bit from the management team directly, that I think it's fair for us to call ourselves, the team has earned the right to call ourselves resilient. We're growing. We're in a growth mode here, and most of the value, again, I was saying I have to move away from the term early innings because that still implies this turnaround or this transformation. We're graduating beyond that. That's really it. I mean, we believe deeply in our plan. We feel as though we can say, look anybody in the eye that we've really achieved a lot in a couple years, 2.5 years. Yet there's really more opportunity ahead than behind. With that, I'll pause. Maybe a round for the team here, and then we'll move to Q&A. Thank you, guys. If we've got some questions, I guess we've got a mic here. I'll repeat them. I see John raising his hand. Maybe we'll start with John Lawrence here. Happy to attempt to address whatever we're asked. Yeah, great. Thanks for all that information. Could you talk a little bit about the competitive set? I'm in the South, and we see that Love's has moved sort of the regional highways 78, 72 across Mississippi and Tennessee. Talk about what they're doing and is that kind of model maybe something that's in your plan? Well, first of all, the three of us, the three biggies, us, Love's, and Pilot have a 24% market share, and that's, by the way, where some of our growth will come from in terms of buying independents. In terms of their, what their sort of approach is, the comp set, Love's approach to growth has really been through ground-up development. They've they're a very respectable competitor. So is Pilot. They're growing by building new stores, and they have a development machine really moving rapidly. That is not part of our near-term plan. We're about to open one ground up and another one not too far behind it. We'll dabble in that a little bit, but development has cycle risk. It has lots of outflows before the first inflows. When we have so much other value to harvest by improving ourselves, that organic stuff we talked about, by franchise and by buying sites that once we close, there are these major synergies that immediately turn on and we're starting to reap the benefits of. We've, through the underwriting we had done in the first few acquisitions, started to realize those synergies. That's our approach to growth, which is very different than theirs. You know, Pilot has had a very big investment from Warren Buffett. And Warren Buffett has investments in other parts of the fuel supply chain. Those guys, and, again, they're a respectable, formidable competitor for sure, Pilot. They just closed on, maybe six or nine months ago, a diesel refinery in Brazil. That's not part of our business. The person who's their CEO has been now for a couple of years, was their chief strategy officer. He really improved them by acquisition and broadening their breadth into the fuel supply, into the fuel pipeline, I should say, and I expect that'll continue to be their strategy as well as I understand really leveraging technology. You know, I say respectfully to them, but they announced a splashy partnership with an EV charging company that was very aggressive. That's not exactly what we will be doing. We're not far from some announcements in that alternative energy world, but we're taking much more of a cautious, careful approach to how we apply our CapEx in that area to really watch and do it carefully and not get too ahead of our skis. In 2015, lots of companies made big investments in natural gas that didn't pan out, and it was a lot of wasted capital, frankly, by us and a lot of others. We're gonna walk before we run. They're very formidable, both of them. I respect them a lot. I also say humbly, we've been taking market share from them now for 2.5 years, and you saw Lloyd's slide of the underperformance to overperformance starting in 2020. I'm somewhat confident we'll keep doing. I'm very confident we'll keep doing our best to take market share from both of them. Thank you. Thanks for the question. Yes. Can you give us a little bit of information on the acquisitions you closed today? I may have Dennis. Dennis, why don't you come up, and if you could talk about those. This side of the house, I'm very excited about. It was something that we were. I mean, from a dead start, you know, there was nothing. Come on up, Dennis. Absolutely nothing happening, and now we're really starting to scale a little bit. Dennis, if you could just address that, it'd be great. Can you repeat the question? Oh, sorry. The question was, can we tell the audience and folks streaming in a little bit about the two acquisitions that we just announced just moments ago? Yeah. The acquisitions that we just closed on in the past two weeks. The first couple of acquisitions were really buying up a couple of our really successful franchise locations. We closed on two acquisitions in the past two weeks that were two independent locations, one in Cuba, Missouri, and then also yesterday, specifically, we closed on another location in South Carolina that we're