Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the last presentation of the day. I am John McNamara with Three Part Advisors. Our next presentation is Interface, Inc. Interface is a global provider of commercial flooring for more than 50 years. It trades under the symbol TILE on the Nasdaq. Presenting to us from management is Bruce Hausmann, Chief Financial Officer. Bruce? Thanks, John, and thank you all for staying here. Saved the best for last. I was actually wondering if anyone was going to be here. It has been an incredible day, and I have been super impressed. This is my first year at this conference, and I have been super impressed with the engagement. So thank you for being here. I want to tell you about the best flooring company in the world and why that is, why I work for this company, been here for about nine years, and why, if I was you, I would invest in this company. I am going to try to be a little funny along the way and hopefully make you laugh. If my jokes don't land, then sorry about that. I don't know if you have noticed, there is a lot of commercial flooring out there. There is a lot. That is the space that we play in. So it is a really, really large market. Just a few factoids on us. We have three brands. We have the Interface brand, we have the nora brand, which is our nora rubber flooring, and we have our FLOR brand, which is our consumer brand. 98% of our business is commercial. About 2% is residential, and that is on the FLOR brand. We do have a very large geographic footprint in over 100 countries where we distribute. We have manufacturing on six continents. If you look up the makeup of our revenue, we are about $1.4 billion in revenue. If you look up the makeup or the composition, it is about 60% in the Americas, 29% in Europe, 11% in Asia-Pacific. We focus maniacally on three market segments, corporate office, education, and healthcare. That is not to say we don't take business in other spots, transportation, government, retail, hospitality, but we are really focused where we have a strong right to win on those three market segments, and about 3,600 employees globally. We are not the biggest in the industry, that would be Mohawk, but we have the best company in the industry. I would say we have a lot of data points to prove that out. If you look at our net promoter scores, if you look at our growth rates, where we have been overachieving top-line growth rates quarter after quarter, overachieving in the industry. If you look at our margins and our margin expansion and our margin structure, we have the best margins in the industry. We have the best brand in the industry, and I think the best products in the industry. If you are looking for a place, if you say, "Man, commercial flooring is a big market. It's an interesting space to allocate some of my portfolio." I think you cannot go wrong with betting on us. We compete on three major fronts, design, performance, and sustainability. I came from outside the industry. I did not appreciate until I came to this company how important design is. People look at a floor, and so much of that is where it all starts when a designer or an architect is trying to figure out the layout of a room. That is the beginning face plate, and then they build from there. Design plays a huge part in what we do. Interestingly, we have an amazing product. We have a 15-year warranty on our product, on our carpet tile product. It lasts, and it holds up extremely well in really, really rough commercial environments. A lot of times, it does not get replaced because it is worn out. It usually gets replaced just because of style. People say, "Hey, this is out of style now. We want to refresh it." Sustainability, I do not know if that is important to you. For some people, it is super important. If sustainability is important to you are going to love our company because it is in the DNA of who we are. If you do not care about sustainability, that is okay too because we have plenty of brand differentiators and plenty of reasons why we excel in the marketplace, whether sustainability is important to you or not. We have a very strong balance sheet. Our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio is 0.5 x. We have a very strong purpose-driven culture. One of the things that we are proud of, I am 57 years old. I have been doing employee engagement surveys for many years at many different companies. It is really hard to get good scores. One thing I have noticed is that if you ask your employees to give candid feedback anonymously, they are going to do that. I have been put on my heels over the course of my career with some pretty candid feedback from employees saying, "Here is where to do well," and "Man, you are terrible in these areas." I am just amazed and blown away at the scores that we get. I do not know if you are familiar with this employee engagement survey called Great Place to Work, but we are certified in every place that you can be certified in. Over 95% of our employee population is certified as a Great Place to Work. I can tell you from personal experience, that is really, really hard to do. It tells me that we have got a very engaged workforce who likes being a part of the company, who really believes in what we are doing. I think that that is manifesting itself on the P&L as well, which is why