Baird Industrial Conference here in Chicago at The Ritz-Carlton. We appreciate your attendance, and we're really pleased to have WM here to talk with us about the business today. It's a company that's among the highest quality companies that we know of, and we were looking for an opportunity. We found one here recently. It's just a great story, and I'm sure the guys will fill in the details for us. To speak with us today about the company, we have John Morris, Chief Operating Officer, and Mike Watson, Chief Customer Officer, sorry. They're going to talk about the business a little bit. I'm going to ask the guys to give us a brief overview. If you could give us just sort of like, "Here's what we do," and then once we get that taken care of, we'll transition into the Q&A session, and I will offer details on how to send questions to the iPad. Otherwise, we can go with raised hands. So with that, I'll turn it over to the team. Thanks, guys. All right, I think I'll try and do this in 60 seconds or so. So WM is primarily a North American company. We run about 15,000 collection vehicles across the U.S. and Canada, and with the addition of the healthcare service business, we added about another 4,500 routes in the healthcare space, primarily in the U.S. and Canada. We have about 1,400 operating locations with the business that we acquired from Stericycle last year. Run 262 landfills, 350 transfer facilities, about 500 collection operations, and we have about 100 recycling operations combined from single stream, traditional recycling, organics, construction, and demolition, etc. Maybe you want to give a few stats on the customer base. Yeah, from a customer standpoint, we service over 20 million customers. A big chunk of those are residential customers, about 16 million. The remaining are really broken down to very diverse customer segments. We don't have an overweight in any customer segment. It's pretty diverse: retail, commercial property, industrial, so a very diverse customer base. Our customer base has grown significantly, as John mentioned, from the acquisition of Stericycle and Shred-it. It used to be a small portion of our business, but we feel the acquisition positions WM very, very well for extended growth platform well into the future. Last thing I might say, Dave, is, I appreciate the compliments about the organization. We've just announced our Q3 earnings here a handful of weeks ago, and collection and disposal business is performing exceptionally well. Another record quarter at almost 38.5%, 38.4% margins, the legacy business at 32%, and the overall business over 30%. And those are some high watermarks that we've been working towards over the last couple of years, and it's been a combination of top line and doing a lot of work in the middle of the P&L as well. Yeah, it's pretty phenomenal. Maybe we could talk about the investors love growth algorithms, and could you talk about your base business growth algorithm, organic, M&A, and then how that translates to EBITDA growth over the long term? I'll start and give a couple of, I think from an EBITDA growth standpoint, we said traditionally we want it to be 5%-7% EBITDA and free cash flow to be commensurate with that. We've also targeted at least 50 basis points of margin improvement, sort of in the traditional business every year, bless you. And we've had a successful run over the last handful of years in terms of achieving those targets. On the M&A front, we've always said it's about 50 basis points of growth, and it can be a little bit episodic because we try to remain disciplined in how we go about acquiring the traditional business. The last couple of years, we've seen some nice, call it mid-tier deals that we were able to execute on, so it's been a little bit more of a tailwind for us. But we've said about $100 milion-$200 million a year is kind of a normal run rate for us on the M&A front. Yeah, I was surprised. What's the number of traditional waste acquisitions you did this year? How many hundreds of millions of dollars is it? &450 million. $400 million. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's a larger number than I would have thought. So these are small bolt-on type acquisitions, easy to integrate. Yeah, that one was a regional one. I think D.C. Metro area in Northern Virginia, Maryland. We did one out in Long Island last year that was $700 million as well, and then we do a number of the small tuck-ins, but again, those are smaller in nature and more frequent in terms of number. While I'm thinking about it and we're talking about acquisitions, one of the things I know about the former Stericycle business is they had sort of this dominant market share. And when I say that, I mean there's other small players in every market, but they're like the brand A. My dad used to work for IBM. It's like no one gets fired for hiring IBM or Stericycle. So I just wonder, how do you think about Stericycle in the mix of M&A? Is there opportunity there or are you just thinking, "Let's just get the thing straightened out. We have enough market share. We have enough to focus on organically that that's going to be our main focus? So maybe I'll take a crack at it. I'll turn it over to Mike to fill in a little bit. I think in terms of the assets they have, I mean, it's not a secret. We've made a couple of forays into the healthcare waste space over the years in different markets and with varying degrees of success, but clearly us acquiring, I think Jim said it a couple of calls ago, we've looked on and off at that business for over a decade and felt like this was the opportune time for us to make the offer and acquire the business. But I think, first of all, we've got 13,000 folks who have been really a surprising pleasure to deal with. Usually when we do acquisitions, that can cause a little friction. The team there has been very receptive, which is certainly important. But I think when you look at it strategically, when you look at those assets, they're unique and very hard, if at all, able to be replicated certainly at the scale that Stericycle had built over the years. So to us, that was certainly a key element of the acquisition, was the unique assets they had. I do think