really excited to bring into our network. The other one that we closed on yesterday was just a truck service, not just a truck service facility, but this was. You know, when Homer started talking about our. He's grinning in the back. When Homer started talking about our HD trailer repairs, that's one of these facilities that we closed on. We'll be looking at those kind of independent facilities as well 'cause they have very high returns, and we're really excited about that business. To just piggyback, buying the existing franchisees where there are opportunities, while we don't have the extent of synergistic upside, at least we don't pro forma it. Frankly, the first few we've seen very significant upside beyond what we expected. There's also low execution risk. These are companies, these are operators we know very well. I'm excited to continue to do those. The ones we're most excited about are those independents. Extrapolating from the franchise side, we've seen when a franchise, an independent truck stop, becomes part of our network, they'll see top line growth of as much as 40% because those big fleets that used to drive right by because they had discounted fuel deals with the big guys like us and not with that independent are now pulling in. We're very optimistic the synergies we should see the same in an independent truck stop that we buy, and that's why we can be a little bit bullish here. Same as before, we take a cautious approach. We start slow, we test, we evaluate, we underwrite very conservatively. Once we prove concept, then we put our foot on the pedal, and that's kind of where we're starting to get to now on the acquisition side. Can you share the magnitude of them, what you paid, how? The question of magnitude of these acquisitions, what we paid, revenue. Dennis? Yeah. The one in Missouri was slightly over $30 million that we paid for, and this is a really kind of you know robust site. It looks like a TA. It's a really big location. The other one in South Carolina, we paid just north of $5 million for the purchase, but we have a very kinda strong growth plan that will probably double that capital outlay 'cause we're expanding it to be to look more like a TA. You'll see different flavors. Some that will come right on and look and behave just like a TA. Others we'll acquire and will expand to you know really run like us. One of the franchises. Not the ones we're talking about here, but one of the first two is either the second one of the largest truck stops in America. It's about 850 truck parking spaces as part of that. Actually, as a side note, the largest truck stop is also a franchisee at about 1,000, we measure in terms of parking spaces for trucks. Very large sites. Paul? Thanks. Paul Lejuez, Citi. You have a target for EBITDA, 400, mid-400s in the three-five- year timeframe. It's a pretty broad range in terms of the years that you might achieve that 450. I guess I'm saying 450 because you said mid-400s, right? What is going to be the key determining factors as to whether you can achieve that three years from now versus five years from now? Is it more macro? Is it more execution? Just how do you think about that three-five- year range for your targets? 'Cause it is a pretty broad range timeframe-wise. Sure. I mean, we talked about the Peter spoke of the three areas that are very sort of primary drivers. First, the organic improvements. We call it organic, meaning taking the base of the business, the corpus, the body of what we do today and continuing to improve it. Within that, you saw a target for fuel, blended fuel margin that moves up a bit from where our guidance has been, and we moved up our guidance a penny not that long ago, 14-16 to 15-17. This puts a target of 17-19. That'll be a part of it. Getting to a target like that range in that timeframe will be one of the key components. Boy, we have so many things happening in so many different parts of the company, you know. Dennis' area talked quite a bit about it, but in some ways, everybody spoke of at least some illustrations from each, and they're not comprehensive. Those are illustrative. All of those do not have to hit. Some of those, maybe even many of those, will have to produce what we think. While we don't publish this, you know, we track. Dennis alluded, more than alluded to this. We track these initiatives. We have real assumptions around every single initiative, and we track against those, and we hold ourselves accountable to those. Without getting more specific, a good number, but not all of those have to hit to contribute to those organic improvements. Then the dots on the map. We need to hit again the target in the order of magnitude of what we talk of in that year-over-year growth on the franchise side. If we're sustaining, call it that 30+, certainly not this year and not next year, but in these mid to out years, we need to be hitting that. We have the scale. Boy, do we have the demand. The demand is really impressive and even a little surprising, the extent of it on the franchise side. Finally, in an