SiteOne Landscape Supply, Inc. Aktie

Greetings, and welcome to the SiteOne Landscape Supply, Inc. Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Eric Elema, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We issued our third quarter 2026 earnings press release this morning and posted a slide presentation to the Investor Relations portion of our website at investors.siteone.com. I am joined today by Doug Black, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Daniel Laughlin, SVP, Strategy and Development.

Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today's press release, slide presentation and the statements made during this call include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. Such risks and uncertainties include the factors set forth in the earnings release and in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Additionally, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. A reconciliation of these measures can be found in our earnings release and in the slide presentation.

I would now like to turn the call over to Doug Black.

Thanks, Eric. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today. We delivered a solid third quarter performance with 3% growth in net sales, 8% growth in adjusted EBITDA and 60 basis points of adjusted EBITDA margin expansion compared to the prior year period despite continued softness in underlying market demand and the delayed fall season. Our teams made good progress on our commercial and operational initiatives and maintain strong cost discipline in the face of lower sales volume. Our acquisitions continue to perform well, and we were able to add another excellent company to SiteOne through acquisition during the quarter. We also continue to leverage our strong cash flow and balance sheet to take advantage of our recent share price weakness and returned over $62 million to shareholders during the quarter through our share repurchase program. Our Board recently increased our share repurchase authorization by $500 million, and we plan to continue returning capital to shareholders opportunistically in the coming years.

While we expect market conditions to be challenging in the near term, we remain focused on the opportunities within our control to gain market share, improve productivity and strengthen our competitive position. These self-help opportunities, combined with our strong cash flow and acquisition strategy, enable us to drive sustained performance and growth for our shareholders this year and in the years to come.

I will start today's call with a brief review of our unique market position and our strategy, followed by highlights from the third quarter. Eric will then walk you through our third quarter financial results in more detail, and provide an update on our balance sheet and liquidity position. Daniel will discuss our acquisition strategy, and then I will come back to address our outlook and guidance for 2026 before taking your questions.

As shown on Slide 4 of the earnings presentation, we have a strong footprint of more than 690 branches and 5 distribution centers across 45 U.S. states and 5 Canadian provinces. We are the clear industry leader approximately 3x the size of our nearest competitor, yet we estimate that we only have about a 13% share of the very fragmented $36 billion wholesale landscaping products distribution market. Accordingly, our long-term opportunity to grow and gain market share remains significant. We have a balanced mix of business with 66% focused on Maintenance, Repair & Upgrade, 20% focused on New Residential Construction and 14% on New Commercial & Recreational Construction. As the only nationwide full product line wholesale distributor in the market, we also have an excellent balance across our product lines as well as geographically. Our strategy to fill in our product lines across the U.S. and Canada both organically and through acquisition further strengthens this balance over time. Overall, our end market mix broad product portfolio and geographic coverage offers us multiple avenues to grow and create value for our customers and suppliers while providing important resiliency in softer markets, like the market we are in today.

Moving to Slide 5, our strategy remains straightforward and unchanged. We leveraged the strength of both our large nationwide organization and our very experienced and highly entrepreneurial local teams. Our goal is to fully utilize our scale, resources and capabilities in support of local execution to deliver superior value to our customers and suppliers in every market we serve. We do this through our focused commercial and operational initiatives which not only build a long-term competitive advantage for all our stakeholders, but also help us overcome the near-term headwinds. These initiatives are complemented by our acquisition strategy, which filled in our product portfolio, moves us into new geographic markets and adds terrific new talent to SiteOne. Taken all together, we expect our strategy to create superior value for our shareholders through organic growth, acquisition growth and EBITDA margin expansion.

At our Investor Day in June, we described our strategy and initiatives in detail and outline our financial targets through 2030. With the current challenging end markets, we believe the execution of our strategy allows us to outperform the market organically while leveraging acquisition growth and EBITDA margin expansion to deliver solid financial progress. We expect our progress to accelerate as end markets return to normal growth. Accordingly, we remain highly focused on executing our commercial and operational initiatives, strengthening the business and continuously improving areas that are within our control.

On Slide 6, you can see our strong track record over the last 10 years with consistent organic and acquisition growth. As mentioned, we expect to continue driving organic and acquisition growth while [indiscernible] and expanding our EBITDA margin significantly over the coming years. You can see from the slide that we expanded our adjusted EBITDA margin last year and expect to make further progress this year despite soft markets and significant headwinds. Our ability to deliver EBITDA margin expansion in both soft and healthy market conditions is expected to yield attractive EBITDA growth and improve return on invested capital in the coming years. Finally, with our strong cash flow, we can support our strategy and return capital to shareholders through our share repurchase program. Overall, we believe that we are well positioned to create solid value for our shareholders in 2026 and significant value over the longer term.

We have completed 109 acquisitions across all product lines since the start of 2014, adding approximately $2.2 billion in trailing 12-month sales to SiteOne, which demonstrates the strength and durability of our acquisition strategy. Our pipeline of potential deals remains robust, and we expect to continue adding and integrating more companies in 2026 to support our growth. Given the fragmented nature of our industry and our current modest market share, we believe that we can add over $2 billion of acquired trailing 12 months revenue to SiteOne over the next 10 years.

Slide 7 shows the long runway that we have ahead in filling in our product portfolio, which we aim to do primarily through acquisition, especially in the Nursery and Hardscapes lines of business. We are well connected with the best companies in our industry and expect to continue filling in these markets systematically over the next decade. I will now discuss some of our third quarter performance highlights as shown on Slide 8.

Net sales increased 3% to $1.29 billion compared to the prior year period, while Organic Daily Sales decreased 1%. Higher price contribution was more than offset by lower sales volume amid continued softness in underlying market demand, while acquisitions continued to contribute to growth. Note that we experienced hot and dry weather in key markets during August and September, which pushed some of the fall season into October. We are encouraged to see those sales come through this month, with Organic Daily Sales growth of approximately 2% so far in October, yielding modest organic daily sales growth of flat to up 1% for the 4-month period of July and through October. Gross profit increased 5% to approximately $459 million, and gross margin improved by 80 basis points to 35.5%, reflecting strong price realization and continued execution of our commercial initiatives.

SG&A as a percentage of net sales increased 20 basis points to 28.6% as lower sales volume and higher fuel and health care costs more than offset the benefits of our operational initiatives and strong overall cost control. Note that increased fuel costs added approximately 15 basis points to SG&A as a percentage of sales, while our fuel surcharges added an offsetting 15 basis points to gross margin. Adjusted EBITDA increased 8% to $138.3 million, and adjusted EBITDA margin improved by 60 basis points to 10.7%. Overall, we were pleased to expand adjusted EBITDA margin despite the challenging demand environment and organic daily sales decline. In terms of initiatives, we continue to make solid progress during the quarter despite the lower end market demand, executing specific actions to improve our customer experience, drive organic sales expand gross margin and control SG&A.

For organic sales and gross margin expansion, we achieved good Organic Daily Sales growth with our small customers and grew our Pro-Trade, Solstice and Portfolio private brand products collectively by 23% during the quarter and over 35% year-to-date. Our percentage of branches with bilevel capability is nearly 70% and despite adding 12 Reinders branches earlier this year without this capability. We continue to execute our Hispanic marketing strategy to drive growth in this important customer segment. We increased our digital sales on siteone.com by over 45% year-to-date versus the prior year period, while also increasing our regular active users by approximately 35%. We believe we are gaining market share with the customers who are engaged with us digitally as we achieved strong positive total sales growth with these customers during the quarter. siteone.com helps customers to be more efficient and helps us increase market share while making our associates more productive through win-win-win.

On the SG&A front, we continued to lower our net delivery expense during the third quarter with increased efficiency, along with improved pricing. As mentioned, our teams have done a good job of working with our customers to pass through fuel surcharges to mitigate the significant near-term increases in fuel cost. We have reduced net delivery expense by over 35 basis points year-to-date and expect to drive additional improvements in 2026 and for the next several years, as we execute our local market delivery strategy and best practices. We also continue to achieve improved profitability with our underperforming branches or focused branches during the quarter. though they were also negatively affected by low organic daily sales growth. We expect to drive steady improvement with these branches in 2026, which should accelerate with normal end market demand in the coming years.

In total, our ability to execute our commercial and operational initiatives, we believe enables us to outperform the market and deliver EBITDA margin expansion despite lower end market demand. Furthermore, we expect these initiatives to help us drive organic growth and expand our adjusted EBITDA margin over the next several years toward our 2030 targets. On the acquisition front, we have added 3 companies to our family so far in 2026 with approximately $125 million in trailing 12-month sales. Our latest acquisition, Patterson Nursery, not only expands our high-performing Devil Mountain business but will help us provide high-quality West Coast nursery material to customers across the entire country. We continue to have an active pipeline of additional companies, and we expect to close more acquisitions during the remainder of the year.