if you step back from it, there are some similarities in terms it's a route-based distributed business model. It's got some similarities, although the trucks and the customers are not exactly like the solid waste business. Another thing that was very appealing to us is we look at the front end of our business as a logistics business, the 15,000 collection trucks that we run, and they run a handful of thousand vehicles as well and do a lot of the similar work. So we felt like from our data science and ops research group that there were some synergies we were going to be able to build and take advantage of within the Stericycle platform. But I think the takeaway is the assets are very unique. It gives us a national footprint across the U.S. and Canada. And as you heard on the call, we're working our way through a couple of the top line challenges that we knew when we bought the business with the ERP system. Sounded to me, correct me if I'm wrong, that that was more of a clearing event. I mean, our impression is by mid-2026 that things should be fairly on track. Now, don't get me wrong, I followed Stericycle. I know that it's been challenging, let's say, but it feels like with your scale and your ability to integrate businesses and the efforts that you're doing, it seems reasonable that by middle of next year, that could be a well-run machine and we could be off to the races here. I'll give it to Mike on one side. What I would tell you is if you look from where we jumped off, we originally said we'd be at $125 million in synergies. Within a few months, we upped that to $250 million, and then since then we've upped it to another $50 million or $300 million at the end of 2027. So if you just step back and look at it from there, and we went into that, Dave, to your point, eyes wide open in terms of we know there was going to be some friction, and it's sort of episodic is the term I used earlier because that's the stuff we're fighting our way through now. But back to your original question, the strategic value of us having that business as part of our portfolio and those unique assets, that has not changed at all. We're fighting our way through some of the rough stuff right now, but I'll let Mike talk a little bit about that. I think you framed it up well, John. I think the long-term play we have for this business is what attracts us the most. The secular growth really outpaces the MSW collection that we have at WM. You mentioned that Stericycle, now WM Healthcare Solutions, has a good share. Is there a potential for some inorganic growth? Potentially, but I think the white space and our opportunity to grow inside this is what really attracts us the most. It is very episodic. We've had the opportunity to get new business in this space. We've had the opportunity to grow price. We have delayed some price increases for some customers that had some integration strife as we worked through the ERP, but that decision was demonstrative and it was because we understand the long-term play in this space. We want to keep these customers and really ride that secular growth that we've seen already in some of these customers that are having more beds, more wings, aging population, and this is what really attracts us. This episodic bump in the road is just us stabilizing and getting the ERP right, which we kind of inherited that transition, and we've got the right people on it, and our goal is to get this stabilized by pretty much the end of this year, maybe leaking a little bit into Q1, but the back half of 2026 is when we feel that WM way, the machinery that has proven that EBITDA margins and growth that John mentioned will really be put into place all the way through the P&L top line, middle, and SG&A, which has been a really good story so far. Stericycle pre-acquisition was in the upper middle 20s from an SG&A standpoint. We brought that down in the 19s, and that's just applying some of the things we know how to do at WM, and we know how to do them well, and it's just going to take us a little bit more time to get us there. What are the elements that are different about, and I don't need to dwell on this. We can certainly talk about other things, but what are the elements of SG&A at the healthcare business that are different from the core business? I know people are sort of assuming that maybe you can gravitate closer toward the corporate average, but what, if anything, are there differences that make that harder than it would seem to get there? I could start there. One. I think the progress we've made so far has been on the sales expense and SG&A standpoint. Their sales expense percentage of revenue was quite substantially higher than ours. They didn't have the automation, kind of the organizational elements that we are putting in place and we still will, but also integrating the sales organization. They had a lot of outside sales resources, not a lot of inside, lacked automation, self-service. Those are some of the things we see on the front end. But even just if you think about corporate SG&A, you don't need two CFOs, you don't need two Chief Commercial Officers. But as we start to work down the P&Ls, we start to integrate the back office, some of the technology we've implemented, how we've used some offshore resources. All those components of the SG&A are coming together. In addition to that, I think as they've navigated through the ERP, we've had some increasing customer experience costs. As our service is getting better, the bills are very accurate. We don't need as many customer service agents. So all the way through that SG&A equation has been a plus. And the last thing we commented on the call that goes to Mike's point is we've been thoughtful and deliberate about when and how we started to integrate the business into the 16 regions that we have. We call them areas, but think of them as geographic regions, one of which is Canada, 15 in the States. And we just got through that process. We ran a pilot with four areas to make sure that we had all the kind of kinks worked out, but now all 16 of our area VPs and area leadership teams in those arenas have the healthcare business locally sitting at the table with them. And Mike and I were in, we