order of magnitude, we have to hit these ranges of acquisition CapEx, and those in turn have to produce these, what I think are conservative, ROIs. If we do some, most of that, we get to these target ranges in roughly this three-five-year timeframe. Hopefully that's helpful, Paul. Thanks. Yes, Bryan. Thanks for that. On a multiple of EBITDA basis, what were the recent acquisitions done at roughly? You know, Peter. Again, we look at these pre and post synergistically, of course, but maybe Peter, if you could touch upon that. Yeah. We'll typically try on a pre-synergy basis in the 5% range. basis in the 5% range. On a post-synergy basis, 4%-5%. I think it's gonna be. Yeah, ask it. No, it's, I- That's it? Okay. I bet you will not be able to guess it. No, I probably will. I won't. I won't be that. Go forward. When it comes to the renovations that you've been doing, how are you thinking about the renovations that need to be done at the SVC-owned properties that prior management typically funded, got money from SVC, and rents went up? I mean, at the end of the day, somebody's gonna have to repave a lot, build a restaurant, add a truck service bay. Where's that money coming from? Thanks. Right. We have a program in place. We've started with this roughly 50 we've completed. When I say complete, you know, some of the wayfinding signs and art is not yet in place, but the base of the construction is done. You know, we have a little bit of a schedule that's spread over a period of time to make these improvements. We'll fund them on our balance sheet like we've already done. We expect to get a lift. It's a little with this unbelievably dynamic time we've been living through. It's hard to intellectually, honestly measure these with a high degree of accuracy, mathematical accuracy. It's as much art as it is science. We don't have no intention to fund these by selling effectively the leasehold improvements. We'll be funding these on our balance sheet and in the future, depending on where we land over this next period of time on capital allocation and in particular, potential, our debt and potential recaps and restructurings and any number of other things we're sort of starting to think about. These may be funded through other vehicles, but it will be on our balance sheet and not selling leasehold improvements and building that lease base. That's not part of the plan. Thanks, Bryan. Oh. Yes. Thank you. Hey, Jon. I just had a quick question about your capital allocation policy and just kind of curious on the last earnings call, you kind of mentioned, you know, thinking about doing a dividend, maybe even a special dividend. Just kind of curious, you know, as you kind of think about that with all the kind of free cash flow you expect to generate, what are kind of some considerations with doing a dividend or a special dividend? Thank you. I didn't necessarily wanna, and I don't think you're suggesting this either, but just to be clear, I didn't wanna suggest any one thing that we would or wouldn't be doing, of course. But we're being very cautious and careful about what we do. On the table, probably the first areas of consideration, not priority, consideration. Remember, we've wanted to prove out how acquisitive we can be. We're starting to have a view on that. The first area of consideration would just be bringing down our debt cost by any variety of means and yet maintaining flexibility. That's the first place to sort of look and see what options we have. Again, we wanna make absolutely sure, A, the balance sheet remains very, very strong, and two, that we continue to have the optionality, the availability of capital to do acquisitions. Again, that's part of this hitting these targets to Paul's question. An important part of that is acquisition CapEx. Those are some of the first areas. You know, we would. I'd never, I don't think, commit, get to a place of committing to, say, a recurring dividend without first walking before we're running and maybe someday think about a one-timer and then kind of develop and build on that. That's the approach we take to everything. Walk before we run, prove out something, make sure we're comfortable and continue. The first area to look, I think, is really on the debt service side and what opportunities we have and then go from there. We still have a little work to do on really understanding how acquisitive we can be. Dennis' team has done a great job of getting the machine going. We still have a little more runway ahead to figure that out and feel really comfortable. We need to make sure to fully understand that before we get, say, too aggressive. Can you balance both acquisitions as well as fixing the debt? I hope so. I don't wanna suggest we have to fix the debt. I know that's not what you're saying either. I mean, we have some opportunities possibly to improve. It really depends on how acquisitive we conclude we can be. In other words, if tomorrow, put it this way, my last company, first year at my last company, we found a 55-location hotel number of hotels to add to what we're 