With an experienced acquisition team, broad and deep relationships with the best companies a strong balance sheet and an exceptional reputation as the acquirer of choice. We remain well positioned to grow consistently through acquisition for many years in our very fragmented market. Now Eric will walk you through the third quarter in more detail. Eric?

Thanks, Doug. I'll begin on Slide 9 with some highlights of our third quarter results. Net sales increased 3% to approximately $1.29 billion during the quarter compared to approximately $1.26 billion for the third quarter last year. Organic daily sales decreased 1% driven by lower sales volume with continued softness in underlying market demand and a delay in fall applications, as Doug mentioned, which more than offset higher price inflation. Acquisition sales, which include sales attributable to acquisitions completed in 2025 and 2026, contributed approximately $40 million or 3% to our net sales growth during the quarter.

From a demand perspective, conditions remain challenging with sales volume declining approximately 5% more than offsetting price contribution of 4%. We believe that the delayed start of the fall season reduced the third quarter organic daily sales growth rate by approximately 70 basis points. Pricing strengthened during the quarter and was positive across all product categories, including grass seed and PVC pipe where prices were up 6% and 2%, respectively. For the first time since the first quarter of 2023, we did not experience deflation in grass seed, PVC pipe or fertilizer products in the quarter. Price contribution is expected to continue to track near 4% for the fourth quarter as inflationary pressures are likely to keep prices elevated. Pricing for the full year is expected to be up approximately 4%.

From a regional perspective, performance continued to vary. The Central region remained our strongest performer, with organic sales growth of approximately 7%, supported by solid underlying market performance and our stronger market position following the Reinders acquisition earlier this year. California also improved meaningfully from the first half of the year with organic sales up approximately 1% for the quarter, driven by share gains and the performance of our Devil Mountain Nursery business within that market. Organic sales declined in three of our other regions during the quarter due to the later start of the fall application season. However, these regions have recovered with positive organic sales growth so far in October. Sunbelt markets, such as Texas and Arizona continue to face headwinds due to weak new residential construction and repair and upgrade demand.

Organic daily sales for Agronomic products, which include fertilizer, control products, [indiscernible] and equipment, decreased 1% during the third quarter due primarily to the delayed fall applications. We also believe the higher prices for certain Agronomic products like fertilizer continue to weigh on volume in the short term as our customers deal with fixed maintenance budgets. Organic daily sales for Landscaping products, which includes irrigation, nursery, hardscapes, outdoor lighting and landscape accessories, were flat in the third quarter compared to the prior year period, reflecting weakness in new residential construction and softer repair and upgrade activity, offset by price inflation for certain product categories such as the Irrigation, Landscape Accessories and Outdoor Lighting.

Gross profit increased 5% to approximately $459 million, and gross margin expanded 80 basis points to 35.5%. The improvement was driven primarily by strong price realization, including the benefit of fuel surcharges and continued execution of our commercial initiatives. These benefits were partially offset by higher freight distribution costs resulting from fuel inflation and the addition of our fifth distribution center, which wasn't operational in the third quarter last year. Selling, general and administrative expenses increased to approximately $369 million from $357 million for the same period last year. SG&A as a percentage of net sales increased approximately 20 basis points to 28.6%. Higher health care and fuel costs were the primary headwinds while our operational initiatives and continued cost control efforts helped partially offset these higher costs as well as the deleverage effect of lower sales volume for the quarter.

As Doug mentioned, fuel inflation represented approximately 15 basis points of pressure on SG&A, which was effectively recovered through fuel surcharges and gross margin. SG&A in the base business on an adjusted basis increased approximately 0.5% compared to the prior year period. The modest increase in base business SG&A was due primarily to the higher health care and fuel expenses, partially offset by the benefits of our cost reduction actions. The effective tax rate was 26.0% for the third quarter compared to 20.4% for the same period last year, due mainly to a decrease in excess tax benefits year-over-year. There were no excess tax benefits recognized in the third quarter compared to $4 million in the prior year period. We continue to expect the effective tax rate for fiscal 2026 will be between 25%, 26%, excluding discrete items such as excess tax benefits.

Net income attributable to SiteOne increased 8% to $63.9 million compared with $59.1 million in the prior year period. The improvement for the quarter primarily reflects gross margin expansion, partially offset by lower sales volume, higher SG&A and an increase in the effective tax rate. Our weighted average diluted share count was approximately $43.8 million for the third quarter compared to approximately $45.0 million for the same period last year. During the third quarter, we repurchased approximately 646,000 shares for approximately $62 million at an average price of $96.29 per share. In addition, as Doug previously covered, our Board of Directors approved an increase of $500 million to our share repurchase authorization post quarter end. We also have approximately $38.3 million remaining for repurchases under the prior authorization. We plan to continue executing opportunistic share repurchases, considering the lower stock price.

Adjusted EBITDA increased approximately 8% to $138.3 million for the third quarter compared with $127.5 million in the prior year period, and adjusted EBITDA margin improved 60 basis points year-over-year to 10.7%. We are pleased with the margin expansion for the quarter given the lower demand environment and the delayed start of the fall application season. I'll now provide a brief update on our balance sheet and cash flow statement as shown on Slide 10. Working capital at the end of the quarter was approximately $1.09 billion compared to $1.06 billion at the end of the same period last year. Cash provided by operating activities decreased $3 million to approximately $126 million, primarily due to working capital changes, partially offset by higher net income. We made cash investments of approximately $24 million for the third quarter compared to approximately $16 million for the same period last year. Capital expenditures for the third quarter were approximately $17 million compared to $10 million for the same period last year due to increased investments in our branch locations and branch equipment.

Net debt at quarter end was approximately $523 million compared to $423 million at the end of the third quarter last year. Net debt to trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA was 1.2x which is within our target leverage range of 1x to 2x and compares to 1x at the same time last year. Available liquidity at the end of the quarter totaled approximately $566 million consisting of $88 million of cash on hand and $478 million of available borrowing capacity under our ABL Facility. As a reminder, our priority from a balance sheet and liquidity perspective is to maintain our financial strength and flexibility, so that we can execute our growth strategy and complete opportunistic share repurchases in all market environments.

I will now turn the call over to Daniel for an update on our acquisition strategy.

Thanks, Eric. As shown on Slide 12, we completed the acquisition of Patterson Nursery Sales through our Devil Mountain business in the third quarter. Patterson is a leading grower and distributor of premium Oregon nursery products serving customers coast to coast. The acquisition expands our nursery product line into the Pacific Northwest, and strengthens our ability to distribute high-quality West Coast nursery products efficiently across the country. This is our third acquisition of the year and brings our combined trailing 12 months acquired net sales to approximately $125 million year-to-date. Since 2014, we have acquired 109 companies approximately $2.2 billion and trailing 12-month net sales added to SiteOne.

Summarizing on Slide 13, our acquisition strategy continues to create significant value for SiteOne by adding excellent talent and moving us forward towards our goal of providing a full line of landscape products and services to our customers in all major U.S. and Canadian markets. We continue to drive steady acquisition growth with a focus on building strong relationships with potential [indiscernible] that lead to negotiated deals when they are ready to sell. We have several letters of intent currently and expect to close more deals in the remaining months of 2026 and in 2027.

Overall, we remain confident in the long-term acquisition opportunity in front of us. Our pipeline is active, our relationships remain strong, and our competitive advantage as a buyer continue to resonate with prospective sellers. We believe SiteOne remains uniquely positioned by a strong role in consolidating our industry for many years to come.

I will now turn the call back to Doug.

Thanks, Daniel. I'll wrap up on Slide 14. We believe that the ongoing energy volatility, higher interest rates, weak consumer confidence and increased macroeconomic uncertainty are collectively having a negative effect on the already weak new residential construction end market and the typically more resilient Repair & Upgrade end market. These trends are more than offsetting a more resilient Maintenance and new Commercial Construction end markets. Pricing continues to be positive, and we believe that pricing will contribute approximately 4% to net sales growth for the full year. Overall, with the benefit of our commercial initiatives and with the 53rd week reducing organic daily sales by 80 basis points, we expect full year organic daily sales to be flat to down 1%. In terms of end markets, we are experiencing significant weakness in new residential construction demand, which comprises 20% of our sales, and we expect this market to be down double digits for the full year 2026 in line with lower new home completions. New commercial construction demand, which represents 14% of our sales, has been solid so far, and we believe it will remain approximately flat in 2026.