got in yesterday and spent some time with the team here. It's really, I mean, we always knew it would be a benefit, but just listening to those conversations about some real fundamentals that happened, you know, because this is, you know, the waste business is a local, maybe regional business. The healthcare business leans more regional, but when you think about trucks and assets and people and you take what the folks they had, the assets they had and lay it over, now we're really starting to see some really healthy conversations about what the next set of benefits are and when they're going to show up from sort of locally in the markets. One last question on this. It's just interesting, really interesting. When you think about the capability of WM plus what was the old Stericycle business, are you now able to service everything from collection all the way through to the end of disposal? Because I know there was, I know a lot of it is autoclave, which is just, you know, landfill stuff, but there's also the incinerator. So could you just talk about that entire waste stream from end to end? You could service all of that today. Yeah, I would say that's what excites us the most. If you think about WM's capabilities, sustainability service, our reporting, our analytics, and then complementing that with the WM Healthcare services of document destruction, medical waste, implementing Haz. We have a comprehensive environmental solutions program that I think is second to none in the market, and if you think about the hospital space, as I mentioned, growing, but also our ability to serve our existing WM customers with regulated medical waste, sharps containers, and document destruction. We shared this in our Investor Day that the addressable market for cross-sell is why we increased our EBITDA from synergies, $50 million in our Investor Day, is our confidence level in being able to cross-sell this business, and that's really has taken off. One of the things that we saw in our industrial volumes at WM, and this is where it can be a little bit confusing, is some of the growth that we've gotten from the acquisition is showing up in the legacy business. A perfect example of that is we moved over about 75 basis points of our 1.2% volume increase, which is positive, which we haven't seen in three plus years, has come from the integration of that of basically they were being serviced by a competitor of WM's, and we moved those over to WM's trucks. I think that's just a testament of the opportunity of growth that we have in this segment. That's not just necessarily riding the secular trends or the growing healthcare business. It's bringing that cross-sell capabilities. And that addressable market for us is in excess of $2 billion in revenue that we've sized. So it's exciting for us, and we're excited to work through the stabilization and get to work. Yeah, sounds very good. Maybe we could talk about the core C&D business and maybe discuss yield that you're able to capture today, open market index, what's your experience been lately? I I know you mentioned it on the call, but just for everyone, could you talk about those two different types of price opportunities and what kind of realization you're getting today? Yeah, I think the thing that the team's really done a nice job on under Mike's leadership over the last couple of years, our commercial and industrial pricing has always been strong in the longer haul in intent, but we've made a very deliberate effort over the last couple of years to focus on a few things, one of which is improving our residential business, which has always been annuity-like, but it's been depressed margins compared to the rest of the business, and we've talked about that for the last three years and the progress that was made there. I think the other one is really the approach we've taken on disposal pricing, and if you look, you know, it wasn't that long ago where MSW pricing was printing about 2% a quarter in a year, and it's kind of what it was. And that's another effort that Mike and I and others took on, started acting on a handful of years ago for all the right reasons. The strategic value of our landfill space, the strategic value of where those sites are located, the value of our network. And I think what you're seeing on the post-collection side between landfills and transfer stations, whether it's core price or yield, is you're seeing healthier numbers there than you've seen really ever, at least in recent history. But I think when we talk about core price and yield, which are very important indicators, the other thing we've been very, very keenly focused on is two things. One is managing the middle of the P&L, which I think the team has done a good job on, partly due to process, some due to technology we can touch on. We can touch on that. And I think that's why you're seeing our OPEX sub 60. That's a range we had not been at ever. We were more 63%-64% at some point in the past. So, but I think what it comes down to, I guess that while we focus on all those different KPIs, I think what we've really focused on is the cost-price spread. And you're seeing it in the, I mentioned the margins on the collection and disposal business being at 38.4% for the quarter, which has ticked up the last handful of quarters. I think it's a combination being disciplined, thoughtful, long-term focused on customer lifetime value and how we approach pricing. It's about syndicating pricing over a broader base of our lines of business. And it's really also about making sure we're really disciplined in the middle of the P&L. I think what you're seeing is the culmination of those things coming together and showing up in the margins. As it relates to the profitability and the residential piece of the business, what inning do you think we're at and how much further can we go on that? I would tell you we're in probably the late middle innings in terms of the automation effort. Mike and I look at that every quarter and he's got a team of folks look at it every day. And we're probably about 70% through what we can automate. So I think that middle of the P&L. But I think the mission has been more broadly, as I mentioned earlier, structurally