130, and that was transformative. I'm not gonna suggest we'll find, you know, a portfolio that's 40% the size of ours that we could undertake tomorrow and acquire. On the other hand, there may be opportunities out there, and we're evaluating some right now in the repair part of the business and some other areas that could be somewhat transformational that will be a little bit more sizable. I just, that's the first priority to make sure that we have this. First of all, being a growth company, not only are we literally just growing our EBITDA and eventually free cash flow, we should eventually enjoy the benefit of a higher multiple. Just apples to apples, forget us. Growth companies enjoy higher multiples than companies that aren't growing in some meaningful way. I think there are a number of multiple reasons, sorry for the double multiple reasons why growth is very important. It's central to us hitting some of our targets, so that is a priority. It's impossible. I'd really be just giving a hypothetical answer to say if those can coexist, and we can meaningfully improve our debt or debt service costs and at the same time acquire. My suspicion is we probably can. I guess acquisition opportunities are always on the horizon. At what point do you tackle the debt? Sure. No, that's a great question. Again, without giving a really specific answer as to next month or January or February, you know, this has been an active dialogue for a long time now. The Term Loan B has some costs associated with it if we pay it down or pay it off early, and that's coming to the end of this year. We've been pretty consistently signaling to the world of shareholders and potential shareholders and analysts that as we get toward the end of this year is the window that we think something like that needs to be addressed, our debt service. I'm not committing to December thirty-first or January one, but that's been our messaging consistently for some time, and I still think feel pretty comfortable that that directionally feels about right. Thanks. Up front? Oh. Just assuming the 5x multiple on acquisition front, would it be safe to assume about an $80 million going into that $450 million over the course of the three years? Peter, you wanna speak. Yeah, yeah. to what we're sort of thinking year over year? Yeah. I think when you look at what we've been able to achieve on these first acquisitions, that level of multiple, and then we've seen synergies and opportunity even on a pro forma basis deliver that. Yeah, if you can do $100 million a year over five years and deliver between 15% and 20% on a cash on cash basis, yeah, you can grow in that range. Just to add to that too, if we can sustain the results we're seeing from the first two, which would not be as synergistic, those first two were existing franchisees that we acquired. Those have really surprised us in a very positive way. If that same fact pattern plays out over and over again, I think we'd see upside to that math. That's how we're approaching it for now. Again, walk before we run, be conservative, you know, underpromise, overdeliver. Thank you. Thanks. Hi there, Patty Kanada from Goldman Sachs. Just thank you again for the presentations today, really helpful. On fuel margins, I had a question in terms of the long-term targets. Just maybe what are some of the assumptions underlying those targets? If we could take a step back, I would love to hear your view on just the fuel margin environment in general, given the elevated rates, and your view on, you know, the sustainability of those margins at those levels. Thank you. Thank you. you. Thanks for the question on fuel margin and sustainability and how do we get to those targets and where we are sort of now, what's the outlook. Maybe let me hit the outlook, and Peter, I'll give you just some words on the targets. You know, this is consistent with the earnings call. I feel a gut sense of optimism for this, and I said before, and I'll repeat, through the end of this year. You know, the farther you go out, the crystal ball gets murkier and murkier. But as I mentioned, this resilience to this, our business model, and I, we continue to see it. The more that there's volatility in fuel markets, which tend to correlate to some extent with uncertainty, supply risk, supply constraints, and so long as there's a war in Ukraine and some of these other factors, these concerns, which often for regular business are negatives, creates a relatively more positive environment for us in the fuel margin side. Not suggesting we're gonna enjoy the extent of what we saw in the second quarter, but I do believe we will have some. I do feel a little bit optimistic about where we've set our guidance and continue to have this optimism through the end of this year. That's sort of a sense on the outlook for fuel margin, at least through this year. Peter, maybe a little bit on the 17-19 fuel margin targets. Sure. What we've tried to do is break this into pieces. As I mentioned, fuel margin in and of itself, the 17-19, you know, target is in addition, right, to