We believe the Repair & Upgrade market, which represents 30% of our sales, was down in 2025 and has taken another step down this year with higher interest rates and inflation continued weak consumer confidence in existing [indiscernible] sales. While the long-term fundamentals for this end market are strong, we believe that Repair & Upgrade demand will continue to be down through the remainder of this year. Lastly, in the Maintenance end market, which represents 36% of our sales, we achieved excellent sales volume growth in 2025 as our teams gained profitable market share on top of steady demand growth. We have seen steady demand so far this year, though there has been some near-term volume reduction in response to higher fertilizer prices where customers' maintenance budgets are fixed for the year. Overall, we expect Maintenance end market to be flat in 2026. In total, we expect end market demand to be down this year, driven by weakness in new residential construction and Repair & Upgrade. We expect gross margin to be higher through the remainder of the year and for the full year 2026 compared to the same periods of 2025, driven by price realization and our commercial initiatives partially offset by higher freight and logistics costs supporting our growth.

Given the lower sales volume, higher fuel and health care costs and the negative effect of the 53rd week, we expect SG&A as a percentage of net sales to be up for the full year as these factors more than offset our operational initiatives and actions to reduce SG&A. We are managing SG&A tightly, and make necessary changes to optimize our cost structure in anticipation that 2027 will continue to be challenging from a demand perspective. Accordingly, we plan to reduce our workforce and consolidate or close brands in the fourth quarter and incur corresponding charge to adjusted EBITDA of approximately $6 million to $8 million. Despite this charge and the negative effect of the 53rd week, which we anticipate will reduce adjusted EBITDA by an additional $4 million to $5 million in the fourth quarter. We expect to expand adjusted EBITDA margin slightly in fiscal 2026.

In terms of acquisitions, as Daniel mentioned, we have a good pipeline of high-quality targets and we expect to add more excellent companies to the SiteOne family during the remainder of the year. With all these factors in mind, we expect our full year adjusted EBITDA for fiscal 2026 to be in the range of $425 million to $440 million. This range does not factor in any contribution from unannounced acquisitions. In closing, I would like to sincerely thank all our SiteOne associates who continue to amaze me with their passion, commitment, teamwork and selfless service. We have a tremendous team, and it is an honor to be joined with them as we deliver increasing value for all our stakeholders. I would also like to thank our suppliers for supporting us so strongly and our customers for allowing us to be their partner.

Operator, please open the line for questions

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from David Manthey with Baird.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. First of all, on the actions that you're taking here. Were any of these contemplated when you were going through your self-help items on that Slide 108 from the Investor Day where you waterfalled to 2030 EBITDA? And second and related, does this represent a change in your view on 2027, I think at Investor Day, you expected the market to be flat.

Yes, good question, David. We're always kind of monitoring where we're at and where we need be. We have seen the markets kind of weaken as we've gone through this year. And we've been taking actions to reduce SG&A. When we look into next year, we haven't necessarily changed our outlook, but we felt like there were additional actions that we could take to not only prepare us for next year to perform, but also in line with that long-term goal. We have target for where we want SG&A to be longer term. And this is all -- these are all just steps to make progress toward that. So we identified additional workforce reductions that we can make and they're throughout the company kind of targeted in certain areas. And then we've identified other branches largely kind of struggling branches that we've been able to -- that we're able to consolidate into other branches to improve the performance and the cost structure of the network. And so yes, so it prepares us for next year. It's not that we've changed our outlook. We expect next year is similar to this year, but it also [indiscernible] us toward our long-term target, which is important.

Great. That's helpful. And then second, on the M&A pipeline, as we look back here, you described it as solid and healthy and now you're saying it's very active. I'm just trying to get a read on if you realistically are looking at your funnel right now, is the current pipeline -- is it moving in the right direction? Is it getting materially better than it was 90 days ago or a year ago? Or is it just -- it's good, solid, and we don't know when something will turn into a transaction?

No, David, this is Daniel. I think it's consistent with the story where we've operated. If we land some of the LOIs that we have under LOI right now, we should deliver towards the bottom end of that range, we said at Investor Day, which was between $200 million and $300 million. We should sort of be in excess of what the average has been in the last 12 years. So we feel good about where we're going to end this year. And then the active conversations that we have going on should trickle into delivering a hopefully improved year in 2027, but at least in line with that $200 million to $300 million that we've been quoting for a while.

Next question comes from Ryan Merkel with Williams Blair.

I wanted to start with a revenue question. Can you talk about or quantify the impact of the shift in the fall application from 3Q to 4Q? And then with the increase in interest rates, have you guys seen a slowdown in housing or big-ticket R&R?

Yes. I think we quantified that the impact was about 80 basis points.

70 basis points. On the Q3 rate.

Q3, rate. So you can kind of add that to the Q3 rate subtracted to what we're calling the run rate in October of 2%. And when we make that shift and when we look at kind of the 4 months of July through October, absent the 53rd week effect. We're flat to up 1% is where we would be. So that's the shift. I forget the second part of the question.

Yes, just in markets in volume.

Increase in rates and if you've seen an impact since that?

Yes. We've just seen that and if you track completions, they've deteriorated all year in terms of residential completions from last year to this year, completions are now going to be down 10 full percent. And so yes, we think that rate increases the consumer confidence, the inflation with fuel. I mean, these factors affect not only home completions, but the [indiscernible] market as well, the repair and upgrade Again, the top end of repair and upgrade is strong. [indiscernible] the paying cash. But in terms of that middle -- those mid projects, they've really been, I think, affected significantly by some of the things going on including interest rates. And so we'll see how things develop. Hopefully, we're seeing kind of a bottom here, but we'll see how it develops going through the fourth quarter and into next year.

Okay. But to be clear, you haven't seen a step down in activity in the last 2 months? Call it.

Not in the last 2 months, but I mean, we've certainly seen it through the year.

Certainly the overall macro conditions have gotten worse, but we're kind of trending in where we've been in the last couple of months.

Yes, from third and fourth quarter we're seeing the same trend if you will.

Okay. And then second question, gross margins. That was a nice result. Was that mostly price cost? And can you quantify how much price cost lifted margins year-over-year. And I'd also be curious for '26 now how much price cost will lift gross margins?

Yes. We called out the fuel surcharge impact. So that's 15 basis to that 80 basis points and then elevated price maybe in the 10 basis points to 20 basis points range, a little better, stronger. There's just overall price cost where normally runs and our commercial initiatives together is about 20 to 30 basis points, maybe even a little stronger. So it's probably, I don't know, 30-plus basis points incremental right now. Looking forward into the fourth quarter, we still expect gross margins to be up year-over-year. So continuing benefit through the rest of the year.

Our next question comes from Mike Dahl with RBC Capital Markets.

This is Chris on for Mike. Just on pricing, I was hoping you guys could flush out with the 4% in 4Q you guys assuming how that looks between commodity, non-commodity, and when we think about exit rates on the commodity side in particular, what that implies for [indiscernible] for next year?

Yes. exit rate, I think approximately around 3%. On the commodity side, we disclosed [indiscernible] in the third quarter was in the mid-single-digit range. That will continue through the first half of next year. So through the fourth quarter this year as well. PVC pipe, it's finally positive, but low single digits. There's pressure in the softer demand environment. If that holds up, there could be some pressure on that in the first part of next year. And then fertilizer is volatile. So it's kind of hard to call, but it's kind of -- it's been elevated through the third quarter, and we expect that to kind of remain through the end of the year. We will lap the significant fertilizer price increases in the second quarter.

So we would expect that year-over-year to flatten out, maybe step down. So exit rate, like I said, around 3% for this year into the first quarter, and then we'll start comping in the second quarter, the more significant increases. Finished goods that's run up a little higher this year, with inflationary pressures, but I would expect next year to be kind of low single-digit price increases perhaps in the 1% to 2% range.

And then just for my second question on SG&A and some of the cost -- underlying cost there, health care, fuel. How are you guys thinking about that for -- as you exit this year into next year. [indiscernible] you want to comment on that?

Yes. Health care has been elevated the last couple of quarters, a little bit of higher run rate but also kind of episodic expense. And we'd expect that to run a little lower going forward, but it's been an elevated SG&A overall, you can see the actions that we're taking to take cost out. that's going to benefit us next year. We're planning on the continuation of these current market conditions. So we're working hard to get SG&A in a position where it doesn't grow next year, on a base business rate. And you can see in the third quarter, base business SG&A was only up 0.5%. So that's the high-level thinking -- was there another part of your question, I didn't address?

It's about fuel.