lowering the cost to serve. And specifically in residential, what Mike and I just communicated to the team a few weeks ago is, listen, we've been really pushing everybody, fix the business, fix the business. We don't need the practice, et cetera, et cetera. And you see that because we've been shedding about 3% volume quarter in and quarter out. But in every single quarter since we started, every single quarter we've put up more revenue with 3% plus less volume. It's pretty easy math to do. And this quarter was a little bit elevated. That hadn't as much to do with a contract rollover, a franchise. But the message there is that we've taken the margins from low double digits up to approaching 20%. So we've got room to run there. And I think what the message Mike and I gave to the team is we still got some business to fix, but we also see it under a more modernized cost-effective model to be able to grow the business. And that's really where our focus is going to be going into next year. Okay, before I forget, yeah, if there's any questions, we could take hands. Otherwise, it's session2@rwbaird.com if you'd like to send an email up here. You mentioned lifetime customer value, and one of the things from the Investor Day that I thought was really interesting was this sort of coming wave of landfill closures, and you're looking at that and thinking, okay, this is happening. This means that at some point in the future, as you look at that lifetime, you're going to have to pay more to haul waste further away from where you normally would otherwise. Could you talk about that, how you see those closures and then how you're sort of bringing that and saying, let's discount that into the current price and we're realizing that value somewhat now in anticipation of those closures that we're going to see here over the next 10 plus years? We've talked about it for the last number of quarters. We've pointed to places like South Florida, the Midwest, the Northeast. And I spent most of my career in the New York metro area. And that's really sort of the epicenter of where it really became really complicated post-Fresh Kills to start moving waste out of New York City and a lot of it. But it certainly was a frame of reference for me as we looked at some of these other markets over the years. And I think what Jim said, there was 400 or so landfills we estimate and about 150 million tons that would come offline in the next, call it decade or so. It's not going to happen overnight, but we can start to see the incremental effect of that. And having the strategic landfill asset is obviously where you start, but being able to access it seven days a week, 52 weeks a year for the customer is really where we think that that's a particular challenge and I think more importantly an opportunity for us to be able to do that. So we've set up a team a handful of years ago that really focuses, we know how to run landfills where I think our team does an exceptional job of that. We set up a team of data scientists, operations research folks, et cetera, who are now supplementing this network team we have who is starting to frame out. This is not something where you can point a truck from one landfill to the next day and then back. That's traditionally how that worked. But now you're seeing, you know, you're going to have to go a distance. It's not going to be by truck. It's going to be by some form of rail or even by marine transportation mode at some point in some places. So we see that long term, certainly an opportunity for us to really improve our network capabilities, especially if you think one of our largest customers is the city of New York. We move about 7,000 tons a day, give or take out of there. And none of it goes out by truck. It goes out by rail or by boat. And there's an example of it. It has to happen six, in this case, seven days a week. And we see some of the complexity, not at the same scale, starting to hit some other markets as these landfills reach the end of their life. And we want to be in a position to take advantage of that. I would add to that the network planning group that John mentioned connects with our pricing organization. That's why I think you've seen an extraordinary high MSW pricing matching a high volume, a 6.7% yield on MSW and a 5% volume. I think it just helps us understand. We understand the value of that network and how to price it, and we have a significant amount of analytics around next best alternatives. How is the waste moving, as John mentioned? What are the competitive profiles? So that helps us evaluate how we really earn that return on those assets that obviously are diminishing, as we talked about, but we're so well positioned. We want to make sure we've earned that right to charge appropriately. And correct me if this is not even measurable for you, but as you think about automating recycling, getting better at that, I mean, I think it used to be that most of that material would wind up in a landfill anyhow. But as you have automated sorters and you're sort of figuring that formula out, is that one way to have a sort of a relief valve on landfills, or is it not big enough to move the needle for you? I think diversion certainly is one way to help offset some of the pressure on the landfill. And I think it's a great example. I mean, you know, we're sort of entering the late innings on $1.5 billion-ish, keep me honest here, on automating a bunch of our recycling facilities, in particular our single stream fleet. And we're doing that through even some depressed commodity markets. And we're going to continue to do that to finish those up. And those plants, even in this, you know, historically low commodity market, are still performing really well. And we're happy with that. But part of the equation has been we've structurally lowered the cost of how those plants operate. You know, we've taken 80%, 75%- 80% of the labor out of those facilities. And it's being done through automation and forms of artificial intelligence. So, but I do think the demand for recycling commodities has to be strong over the long term. And we can produce it. We obviously want to have strength in the end markets for us to be able to move that material for