acquisition. We've tried to carve out the acquisition, the franchise opportunity, those two legs of the stool, and this separately. As Jon Pertchik pointed out, whether it be small fleet, whether it be AI, other opportunities in the market, those elevated levels we've seen, we're not building this plan around 22- or 23- or 24-cent CPG. We're blending in all three legs of these stools to provide flexibility and to provide believability and executability. Just if I could add too. Two key very sort of near term when we start to harvest or reap the benefits of a couple of initiatives just to share. We've talked about them, it's a highlight and within the fuel margin context specifically. This small fleet program that Lloyd spoke of, you know, there are two fleet card companies ultimately in this country, and the one that we're using for this has said this is about the most successful launch they've ever seen. This is very high margin part of the customer segmentation, and I have a lot of optimism that that will scale. As we also spoke of, Brett spoke of from fuel, AI and machine learning we are using right now, and in the early phase of rolling out nationwide, AI and machine learning to support straight diesel and straight diesel pricing specifically. While the results were tremendous during our beta testing, exceeding our expectations once again, I expect AI will be something in the not too far future we insource. Instead of using outside consultants, this will just. I think in several years, most companies will have AI and machine learning as a part of either their IT department or some other department. I think you'll see that within our company a lot sooner than a lot of others. Areas like supply management we're exploring right now, and boy, the opportunity there, for example, put it this way, the complexity of what they do, these 12,000 decisions and all of that, it's highly complex. The mathematical challenge of street diesel pricing where we already have abated and now rolling out, is a far simpler, much more capable of the human brain to sort of get close to optimize. Supply is much more complex, more variables, more intensity, more activity, and it's just a natural and we've sort of believed that all along, but same point, we wanted to walk before we run. Let's start with a simpler challenge, a simpler set of math problems to use effectively the machine to leverage, to test, and we've now done that through testing. We're about to roll out against street diesel pricing. I think supply management's right behind it, and I'm not sure beyond that. I know Dennis mentioned 30 use cases. It could be really a game-changing set of changes we effect there, a lot of which can benefit fuel margin. It's not speculative. I mean, it's the first use case, we're beyond the use case. We've proven it out through very extensive, very thoughtful two phases of beta testing and now rolling out, and the dollars can be very significant. Thanks for the question. Anybody? Yes. Hi there. This is Ethan Huntley, also with Goldman Sachs. Thank you for your time. If you could maybe just provide, you know, some color on the health of or maybe some of the trends that you're seeing in freight demand. Sure. You know, oh, goodness, I'm gonna forget now the source, but just reported less than a week ago, U.S. imports are roughly flat to maybe a smidge down, but still double digits up to pre-COVID levels. More anecdotally, when we talk to our big fleets, you know, Lloyd, who has these very close relationships, I've gotten closer to many of them, and I talk to my peers at some of our biggest customers. There's still a level of optimism out there. Now, you know, what happens is, say, next year or the year after, if there's persistent inflation, these very high levels or, you know, other thoughts one can ponder. I come back to the basics. You know, we've proven through the historically almost a 100-year storm of COVID, particularly early on, that we can execute and frankly set an EBITDA record. That's point A. B is we have all these initiatives, all these areas to improve that we can tie pretty directly, and we've proven to ourselves that we can create assumptions that actually happen. Because we've done it now through 10 or so quarters. Whatever comes along, you know, macroeconomically, geopolitically, we've got this resilient business model and a team that's executing through thick and thin. I just feel very strongly whatever comes along that affects the whole world, we'll continue to outperform others. That's what we need to set our sights on more than worrying about what wind will come along and change lots of things. We can't control everything, so we focus on what we can control and then really execute to the highest level. One in the back and maybe a couple more, Brian, up here, and then we might have to wrap. Yes, sir. Hey, thanks for a great presentation. I was wondering if you can comment a little on trends for in-store traffic, maybe highlight some key categories, opportunities for margin expansion. A second part to that