Fuel. Yes. Fuel is going to continue to be a headwind right now, the elevated pricing, diesel up what, 70% year-over-year. We have effectively passed that on to keep that net neutral on an EBITDA basis, but it's been running about 15 basis a quarter deleverage impact, but a corresponding benefit in gross margin.

Our next question comes from Charles Perron with Goldman Sachs.

First, I just want to talk about pricing a little bit more. With the factors you just highlighted, Eric, and the outlook potentially for '27. How do you approach the potential for testing price elasticity with certain end markets and customers considering the weaker micro backdrop that you're seeing out there?

Missed the first part. Did you say testing?

Yes. testing the price elasticity.

Yes. Well, we're -- the market is effective in our market is effective in passing on price increases. So on the elasticity side, there has been some of that, especially on the I think fertilizer pricing, where there's been short-term volume -- negative volume impacts in skipped applications, but that pricing has been effectively passed on. And that's typical of all of our products. So in terms of testing, we work closely with our customers to ensure that we have the right pricing with them. And we could we make decisions, where we need to, where we need to adjust price to continue to maintain our relationships.

Yes. The for most of our products, there's not a great deal of elasticity. We're talking about kind of low to mid-single price increases, the majority of the cost of installed product in terms of like irrigation or hardscapes or nursery is the labor of the contractor and the material cost of that job is actually pretty low. So price elasticity tends not to be high. Where we do see it is more in the fertilizer chemical space where you have maintenance contractors with fixed budgets. And when those prices move significantly, then they tend to cut back on applications in the short term, they can't do that for a long-term strategy. And we've seen some of that this year. We would not anticipate next year. I mean, the prices -- fertilizer prices were up this year. They're going to level out year-over-year, but just get reset -- and so at this point, we wouldn't expect that to be a major factor for next year's volume, but we'll see how things progress.

Got it. That's good color. And it's good to see the restructuring initiatives announced this morning and your ability or willingness to protect the SG&A leverage. But considering the shifting market conditions, does that influence the timing and magnitude of some of the initiatives that you piloted at investor day in terms of focused branches or delivery optimization and the timing of some of those efforts to drive further SG&A deleverage going forward?

Well, it obviously accelerates it. I mean we're still -- we have been very careful that any reductions that we're making does not degrade our ability to drive our initiatives in terms of focused branch improvement, net delivery, cost reduction private label growth, small customer growth, organic growth in general. So we're trimming where we're able. And obviously, some markets off more than others. Not all markets are equal. But we're doing it in a way that preserves our ability to drive our initiatives and continue to create that EBITDA margin expansion that we are looking for and anticipate that we will be successful next year in making significant progress there.

Yes. It keeps us on track towards how we laid that out at Investor Day to the 13% target.

Yes, we're going to get a little bit this year. Obviously, the 53rd week and the charge itself will mitigate some of our progress this year, but we're looking longer term towards 2030, and we expect to be on track to our goal when you combine this year and next year.

Our next question comes from Matthew Bouley with Barclays.

You have Elaine Ku on for Matt today. So I just wanted to clarify for Q1.October is currently trending up 2% in organic daily sales before Q appears to be applied down. I guess what are your assumptions there maybe on volume? Is there any conservatism and kind of how does that lead into 2027?

Yes. The 2% growth for October includes kind of the catch-up or recovery of what was pushed out of September. So on a year-to-date basis, we're up in that flat to 1% range. And we'd expect that trend to kind of continue across November and December. So if you look at the overall fourth quarter, year full year, we'd be slightly positive, but we have that 53rd week, which happens right at the end of the year that's dilutive in about the 80 basis point range. So that's where you get flat to down [indiscernible] guide.

Got it. And I guess on maybe the labor front, have you observed anything around like change in labor supply? Or just what are you seeing there?

No. We've seen that be pretty steady. I mean obviously, these are tougher times. So if anything, the constraint on labor is a bit better, but it's still there for our customers. And -- but in terms of SiteOne, we are able to hire the people that we need to drive our business. So it is not a significant constraint for us. I would say it's a moderate constraint for our customers, but not as pronounced as it was -- it would have been a couple of years ago.

Our next question comes from Matt Johnson with UBS.

I guess, first off, I think you guys said you expect a $6 million to $8 million EBITDA related to the branch closures. Now I think this compares roughly and I could be wrong, but I think it compares to about a $4.5 million charge last year when you close [indiscernible] branches. So I guess is there just any kind of help you can give at least directionally in terms of how many branches you're expecting to close in the fourth quarter and how much it could impact sales next year?

Right. Yes. So just to clarify, the charge includes reduction in force and branch closures and the larger component is reduction in force. The branch closures is actually a lower amount compared to those two. 2 years of closures the impact on a cost basis is less than half of what it was a year ago. And the number of branches closing is less than what we've done in the last couple of years. So just to clarify those points.

That's great, Eric. And then I guess, second, I guess, as demand has come under pressure this year, how would you guys characterize just the competitive intensity across the industry? Particularly, is there any kind of difference in the competitive intensity across customer size, whether it be small, medium, large customers and kind of where it is specifically in the business you're seeing competition intensifies anywhere?

Yes. So obviously, in tougher times, the competition intensifies, right? So there's a significant amount of competition out there. It's really tends to be focused on the larger customers. I mean, those are the ones that are the easiest to go after. And so that's where we're -- we know how to fight as hard as anybody in the market, and we feel like we're holding our own there with the larger customers, but certainly, it's certainly a competitive market there. We've seen steady progress in terms of share gain and success with the small and medium customers. That's a harder set to go after. You have to be more broad-based and more organized with [indiscernible] et cetera. And so we've seen continued success there, and we feel like we're continuing to gain market share there. So yes, very competitive market. focus tends to be on the larger customers. We have the capability of being as competitive as anybody in the market. And then we continue to court the small and medium customers and are having some success there.

Our next question comes from Jeffrey Stevenson with Loop Capital Markets.

So Doug, you talked about some temporary maintenance project delays due to higher commodity pricing such as fertilizer beginning at the end of the second quarter. Has that trend moderated at all as we move through the back half? Or is continuing to be the case for some of the increases we've seen on the commodity side of the business?

Yes, I think we've seen that. I mean it's been pretty consistent through that period starting in the second quarter. I mean, obviously, you have the fall season, right? In the fall season September and October. And so yes, we've seen it be consistent in September and October, and that's tend to how it runs, right? If prices are elevated as you enter into the season, you're going to make those calls and make those adjustments during the season. As you -- as the fall season dissipates and you go into the winter, then obviously, you have a chance to adjust your budgets and get prepared for the spring. And so that's how that elasticity works. And so it's been consistent through the fall season. and through where we've been so far in October.

Got it. And obviously, residential continues to see headwinds, but commercial remains resilient. You maintain your flat guidance there. Just if you provide an update on kind of bidding activity on backlogs as you kind of move through the end of the year into 2027 and whether you expect the resilience to continue moving forward?

Yes, that's a good on the commercial market, which is 14% of our sales has been stable. It's been flat. I would say it's still stable, through the remainder of this year and we'll see how it works into next year. I would follow backlog stable. Our bidding activity is, I'd call it flat, maybe slightly down, as we end this year, but our customers tend to be optimistic. So we'll see -- don't have a big lens in the next year, but we'll see how things develop.

And then just one more part on the Maintenance side. I mean, the Maintenance is where we're particularly strong. We feel like we gained market share, we are gaining market share. We're seeing a strong October in terms of Maintenance. And so it is encouraging, even though we still think that elasticity is out there. We're having a very good finish of the season. We've had a strong early order program this year and feel great about our Maintenance business as we go into next year. And Maintenance is 30% of our business. So it's a bigger more important factor, obviously, than the New Commercial.

Our next question comes from Andrew Carter with Stifel.

I wanted to press a little bit on the competition question. And I guess two parts. One of the first things you said, I don't want to entangle your comments around PVC. You mentioned that it is inflationary, but you're kind of watchful of the market out there, would it take I want to make sure, is that a manufacturer comment? Or is that you making specific actions that is divorced from the manufacturer, which would be a break with kind of your -- the typical way pricing.

The second on the competition, you mentioned large customers. So I just wanted to specifically ask, is that heritage? What are you seeing from them in their markets? And I give you a chance to kind of address what they said earlier this year on a call, which is that we're outperforming our peers by hundreds and hundreds of basis points. Anything you can help with that?

Eric, I think you referred to the manufacturer, right? On the PVC front, I mean, the price increases have gone in. They went in during the second quarter. So it is into the Solstice end market, the more indexed to new residential construction. So there's obviously pressure there. I think an inflationary outlook would be like we're running low single digits now. I think that would hold through the rest of the year. And I guess, we'll see at the first part of next year. But a reminder to PVC as a percentage of our overall sales is in the 3% to 4% range. So I wouldn't necessarily focus overly much on PVC.