I am spending some time talking about it. As I mentioned, these are our three brands, Interface, nora, and FLOR. We are maniacally focused on three product lines. I talk about focus a lot on this presentation because I think that is part of the key to our success. Some of our competitors have way more products in the bag than we do, and they are just less focused. I think part of our success is that three product lines, carpet tile, which we invented, luxury vinyl tile, which we got into in 2017, and we've grown that business organically with accretive margins, been very successful. And we got into the rubber business with the acquisition of nora flooring in 2018. If you're curious about acquisitions and M&A strategy and all that stuff, I'll talk about it at the end of this presentation. But we've done one acquisition in about 20 years, and it has been a huge success. But to be just stating who we are and what we do and how we think, all these successes that we've talked about have really, other than the nora acquisition of 2018, have come organically. And we're the dead opposite of an acquisition machine. We've been really, really focused on sticking to the knitting and being great at what we do. We play in a very large market. To be fair, data is really challenging in our industry to get your arms around, but it's a $39 billion commercial flooring industry globally. Our TAM is around $9 billion- plus. If you look over on the right here of this chart, this Marimekko chart, that's soft surface, so that's carpet. So carpet tile is about a $5 billion industry. Broadloom is about a $5 billion-ish industry. Carpet tiles continue to take share from broadloom. LVT entered the scene a number of years ago. It has been taking shares. It's about a $3 billion-ish TAM. It's been taking share from all of the hard surface. There was a period when it was taking some share from soft surface and commercial, and we've seen a slowing down of that now, significantly. And then rubber is a highly differentiated product. So we're very intentional about these product lines. We know that they have the highest growth rates and the highest margin profile in the business, which is why we focus on these and why these are the product lines that we've chosen to be in. Maybe three-ish years ago, we brought in a new CEO. Her name is Laurel Hurd. She's incredible. She came from outside the industry. She had a lot of observations around, I'll call, the good and the opportunity inside the company. And one of Laurel's observations was, "Man, we are so sub-optimized. We have so much opportunity if we just reorganized and rewired the way that we operate as a company." We used to be very regionally based. We had an Americas region, an EMEA region, an APAC region, with a holding company on the top. It was all very decentralized, and we weren't leveraging the power of one company. Each one of those regions had a president. They all had their finance organization, their supply chain organization. They're all running their own VP of marketing. Laurel came in and said, "Man, if we just operated as one, we could be so much better for our customers globally, so much better internally at our being nimble and servicing the market." So we've been on this journey for coming up on three years. This will be our third year where we do a planning process in this new model, where we've rewired how we operate. We brought in a supply chain leader to head up supply chain globally. That's how we look at. We don't look at supply chain regionally anymore. We look at it globally. We have one finance organization, one market globally. We have one IT organization globally, one marketing organization globally. To be fair, there's been some cost cutting, but it's been more about speed of business and nimbleness in growth. A really easy example around some fewer costs is we used to have four VPs of marketing. Now we have one. By the way, all of those marketing organizations had their own communications or their own PR firm, their own product launch schedules, our product management, their own product management organizations. They all ran independently. Now, all of that has been aligned to have one organization run things globally. It's really improved the speed and accelerated our growth and helped meet our customers better around the world. We think that we have the best selling organizations on the ground, and so those global functions that I just described, marketing, product management, finance, IT, HR, they need to support our world-class selling teams. That is their mandate. We call this the One Interface strategy. The last pillar of this is leading on our three differentiated areas that we compete around design, performance, and sustainability. The results of this have been impressive. You can see this has been our revenue growth rate. As I mentioned earlier, we've really been outpacing the industry by orders of magnitude on the top line. This is our top-line growth. Again, we win based on focusing on how we focus, focusing on our products, focusing on our brand, and focusing where we play through these three key market segments, corporate office, education, and healthcare. You can see the composition of our revenue. When I joined the company nine years ago, corporate office was the lion's share of our business. Now we've