is, what are some initiatives in place to ramp up in-store traffic? I may ask Kevin to come up and help me out with this too. You know, there's no question, and we see it, our diesel volume's down. Frankly, it's never recovered to pre-COVID. We were down 45%. I'm talking about gasoline 'cause that is a surrogate, a facsimile, a measurement of consumer behavior. You know, we were down 45% during the trough in 2020. I think the industry has not fully recovered to volumes that were equal to or greater than pre-COVID. We have not. Now the good news on that is it's not worsening. It had trended down, I think, early in the year, and it sort of stayed flat and even more recently showed some signs of improving a little bit. Kevin, you wanna talk about maybe capture rate basket and just, you know, share some points on that. Yeah. Our basket rates have stayed solid over the last two years. Even during the downturn, we were still getting the same amount of basket size. Even with inflationary impacts, people weren't buying less. We found the consumer to be really resilient as well, that even when we had supply chain issues, they bought something, right? If we were out of one category, they would buy another. Average check has continued to go up, just not inflationary, but they have been buying at a greater pace during the pandemic. Now we're seeing a little softening of it. You know, again, we're focused on value creation through private label. We're working on a private label right now that will drive value for folks. They're trading down is what they're doing. They're not necessarily spending less, but they are perceived trading down, so that private label will help us out quite a bit. We're also seeing, and Sandy mentioned that the statistics on self-checkout, that as they're getting more comfortable using the self-checkout in our environment, they're buying more product with it. So we're seeing the average check go up on self-checkouts. So we're doing some service stuff as well to make sure that we're able to deliver that. Then the final piece is center of the store, Jon. The food and beverage part of the center of the store. Has really been on the upswing over the last couple of years and continues to be on the upswing. Just, again, bringing it back to these same sort of fundamental points. You know, on the yet to be harvested side, we've been at work now for almost an entire year on a complete fundamental revamp and redo of our loyalty program, and that's really two very big different things. One is the underlying infrastructure and sort of technology beneath it that an app can communicate with, et cetera. Secondly, of course, is just what you get for what behaviors you give. That's all being revamped, and that's a very, very big driver of demand on both the truck side and the consumer side, and that should roll out, say, in March. Again, in the bucket of yet to be harvested, that's just one illustration. I can give you a number, but that's a very, very significant one. I always come back to this now that I've gotten very confident in it, this idea of the resilient business that we, while you know, consumers are clearly in a period of some level of austerity, you know, as inflation hit 8% and 9% and so forth. You know, consumers have tightened up and lots of companies and businesses, particularly ones that are more singular in nature, have experienced the adverse effects of that. We've got the trucking side, the truck service side that's growing at double digits. So we're very fortunate not just to be in the still early innings of all these improvements, but to have this intrinsically, fundamentally, inherently resilient business model. There was a question. Brian, did you have another one? Then I'll come up front. Yeah. Not to beat a dead horse on fuel margins, but it is just so important to your profitability. Now that you've had a few quarters to digest very elevated fuel prices before they started to move back down, I think pretty much everybody that follows the company knows the trajectory is gonna impact your margins up, down, sideways. The very elevated level in conjunction with a downward trajectory in the second quarter really spiked the numbers. Do you get the sense if we stay at an elevated level, that we will be able to stay at a very high teens to low twenties numbers? You know, wholesale barrels, you know, 100+. I mean, Brian, we've talked a lot about this. I mean, we have, not just the collective bigger we. You know, we have to the extent of the levels we had seen in the second quarter, is that sustainable through this year and into next year? That would be doubtful in my mind at those levels. That said, and this is maybe just a repeat, but the volatility and uncertainty that's out there continues to create the circumstances within which Brett's team really can execute and optimize and find some additional incremental margin. I'm pretty optimistic we'll continue to see that through at least the end of this year and maybe into early next year. Beyond that, it's just hard to have visibility