And we're a small part of the broader pipe market, right? So the pipe manufacturers make their decisions. I think the point there is that, in weak markets, it may get more competitive for them with each other, and they may -- that may cause them to lower prices.

But prices held up since that May increase for this year.

Right. So that's purely speculative. In terms of the large customers, it's everybody. I mean Heritage isn't the only one out there that's competitive. [indiscernible] Horizon, our small competitors. Yes. So I would broaden it more than Heritage. Obviously, Heritage tends to be very competitive. But when markets get competitive, when spend is down, folks are fighting for the demand that's there, right, and it tends to be centered on the large customers. But we know we know how to battle that as well as anybody, and the hundreds and hundreds of basis points. I just -- I can't react to that because it's -- we'll see if they want to disclose [indiscernible], then that's fine. But we feel like we're holding our own and doing well.

Our next question comes from Connor Winston with Truist Securities.

Connor Winston on for Keith Hughes. Just a quick question regarding the increased share repurchase authorization. I was wondering how we should think about capital allocation priorities going forward? And so will M&A remain the preferred use of cash when active opportunities arise? Or should we expect a greater emphasis on buybacks?

Yes. So you've seen an elevated buyback rate this year. But M&A investing in our growth remains #1. And we laid out a long-term run rate assume more normalized conditions where M&A is $200 million to $300 million of acquired annual sales and obviously, the deployment of capital is a little less than that. And share repurchases would be in the $100 million to $200 million range. This year, we're going to be over the top end of that with share repurchases. The lower stock base provides that opportunity as an attractive deployment of capital. And in the near term, we would push up but stay within our 1x to 2x leverage range.

So you'd see the last few years, it's been in the low end of that range, what we would push up more to the midpoint. And it'll be opportunistic on buying back shares. So expect a continuation of that in the near term. And with this increased authorization, it gives us that latitude now for years ahead to -- and execute our share repurchase and capital deployment strategy.

Great. And then can you also help frame kind of the magnitude you're seeing in commercial relative to residential growth? And maybe how you expect to see that gap evolving in '27?

Yes. So we've seen commercial flattish and new residential down double digits with home completions. We're indexed to single-family residential much more than the multifamily. And so yes, that's what we've seen. As we look into next year, residential starts are actually down kind of mid-single digits, so that we would expect the market in terms of residential for us to be less down next year. We think this is probably a bottom. But too early to call and commercial seems stable as we exit this year.

We have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the floor back over to Doug for closing comments.

Yes. So thank you all again for joining us. We appreciate your interest in SiteOne, and we look forward to speaking to you again next year after we've completed 2026. Also a big thank you to our terrific associates for all that they do. our suppliers for supporting us and our customers for allowing us to be their partner. Thank you.

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

Greetings, and welcome to the SiteOne Landscape Supply Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

It is now my pleasure to introduce Eric Elema, Chief Financial Officer. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We issued our second quarter 2026 earnings press release this morning and posted a slide presentation to the Investor Relations portion of our website at investors.siteone.com.

I am joined today by Doug Black, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Daniel Laughlin, SVP, Strategy and Development. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that today's press release, slide presentation and the statements made during this call include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. Such risks and uncertainties include the factors set forth in the earnings release and in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Additionally, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures which we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. A reconciliation of these measures can be found in our earnings release and in the slide presentation.

I would now like to turn the call over to Doug Black.

Thank you, Eric. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. We delivered a solid second quarter performance with 5% growth in net sales and adjusted EBITDA, 8% growth in net income and strong cash flow despite softer end markets.

Our teams executed well throughout the quarter, driving our commercial and operational initiatives while continuing to manage our SG&A spending tightly. We also took advantage of our strong cash flow and recent share price weakness and returned over $100 million to shareholders through our share repurchase program while maintaining a strong balance sheet to invest in our business and pursue attractive acquisition opportunities.

While market conditions remain challenging, we continue to focus on serving our customers, gaining market share, expanding our EBITDA margin and strengthening the business to drive future performance and growth. Our acquisitions are performing well, and we have an active pipeline of opportunities, which we expect will result in more acquisitions during the remainder of the year.

Overall, we remain confident in the long-term opportunity ahead of us and believe our strategy, competitive position and execution capabilities will continue to differentiate SiteOne in the market.

I will start today's call with a brief overview of our unique market position and our strategy, followed by highlights from the second quarter. Eric will then walk you through our second quarter financial results in more detail and provide an update on our balance sheet and liquidity position. Daniel will discuss our acquisition strategy, and then I will come back to address our outlook and guidance for 2026 before taking your questions.

As shown on Slide 4 of the earnings presentation, we have a strong footprint of more than 680 branches and 5 distribution centers across 45 U.S. states and 5 Canadian provinces. We are the clear industry leader, approximately 3x the size of our nearest competitor, yet we estimate that we only have about a 13% share of the very fragmented $36 billion wholesale landscaping products distribution market. Note that the $36 billion total addressable market is a significant increase from the previous $25 billion estimate as it includes important adjacent product categories that we have entered over the past 5 years.

Accordingly, our long-term opportunity to grow and gain market share remains significant. We have a balanced mix of business with 66% focused on maintenance, repair and upgrade, 20% focused on new residential construction and 14% on new commercial and recreational construction. As the only nationwide full product line wholesale distributor in the market, we also have an excellent balance across our product lines as well as geographically.

Our strategy to fill in our product lines across the U.S. and Canada, both organically and through acquisition, further strengthens this balance over time. Overall, our end market mix broad product portfolio and geographic coverage offers us multiple avenues to grow and create value for our customers and suppliers while providing important resiliency in softer markets, like the market we are in today.

Turning to Slide 5. Our strategy remains straightforward and unchanged. Leverage the strengths of both a large nationwide organization and our very experienced and highly entrepreneurial local teams. Our goal is to fully utilize our scale, resources and capabilities in support of local execution to deliver superior value to our customers and suppliers in every market that we serve. We do this through our focused commercial and operational initiatives which not only build a long-term competitive advantage for all our stakeholders but also help us overcome the near-term headwinds. These initiatives are complemented by our acquisition strategy, which fills in our product portfolio, moves us into new geographic markets and adds terrific new talent to SiteOne.

Taken all together, we expect our strategy to create superior value for our shareholders through organic growth, acquisition growth and EBITDA margin expansion. At our Investor Day in June, we described our strategy and initiatives in detail and outline our financial targets through 2030. The current challenging end markets, the execution of our strategy, we believe, allows us to outperform the market organically while leveraging acquisition growth and EBITDA margin expansion to deliver solid financial progress. We expect our progress to accelerate as end markets return to normal growth. Accordingly, we remain highly focused on executing our commercial and operational initiatives, strengthening the business and continuously improving areas that are within our control.

On Slide 6, you can see our strong track record over the last 10 years with consistent organic and acquisition growth. As mentioned, we expect to continue driving organic and acquisition growth while recovering and expanding our EBITDA margin significantly over the coming years. Our ability to deliver EBITDA margin expansion in both soft and healthy market conditions, is expected to yield attractive EBITDA growth and improve return on invested capital in the coming years.

Finally, with our strong cash flow, we can support our strategy and return capital to shareholders through our share repurchase program. Overall, we are well positioned to create solid value for our shareholders in 2026 and significant value over the longer term. We have completed 108 acquisitions across all product lines since the start of 2014, adding approximately $2.2 billion in trailing 12-month sales to SiteOne which demonstrates the strength and durability of our acquisition strategy. Our pipeline of potential deals remains robust, and we expect to continue adding and integrating more companies in 2026 to support our growth.

Given the fragmented nature of our industry and our current market share, we believe that we can add over $2 billion of acquired trailing 12 months revenue to SiteOne over the next 10 years.

Slide 7 shows the long runway that we have ahead in filling in our product portfolio, which we aim to do primarily through acquisition, especially in the nursery, hardscapes and landscape supplies categories. We are well connected with the best companies in our industry and expect to continue filling in these markets systematically over the next decade.

I will now discuss some of our second quarter performance highlights as shown on Slide 8. Net sales increased 5% to $1.53 billion during the quarter with 1% organic daily sales growth and 3% sales growth added through acquisitions. We believe that new residential landscaping demand is down high single digits, and demand in repair and upgrade is down mid-single digits this year, reflecting the decline in new home completions and ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty.

Additionally, we believe that end market demand for maintenance products has been negatively impacted in the short term by the recent significant price increases as customers adjust to meet fixed budgets. Accordingly, even though we believe that we are outperforming the market through our commercial initiatives, we were unable to fully offset end market declines, resulting in a 2% decline and sales volume during the quarter.