really diversified and been less dependent on corporate office. When I think about corporate office, so many investors, for a while there, that corporate office was the taboo word for any investor. I can tell you where we play, we do really well. If you step back and ask why that is, we play in the Class A space. First of all, we're the high price point leader in our industry. We play at the high price points. We play in Class A space, where we're highly differentiated. Class A space is actually doing pretty well in office. There's a lot of competition around there for space. There's a lot of people who are upgrading, if they're in a Class B building, they say, "Hey, I have the opportunity to upgrade to Class A," so we participate in that. If someone's lease is about ready to turn, landlords are throwing tenant improvement dollars more than ever before at those tenants to stay. That typically means new flooring. Landlords are throwing tenant improvement dollars out to prospective tenants to try to lure them away to join their building. That typically means new flooring at that new space. The other thing that's happening is that if you think about a spectrum of work from home, on one end of the spectrum versus full people working in the office, pick wherever you think we're at on that spectrum. Very few companies, you're always going to find one or two exceptions, but almost none are pushing their employees to stay out of the office. More than ever before, they're pushing their employees to be in the office more, to utilize the office more, and they're reconfiguring their space for that. They know to be competitive and to have a competitive employee workforce, that they need to have a decent space. Lastly, something that I really like about this business, or that I thought that lured me to join the company, was that there's this natural annuity in the business intrinsically, where leases turn, every six to eight years, leases are turning. When leases turn, that typically means some sort of refresh. So there's just this natural refresh that happens in office space that really helps with us just from a macro standpoint. Clearly, education and healthcare are also strong markets. We're riding the macro. We have great macro support around healthcare, whether it's labs or hospitals or other healthcare facilities, where our products are differentiated and are able to benefit from that market segment. In education, we also do very well. We have a very strong customer base in those markets. Here are some screenshots of our products. You can see sometimes they're used independently, sometimes they're used as an interdependent system. We have a very strong track record around innovation. As I mentioned earlier, we invented carpet tile. We then also invented a carbon negative carpet tile. We invented a carbon negative rubber flooring product. We have the most sustainable LVT product on the market. Most recently, we launched a product called noravant timber, which we're super excited about for the healthcare industry. It's a very highly unique, differentiated product for healthcare, and most notably, we're marketing it heavily for patient and recovery rooms. Our A&D customers care a lot about sustainability. If I'm a salesperson, I wake up every morning, I think about basically three different customers, the architects and designers that are in my territory. That's who I'm visiting with. I want to win that business. I want to help them be successful with the projects they're working on. So they specify, I want to win the spec, so they spec my product into their job that they're working on. If they're successful, I'm successful, and I'll get follow-on business as a result of that in the future. There is the dealer/installer. That's the person who actually installs the flooring. It's an important constituent, but less than 80% of the time, they're the deciders of what goes down on the floor. More often than not, in our business, 80% + of the time it's the architect and designer that decides what's going to go down on the floor. Then, of course, there's the end user. We do have some end users that name us by name. They say, "We want Interface in our building." Sometimes they do that if sustainability is important to them. If sustainability is important to a customer, we should win every time, because by orders of magnitude, we have the most sustainable products in the industry. We have the numbers to back that up. They are third-party verified. I encourage you, if sustainability is important to you, please go to our investor website. You can pick up a copy of our impact report. I think you will be very impressed with our track record and our results, because by orders of magnitude, as I mentioned, we are leaps and bounds ahead of anybody else in our industry. All this translates into gross margin and margins that have been expanding every single year. This is a combination of activating our strategy by being more efficient in our plants, in the way that we operate, in the way that we manufacture our product, to being more efficient around where we go to market, and where we are focusing our time and our attention. Then maintaining our right to win in our really compelling market segments that I mentioned earlier. I will briefly touch on one thing, capital allocation strategy. It