our customers. That reminds me, I'm supposed to ask you about AI applications and anything tangible that you're seeing in the business today. Beyond what you just mentioned, are there any other applications you'd like to say? You know, I've been asked a few times, like, you know, what do you think about AI? Do you see it fitting in your business? I'm like, we've had it in our business for a decade. And people go, well, tell me how. And I'll give you the big example, Mike, filling some of the blanks, but we have inward and outward facing technology in every one of our trucks for inward for safety and outward for customer data. And what we do is we capture all that information. But in particular, you know, we have the capability to analyze tens of millions of images every year about what happens every time in this example to dump a customer. That started out as a program called Snapshot where people used to hold up, some people in the audience don't even know what a flip phone is, but had a flip phone and would take a picture, say the can's overloaded, right? Fast forward 12 years later, now we do that all through automation. Our operators and our vehicles don't touch it. It's all done. The photos are captured and transmitted to the team. They're filtered almost primarily through AI. They come back. Mike's team gets a hold of them and he can tell you a little bit more about it. Yeah, and then basically we prioritize them whether we are over-servicing a customer, under-servicing a customer. We can upgrade their service. We also use it to identify recycling in the MSW waste stream for prospects for recycling. Conversely, if we have a recycling stream that's contaminated with MSW, we use it as an education and communication tool for our customers. So that moment of truth where our customers are served, it allows us to understand what's in the waste stream. In addition to that, we use it for our customer experience group to say, you were here or were you not? Here's a picture of your container. So it helps them from a customer standpoint, helps us right size, and also educate from a sustainability. I think processing that information in addition to the connected truck that John talks about is just one way that we use artificial intelligence to really serve the entire P&L as well as our customers. We're also talking about being people first. One example where we're using AI to do just that, and I'm looking at the picture of the gentleman in the front-load here on the screen. We don't have the communication technology in our trucks; now it's all tablet-based. Nobody has a phone. So people bring their personal phone with them, but the rule is you don't pick that up while you're driving. Well, one of the ways we're giving data to our operations managers who oversee these folks in this example is if you're driving down the street and you happen to pick your phone up, artificial intelligence from the inward safety technology will catch you and warn you. And the second time, the supervisor will get notification. And more importantly, if you're a driver who's been with us for any period of time, we do regular observations. It used to be, I'm going to go find Dave, driver on the truck and I'm going to go ride with him for a little while, see how he's doing. Now our operationsaz anagers get in that vehicle with a plethora of data that's all AI generated. So they already know when they come to coach you, they already know Dave's got a tendency to do this. He does this really well. He follows a little too close. I mean, so we're using AI actually to aggregate all this data in this case from a safety perspective and make it a coaching tool for the leadership of the company. We're doing the same on our customer-facing agents, well, how they're interacting with customers, are their word choices, are there phrases that are coming from our customers that allow us to coach or communicate back to our customers, so I think we're just scratching the surface. We have a whole team dedicated to AI and how it's going to impact our business, but we see that as a differentiator for WM, but we've already started. All right, we have about a minute and a half left. And I've got a lot of questions. I overprepared this year. I thought it was going to run out last year. You guys talk fast. But maybe we can talk the next minute about sustainability, growth investments, RNG, how that's playing out. And I think the message on the last call was you're sort of approaching the end of a major investment cycle and now it's sort of a harvesting cycle. Just talk about that transition and what you think about it? So we were just chatting about it before you walked in, Dave. I mean, in terms of the investments we made to automate all these recycling facilities, even a depressed commodity market, you heard this from Tara on the call, the recycling business still did well in that quarter. And those automated facilities, the ones we invested in, did even better, obviously to drive that up. I think on the RNG side, you heard again, we're doing a lot of things to obviously we're on track to complete all those plants with the original timeline. There's some puts and takes quarter in and quarter out, but we're going to hit the milestone to get those 20 plants done when we said we were going to. I think from a commodity standpoint, I think the team's done a really nice job of kind of calling the high and low in terms of RNG and gas prices, and I think you heard Tara speak to that on the call as well, so we feel good about where we're at. I think from a harvesting perspective, you know, we're going to drop $400+ million in capital. We'll see some EBITDA uptick that we'll memorialize for everybody in January, but I think the term you used, harvest, is we have, if you think about going back to ADS, $3+ billion in sustainability investments, the investment in healthcare. We think 2026 and on is a way for us to really focus on those things we've invested in, harvest the cash out of it, and look for the most efficient ways to return it to the shareholder. Sounds great. That's all we have time for. The guys will be at a breakout session, of course, but thank you very much for joining us, guys.