Pricing increased by 3% year-over-year during the quarter, yielding the 1% organic daily sales growth. Gross profit increased 6% to approximately $565 million, and gross margin improved 50 basis points to 36.9%. The improvement reflects increased price realization, along with execution of our commercial initiatives, including continued strong growth in private brands and with small customers, and excellent management of fuel surcharges in response to higher delivery expense.

SG&A as a percentage of net sales increased 30 basis points during the quarter as our operational initiatives and tight management of spending were more than offset by higher fuel cost, increased health care expenses and ongoing cost inflation. Given the market weakness, we are taking additional actions during the remainder of the year, which we expect will achieve approximately flat SG&A as a percentage of net sales for the year.

Adjusted EBITDA increased 5% to $237.2 million, and adjusted EBITDA margin was maintained at 15.5%. Year-to-date, we have improved adjusted EBITDA margin by 20 basis points, and we expect to continue expanding adjusted EBITDA margin in the second half and for the full year 2026 despite the softer markets.

In terms of initiatives, we continue to make solid progress during the quarter despite the lower end market demand, executing specific actions to improve our customer experience, drive organic sales growth, expand gross margin and manage SG&A. For organic growth and gross margin expansion, we achieved good organic daily sales growth with our small customers and grew our Pro trade Solstice and portfolio of private brand products collectively by 40% during the quarter. A percentage of branches with bilingual capability is nearly 70% despite adding 12 Reinders branches without this capability, continue to execute our Hispanic marketing strategy to drive growth in this important customer segment.

We increased our digital sales on siteone.com by over 50% year-to-date versus the prior year period, while also increasing our regular active users by approximately 40%. We believe we are gaining market share with the customers who are engaged with us digitally as we achieved strong positive total sales growth with these customers during the quarter. siteone.com helps customers to be more efficient, helps us to increase market share while making our associates more productive, a true win-win-win.

On the SG&A front, we continued to lower our net delivery expense during the second quarter as a result of increased efficiency along with improved pricing. As mentioned, our teams have done a good job of working with our customers to pass through fuel surcharges to mitigate the significant near-term increases in fuel costs. We expect to reduce net delivery expense in 2026 and for the next several years as we execute our local market delivery strategy and best practices. We also continue to achieve improved profitability with our underperforming branches or focused branches during the quarter, though they were also negatively affected by low organic daily sales growth. We expect to drive steady improvement with these branches in 2026, which should accelerate with more normal end market demand in the coming years.

In total, our ability to execute our commercial and operational initiatives, we believe enables us to outperform the market and deliver EBITDA margin expansion despite lower end market demand. Furthermore, we expect these initiatives to help us drive organic growth and expand our adjusted EBITDA margin over the next several years towards our 2030 targets.

On the acquisition front, we have added 2 companies to our family so far in 2026 with approximately $110 million in trailing 12-month sales, including Reinders, a strong market leader in the Midwest for irrigation, agronomics and lighting products. We have an active pipeline of additional companies, and we expect to close more acquisitions during the remainder of the year. An experienced acquisition team, broad and deep relationships with the best companies, a strong balance sheet and an exceptional reputation as the acquirer of choice. We remain well positioned to grow consistently through acquisition for many years in the very fragmented wholesale landscape supply distribution market.

Now Eric will walk you through the quarter in more detail. Eric?

Thanks, Doug. I'll begin on Slide 9 with some highlights of our second quarter results. Net sales increased 5% to approximately $1.53 billion during the quarter compared to approximately $1.46 billion for the prior year period. Organic daily sales increased 1%, driven by price inflation in response to rising costs and the benefit of our commercial initiatives, partially offset by softer end markets. Acquisition sales, which include sales attributable to acquisitions completed in 2025 and 2026, contributed approximately $49 million or 3% to net sales growth during the quarter.

From a demand perspective, as Doug mentioned, we continue to experience challenging conditions in our end markets. Organic volume declined approximately 2% during the quarter due to weakness in the new residential construction and repair and upgrade end markets. Pricing contributed approximately 3% during the quarter which was generally in line with our expectations coming out of the first quarter. The year-over-year price increases reflect supply dynamics and higher transportation costs. In addition, we benefited from the tariff-related price increases that were implemented in 2025.

Pricing was positive for most of our product categories and more than offset the deflationary impacts of grass seed and PVC pipe where prices were down by 9% and 4%, respectively, for the quarter. For the full year, we expect pricing to contribute approximately 3% to our results. While pricing was solid in the second quarter, there remains a high degree of uncertainty for the rest of the year given the ongoing disruption in the Middle East and related volatility in commodities.

In addition, we lapped the 2025 tariff-related price increases for the remainder of the year. Consequently, we believe pricing is more likely to track near 3% in the second half of the year, rather than accelerate meaningfully from current levels. From a regional perspective, performance varied significantly by market. The Central region continues to be our strongest performer achieving double-digit organic growth for the second quarter following the same result for the first quarter. However, the Sunbelt remained challenged, particularly California, Arizona and Texas where organic sales were down due to weaker demand in the new residential construction and repair and upgrade end markets. Texas also experienced a meaningful amount of rain during the second quarter. Although weather did not have a broad negative impact on our overall sales performance for the quarter.

Organic daily sales for agronomic products which include fertilizer and control products, ice melt and equipment, increased 5% for the second quarter due to price inflation resulting from rising product costs. Agronomic volume growth was 1% for the quarter against a difficult comparison to the prior year period. We believe the higher prices for certain agronomic products like fertilizer have also reduced short-term volume as our customers deal with fixed maintenance budgets. Organic daily sales for landscaping products, which include irrigation, nursery, hardscapes, outdoor lighting and landscape accessories, were flat in the second quarter compared to the prior year period reflecting weakness in new residential construction in softer repair and upgrade activity.

Gross profit increased 6% to approximately $565 million and gross margin improved 50 basis points to 36.9% during the quarter. The improvement was driven by price realization and execution of our commercial initiatives including continued private brand and small customer growth. Pro Trade Private brand sales increased nearly 50% in the quarter compared to the same period last year. And small customer growth also remained strong both of which supported gross margin performance. These benefits were partially offset by the dilutive effect of freight and distribution costs resulting from higher fuel prices, the addition of our fifth distribution center this year that wasn't operational in the prior year period and continued deflation in certain commodity products.

Selling, general and administrative expenses increased to approximately $371 million for the second quarter from $349 million for the same period last year. SG&A as a percentage of net sales increased approximately 30 basis points to 24.2%, driven primarily by the modest organic daily sales growth during the quarter. Acquisitions accounted for approximately half of the total year-over-year increase in SG&A for the second quarter. SG&A in the base business on an adjusted basis increased approximately 3.5% compared to the prior year period. The increase in base business SG&A was due primarily to higher health care expenses and fuel cost inflation.

Effective tax rate was 25.7% for the second quarter compared to 25.4% for the prior year period, primarily due to higher state income tax expense. No excess tax benefits were recognized in the second quarter or the prior year period. We continue to expect the effective tax rate for fiscal 2026 will be between 25% and 26% excluding discrete items such as excess tax benefits.

Net income attributable to SiteOne increased 8% to $139.3 million compared to $129.0 million in the prior year period. The improvement primarily reflects gross margin expansion, partially offset by higher SG&A expenses and continued market-related volume pressure. Our weighted average diluted share count was approximately $44.4 million during the second quarter compared to approximately $45.1 million for the same period last year. In the second quarter, we repurchased approximately 797,000 shares for approximately $94 million at an average price of $117.63 per share. This was our largest share repurchase quarter since we initiated the plan in October 2022. Post quarter end, we repurchased an additional 101,000 shares for approximately $10 million, bringing year-to-date repurchases through July to 1,053 million shares for approximately $124 million. Adjusted EBITDA increased 5% to $237.2 million compared to $226.7 million in the prior year period.

Adjusted EBITDA margin of 15.5% was consistent with the prior year period. Adjusted EBITDA includes $1.3 million attributable to noncontrolling interest. During the quarter, we acquired the remaining 25% interest in Double Mountain wholesale nursery and now own 100% of the business.

Now I'll provide a brief update on our balance sheet and cash flow statement, as shown on Slide 10. Working capital at the end of the quarter was approximately $1.10 billion compared to $1.06 billion at the end of the same period last year. Cash provided by operating activities increased approximately $17 million to $153 million, due primarily to higher net income and a positive contribution from working capital changes. We made cash investments of approximately $15 million for the second quarter compared to approximately $17 million for the same period last year. Capital expenditures for the quarter were approximately $18 million compared to approximately $14 million for the same period last year due to increased investments in our branch locations and branch equipment. Net debt at quarter end was approximately $556 million compared to approximately $532 million for the prior year period. Net debt to trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA was 1.3x which is within our range of 1 to 2x and unchanged compared to the same time last year.