is a balanced strategy that we activate. Number one, we are investing in the business. This year we are investing an incremental $25 million into the business, and to be fair, that is helping drive some of that margin expansion. We look for returns, we invest in the business, and we have been investing in the business every single year, and we intend on continuing to do that when we can see meaningful returns like the ones that we have been seeing so far. We manage leverage and debt with a very disciplined lens. As I mentioned, our net debt-to-EBITDA is 0.5x, so we have got a great balance sheet, which is great. It frees us up. It gives us the flexibility to manage, to invest in the business. It helps us through the thick and the thin as all the different macro noise comes at us to make sure we can navigate all that, while still investing and making sure that they are running the business for the long haul. We do look at M&A opportunities. We look at them through the lens of our customer. As I mentioned, we have only done one acquisition in 20 years, so we are the furthest thing from an acquisition machine. But if we could find something that accelerated our growth, accelerated our margins, was something that our customers needed that we thought we could create value from by bringing it together, we will take a hard look at that. A lot of stars need to align for us to do something like that. It has to be something that we are super confident in, that we can get at the right price, that we can really create value out of. Again, the one acquisition we did in 2018, it has been an absolute home run, so we do have a strong track record there. But to be fair, only one deal. Then lastly, we have a fiduciary duty, and we take this really seriously, to return excess cash to shareholders. We have been doing that. We have been increasing our dividend, and we have been doing opportunistic and disciplinary purchases. We have been good stewards on that front of making sure that our shareholders are participating in the benefits of the appreciation of our market value as well as any excess cash, we make sure that we return that to our shareholders. With that, I will pause here and see if there are any questions. Thank you for the opportunity, and happy to answer any questions. I also know that this is the very end of the day, so if there aren't any questions, no worry. Yes. As you are focused on gaining market share, what is the biggest challenge that you find? Yeah. The question was, as we are trying to gain market share, what is the biggest challenge? I think it goes back to our strategy, and it is making sure that our organization is very clear on our strategy, where we are going to focus, and how we are going to focus. We have been taking share. We have been taking share in office for sure, healthcare as well, and education. You are talking to a hardcore operator. We need to make sure that our organization is ultra-focused in the right place and is very clear on what our right to win is in that space, so that we win that business when we service those customers. I know that sounds really basic, but just having that organizational focus around why we are there, why we are going to win, has been so important. Yeah, sure. When you don't win, what is the hurdle that you didn't quite make it over? Yeah. So the question is, if we don't win, what's the hurdle that we didn't quite make it over? We look at a win-loss report. We don't win 100% of the time. There are many reasons why maybe we didn't win. Nine times out of 10, it's on us. We did not follow what I call our recipe, or we call our recipe, for making sure that we had all of the relationships in place, we understood all the parameters, and we understood the customer's needs. Because if we don't have all that stuff lined up, and for some reason we didn't win, it's on us. We probably skipped a step, or there was something that we didn't follow in our process that we messed it up. But we do those postmortems, say, "Why did we lose that job?" And that's a win-loss report that we look at. Yeah, sure. How frequently is price a reason for not winning? Yeah. The question is, how frequently is price a reason for not winning? So I'm going to answer your question this way. If you talk to our selling people, they will tell you we have to talk about price all day long. And I have immense respect for that. We're the high-price leader. They have to explain to the customer why the customer should pay a higher price for our product. So that for sure is a part of the conversation, but that is not a reason. It's not just about price. It's about lots of other elements of why they would choose us. And if it does come down to, "Man, we love that product, but we just can't afford that," we do have some products in our bag where we can help to meet at slightly lower price points. But to be fair, if you think about spectrum, we are always on the high end. We do not do any low-end stuff. If they really wanted ultra-cheap stuff, they probably would not be talking to us in the first place. Hopefully that answers your question. Thank you for that. Well, thank you everybody. It has been a long day, and I really appreciate your time. Thank you for your interest in Interface, and appreciate your time.
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