over. To your point, I mean, it is just a fundamentally critical thing to understand, and the better we can get at. Brett and I talk about this all the time by email and live. What can you glean? What can you tell me, Brett, this is to Brett, that gives us a little what little things can we get a little further peek into the future, whatever those things are? Even if you're wrong, be wrong, that's fine. I just need to know whatever your gut tells you, and you need to be as proactive as you can be using all the resources at your disposal and others that we don't have, but maybe you can conceive of to give us as far a peek into the future. With Dennis' team and the sort of smart quant analytics folks over there, you know, we'll continue to, I think, over time, get a little better and a little better and a little better having further and further visibility into the future of fuel margin for us. Hopefully that's enough of an answer for now. Yeah. Hopefully none of your competitors get weird and trip it up. Yeah, well, hopefully not. Question up front? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. This is very helpful to understand the opportunity. Thanks for doing this today. I just was interested in laying out the market share growth during that declining fuel volume environment the last few years. If we get another declining volume environment, what your expectations are for share. Was there anything unique about that share pickup, and how do you keep that going? So to be clear, you know, my comments before about declining volume were limited to gasoline. Just to frame this, we sell 8 gallons of diesel for every gallon of gasoline. Diesel, we have not seen that, call it deterioration or diminution or reduction. We've seen it on the gasoline side. Too, you know, when we say we're about flat or maybe just a smidge down, just a smidge at worst in diesel, that's over an overlapping year that is pretty tremendous. You know, I know as of October last year, we were at that moment in time to pre-COVID about 19% up in diesel volume. Our competitors, the CEO of Pilot, had made a comment around that they were a little bit negative. That makes the point that, A, what we're lapping, how far of an extreme we're lapping. Two, we're taking market share. So long as we keep doing things and innovating like the small fleet program Lloyd talked about, AI and machine learning for straight diesel, not only will those bring our average margin up because those are high margin, they should also help us find new volume. It's a double whammy. It brings us more volume, and those volumes that are high margins, which brings the average of our overall blended fuel margin up. So long as we stay focused on innovating and changing and improving, I think we'll continue to have success in that area. I'm being signaled that it's time to wrap. One last quick question from John Lawrence, and we'll wrap up. You never wanna be between people and the bar. I kinda learned that a long time ago. Yeah. Just to beat the fuel margin one more time. Can you dig into the Colonial Pipeline and a little bit what does that do for you? Is it picking up volume that you've missed in the past? Does it have associated penny profit with it? Hey, Brett, if you can come up and just help me out, a question on the Colonial Pipeline and how it sort of relates to our business and any impact. Not so much in terms of what we might experiment with in the future, but just how it affects or doesn't affect our business. Yeah currently. Shipping on the pipelines basically guarantees you security of supply. When things get tight in the market, we'll say we go back to the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack or some other issues. There was a Texas winter storm early last year that kinda took down some refineries on the Gulf Coast, and not a lot of product was getting put into the market. What can happen is, in those scenarios, suppliers can actually start to allocate all of their customers, which really limits how much supply you can get into your sites. When you're shipping your own barrels on the pipeline, it's a little bit more security of supply, and then typically when that type of a thing is happening in the markets, like a cyberattack or a storm, it actually protects our supply, but also our pricing remains extremely competitive compared to other options, so. Thanks for that, Brett. Thanks, Jon. Thanks, everybody. I mean, I just quickly, just one more moment. You know, our shareholders are awesome. You can all thank Justin over here for having the third-party testimonials. We have the most incredibly supportive base of shareholders we talk to all the time. For potential shareholders, we're very available. Tell all your friends, tell them our story, tell them where we've been, and if you believe in where we're heading, share that with them. This is grassroots is better than anything else. Thank you for being here, for taking the time, and we're so proud and excited of the team. A round of applause for our team and for our shareholders.