Available liquidity at the end of the quarter totaled approximately $530 million, consisting of $87 million of cash on hand and approximately $443 million of available borrowing capacity under our ABL facility. During the quarter, we amended our ABL facility to, among other things, extend the maturity date to April 2031, further strengthening our financial position.

As a reminder, our priority from a balance sheet and liquidity perspective is to maintain our financial strength and flexibility so that we can execute our growth strategy in all market environments.

I will now turn the call over to Daniel for an update on our acquisition strategy.

Thanks, Eric. As shown on Slide 11, we did not complete an acquisition during the second quarter, However, our acquisition pipeline remains active and healthy. We continue to engage with a large number of high-quality businesses across the landscape supply industry and remain encouraged by both the quality and quantity of opportunities we are seeing. Our focus remains on building long-term value through disciplined acquisitions that strengthen our product offering, expand our capabilities and enhance our local market positions.

As a reminder, we completed 2 acquisitions earlier this year that together represented approximately $110 million of trailing 12-month sales. These acquisitions further strengthened our position in attractive local markets while adding talented teams and new capabilities to the SiteOne platform. The integration of these businesses is on track and we are pleased with their performance and strategic fit. We continue to drive steady acquisition growth with a focus on building strong relationships with potential targets that lead to negotiated deals when they are ready to sell.

Many of our most successful acquisitions have resulted from relationships that we have developed over many years. In many cases, we are meeting with owners long before they're actively considering a transaction. Our reputation is the acquirer of choice, our commitment to preserving local relationships and cultures and our track record of successful acquisitions continue to differentiate SiteOne in the market.

Overall, we remain confident in the long-term acquisition opportunity in front of us. Our pipeline is active, our relationships remain strong, and our competitive advantages as a buyer continue to resonate with prospective sellers. We believe SiteOne remains uniquely positioned by a strong role in consolidating our industry for many years to come.

I will now turn the call back to Doug.

Thanks, Daniel. I'll wrap up on Slide 13. We believe that the ongoing energy volatility, higher interest rates, consumer confidence and increased macroeconomic uncertainty are collectively having a negative effect on the already weak new residential construction end market and the typically more resilient repair and upgrade end market. These trends are more than offsetting modest growth in maintenance and flat new commercial construction.

Pricing continues to be positive, and we believe that pricing will contribute approximately 3% to net sales growth for the full year. Overall, with the benefit of our commercial initiatives, we expect organic daily sales growth for the year to be flat to up 1%. In terms of end markets, we are experiencing weakness in new residential construction demand, which comprises 20% of our sales, and we expect this market to be down high single digits for the full year 2026. New commercial construction demand, which represents 14% of our sales, has been solid so far, and we believe it will remain flat in 2026.

Beating activity from our project services teams continues to be slightly positive compared to the prior year, which is a good indicator of continued demand. We believe the repair and upgrade market, which represents 30% of our sales, was down in 2025 but seemed to have stabilized during the second half of last year. However, with the increased macroeconomic uncertainty, volatile energy costs, high interest rates and continued weak consumer confidence we believe that repair and upgrade market has taken another step down this year.

While the long-term fundamentals for this end market are strong, we believe that repair and upgrade demand will be down approximately mid-single digits in 2026.

Lastly, in the maintenance end market, which represents 36% of our sales, we achieved excellent sales volume growth in 2025 as our teams gain profitable market share on top of the steady demand growth. We have seen steady demand so far this year, though there seems to be some near-term volume reduction in response to higher fertilizer prices where the customers' maintenance budgets are fixed for the year. Overall, we expect the maintenance end market to grow modestly in 2026.

In total, after almost 7 months of activity, we expect end market demand to be down this year with weakness in new residential construction and repair and upgrade more than offsetting modest growth in maintenance. Given this backdrop and with the benefit of our commercial initiatives and 3% growth in pricing, we expect our organic daily sales to be flat to up 1% for the full year 2026. We expect gross margin in 2026 to be higher than 2025, driven by price realization and our commercial initiatives, partially offset by higher freight and logistics costs supporting our growth. Given the lower sales volume, we expect SG&A as a percent of net sales to be approximately flat for the full year with our operational initiatives and actions to reduce SG&A offsetting higher fuel costs and general cost inflation.

Overall, we expect solid improvement in our adjusted EBITDA margin. In terms of acquisitions, as Daniel mentioned, we have a good pipeline of high-quality targets, and we expect to add more excellent companies to the SiteOne family during the remainder of the year.

Lastly, we have an extra week in 2026. Unfortunately, this extra week occurs in fiscal December during a very slow sales period, which is a traditionally loss-making period for SiteOne. As a result, we expect the extra week will reduce our adjusted EBITDA by $4 million to $5 million. All these factors in mind and including the negative effect of the 53rd week we expect our full year adjusted EBITDA for fiscal 2026 to be in the range of $425 million to $455 million. This range does not factor in any contribution from unannounced acquisitions.

In closing, I would like to sincerely thank all our SiteOne associates who continue to amaze me with their passion, commitment, teamwork and selfless service. We have a tremendous team, and it is an honor to be joined with them as we deliver increasing value for all our stakeholders. I would also like to thank our suppliers for supporting us so strongly and our customers for allowing us to be their partner. Operator, please open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions]

First question comes from Ryan Merkel with William Blair. .

Doug, I wanted to start on the quarter and just the weaker volumes that you saw. It sounds like the biggest issue is new resi in the Sunbelt markets. what kind of negative growth are you seeing in the Sunbelt states for new resi. And then it sounds like R&R took a step down, which product categories are you seeing the biggest impact there? And is that broad-based across the country for the R&R market?

Yes. So new residential, yes, we've seen some increased weakness. If you look at last year, starts were down significantly, completions were a little better than starts. And I think what we've seen this year is that starts are down mid-single digits, but completions are down high single digits. And we're seeing worse than that in the Sunbelt, the California, Arizona, Texas and then better than that up in the Midwest. Overall, it's pretty broad-based, though in terms of residential outside of the kind of the Midwest we're seeing it across the Southeast, et cetera.

So yes, so that market is kind of weaker than expected. Remodel is broad-based. Our remodel products, hardscapes and lighting are good barometers of our model. And yes, it is broad-based across the country. Obviously, it's a little worse than some of those Sunbelt areas. But we really think that's just a matter of the Iran war, the volatility in energy we consume, all the factors that that typically support remodel really aren't there this year. We feel good about the markets long term, and we think it will snap back. And it has the opportunity to snap back faster, we believe, than residential.

But right now, it's taken another step down. It's pretty weak. And we see those in those products. Obviously, we talk to our vendors and our partners. And so we have pretty good confidence that market's just taking another step down, hopefully, it will stabilize at the current levels.

Okay. Got it. That's helpful. And then my second question, how are you thinking about volumes in the third quarter? It looks like maybe down 2% is a good starting point. And then comment on pricing, 3% for the year. It implies you're not getting a lot of traction in some of the PVC and fertilizer price increases. Is that the right read?

Yes. I think our volume outlook flat to up 1%, factors in the 3%. So that does assume kind of a 2% volume. We think the market is worse than that. We're getting a little bit -- we're gaining some market share to get us to that point. We'll see how it goes, but that's what we have factored in.

Eric, you might want to talk specifically about price.

So Yes. We will get a benefit from PVC. We'll see those price increases now play out in the second half. Some of the finished goods to that we've talked about, price increases are in. They're more in the 3% to 5% range. But again, the offsets to that, that are keeping it around 3% for now is fertilizer wrote up in the second quarter, even a little higher than originally we thought into the double digits, has come back down in the single digits with the pressure on urea and those commodities.

So it's kind of uncertain, and we baked in kind of uncertainty coming back from double digits to single digits, so a little bit of pressure there. And then also, as I highlighted, we have fully lapped the tariff-related benefits that went in the second quarter last year. So in the second half of the year and originally how we thought about the year before the Middle East disruption is, there would be some downward pressure or comp on price. So those kind of balance out and get us into 3%. We do acknowledge if commodities were to rise again, that some of that pressure would go away and we could be higher than that 3% outlook. But where we sit today, we think that's a good read for now.

Next question, David Manthey with Baird.

First off, on -- just to check the metrics here, price and volume in both the agronomics and landscape products. Could you repeat that for me? I missed it on the monologue. .

Right. Price for agronomics with 4% for the quarter and volume was 1%

And then landscape products?

Landscape products were flat and price was 3%.

Okay. And then to touch on the fuel dynamics here, could you discuss the fuel impact as it relates to freight in and freight out? And just to clarify, the costs that you incur on fuel from your distribution centers to the branches. Does that fall into COGS, I would assume. And then as it relates to freight out on deliveries, have you been able to recoup that via surcharges?

And then finally, on the freight in stuff, do you have a mechanism to recapture that as we move to the back half of the year? I know it's a lot, but it's a complex issue.

Yes. On the delivery side or the freight outside, as we mentioned before, we implemented fuel surcharges right at the end of the first quarter. Those have been in place throughout the second quarter and continue today. We have managed the rise in the fuel cost impact to net neutral, but it is dilutive to SG&A as a percentage of net sales.

On the freight in side, we've done -- we're doing a number of things from supply chain management to mitigate that cost. But those costs as they come in on the products are translated into price increases. So we're managing that to pass through. There is a little bit of a dilutive effect that we've called out in the quarter, but we're doing the best to manage that.

And David, on the -- just to give a magnitude on the freight out side, that fuel increase adds about 15 basis to SG&A with an offsetting benefit to gross margin. So it's really a transfer between one from the other. And then like Eric said, on the inbound, we capture that naturally through our pricing adjustments.

Okay. And then just mechanically on the costs between distribution center and branch, where do those get picked up in the P&L?

Yes. They're in cost of goods.

COGS too.

Next question, Mike Dahl with RBC Capital Markets.

Chris on for Mike. Just going back to price, could you guys help flesh out just the grass seed and PVC expectation for the back half, how what that year-over-year change is going to look like?

Yes. Grass seed, so those price changes just have gone in effect here in July. So we've been in a number of years of deflation. We are expecting those price increases to translate from the low single digit to mid-single-digit range here in the second half of the year. Third quarter is our largest grass seed selling quarter, about 40% of grass seed sales occur in the third quarter. So there will be some benefit in the second half of the year from grass seed.

PVC price increases went in during the second quarter. We'll start to see those benefits here in the second half. It is into soft -- softer end market. So while we expect price to kind of hold up against the several years of high deflation, what kind of see how that plays out with price elasticity in the second half of the year.

Got it. Okay. And then just on the SG&A and the stepped-up health care inflation you guys saw this quarter. Is that onetime? Or is that kind of something we should be modeling into the back half? Just any comments you can provide on drivers of year-over-year leverage in SG&A on the back half.

Yes. Most of the 30 basis point improvement was made up with fuel inflation and then the higher health care cost. It was -- it's probably a little bit higher in the second quarter than we would expect it to be the rest of the year, but we do expect those to be higher the rest of the year, health care probably a little less than it was in the second quarter, but fuel inflation to continue for now for where it's been. .

Next question from Charles Perron with Goldman Sachs. .

First, I just want to go back on the SG&A. You talked about SG&A leverage flat for the full year which represent an improvement versus the first half. I realize the improvement in volumes will be a key driver. But I think you mentioned in your prepared remarks additional actions to drive productivity. I guess, first, did I hear you correctly? And also, how do you think about the potential for additional actions to help you against the weaker market outlook?

Yes. So we are taking additional actions. Obviously, with the volumes being weaker, we aim to adjust to that. And we are taking actions in our labor and our other costs to adjust down to the new volumes. As we mentioned, health care, which tends to move around during the quarter, we expect that to be a bit better. Obviously, we'll monitor that. And the fuel cost, we've assumed that it's going to continue on in. But taking all that together, we do aim to get leverage in the second half to kind of end up flat. And we are taking additional actions really responding around the volumes. We hope to be able to drive higher volumes, but we're not assuming that we'll be able to do that at this point in time.

Got it. Okay. That's helpful color. And second, I just want to flip to a commercial initiative. Can you provide an update on where do you see the biggest opportunities for penetration in the second half and how should you think about your ability to outperform your end market as a result, considering the weaker market outlook, does that change anything in terms of the different preferences or the performance of some of these initiatives?

Right. Good question. No, we really -- we feel good about our initiatives on the commercial side. Even with the weak markets, we're continuing to penetrate with siteone.com. And we found that the customers that are digitally engaged with us are growing significantly faster than our average. We're still having good success with our small or medium customers which continues, whether it's a good market or a tough market, our private label brands, the growth there is significant, as we said, ProTradeis up over 50% for the year, still driving strong there with Solstice and portfolio and our other private brands.

And so that -- and that has the dual benefit of driving share gain but also improving our gross margin. So we're happy on our sales force productivity. We're continuing to drive that. So all our initiatives are in kind of full full mode, if you will, and they're going to help us navigate through these softer markets. And obviously, as things normalize, we expect that to continue to accelerate and outperform the market.

Yes. And we improved delivery as well in the first half of the year and a net delivered metric that we track against delivered sales, that achieved leverage in the first half of the year as well. And we're on track with how we kind of outlined our long-term contribution annually. .

Next question, Andrew Carter with Stifel.

I guess first question I wanted to ask, I mean, your year 2 -- into year 2 on kind of these branch optimization, you're talking about SG&A Flex. Do you believe that any of your SG&A reductions are impacting your performance in the market? And then I guess the follow-on to that is if you look at the branches you've closed, what have been the retention. How has retention fared relative to kind of your original assumptions around business you lost, business that you would expect to go to other branches in the area?

Yes. No, good question. No, we -- I mean, we are very much focused on growth. We obviously are taking actions with SG&A but we never kind of paid actions that sacrifice growth. For our closed branches, we're quite happy with our retention. We've done, I think, a great job there. We are consolidating those into other branches nearby and maintaining those sales. So -- and so our SG&A actions are more about productivity improvement. The focused branch efforts involve growing sales as well as cutting SG&A. So it's not just kind of a one quiver method there. We are one of the best ways to turn around a focus branch is to improve the customer service and drive share gain. So our SG&A management and reductions we're doing that carefully. But when you have lower volume, like we're seeing, you can take prudent actions and not damage our ability to outperform the market.

Yes. Just a data point, we've always targeted at least to retain 80% of the sales through the consolidation with the nearby branch. And we did a study that in the first half, and we're tracking ahead of that threshold.

And then a second question about kind of the additional SG&A actions that you're planning for this year. Do those come back -- do those come back, number one, in a flat market, which you kind of talked to for '27. And do they come back in like a full kind of normalized environment? .

Yes. No, good question. Because we're doing them carefully and strategically, when the market comes back, we do get leverage on that. I mean it's not -- we eliminate and then we just add right back. We are eliminating or kind of reducing, reallocating more aggressively with the eye that we're going to improve productivity. And as the market comes back, we'll get good drop down to the bottom line on that growth. .

Next question, Matthew Bouley with Barclays.

[indiscernible]. So on the full year guide, I just wanted to clarify I guess there is incrementally weaker volume and SG&A outlook maybe from last quarter, can you parse out maybe what might be coming in a little stronger within the gross margin or some commercial initiatives or just maybe on the acquisition front that is leading to unchanged EBITDA guide?

Yes, I think like we mentioned, there is a swap out between SG&A and gross margin in terms of fuel. And with price moving nicely in the right direction, there's -- as we have more SG&A downside, let's say, as a percent of sales with the weaker volume, there's probably counterbalancing upside that helps us there. And so we're still very confident in our ability to expand EBITDA margins this year despite the weaker markets. .

Is there another part of the question?

Yes. I guess for my second question, just on a different note, like for the Reinders acquisition, any updates around how the integration of that is tracking? And in terms of the biggest or most near-term synergies you might realize what's sort of your outlook on that? And when do you expect to see the synergies fully flowing through?

Yes. No. The integration is going well with Reinders. Reinders is a terrific company. It's in the right part of the country for the current market. I mean, the market is actually quite strong in the Midwest, where they are up in Wisconsin and Michigan, Ohio, Illinois. And so from a top line standpoint, they're doing well. We're getting synergies that we've gotten purchasing synergies. We've got -- we're putting in products we're able to -- our system synergies, they don't have a CRM. We're adopting those things. So integration is on track. We won't have them fully integrated system-wise until early next year. They did quite a bit online themselves. And so we're being careful there to make sure that goes seamlessly. But the team's terrific. We're working well together and feeling really good about binders and long-term growth we can achieve together with Ringers going forward.

Yes. And I'd add too on the synergy front, it's a multiyear. So as Doug kind of mentioned, the first year synergies. But after integration, too, we have distribution and logistics synergies that we're going to get nearby to our Wisconsin DC, and then as well as there will be some branch optimization opportunities as well going forward in year 2.

Right. You'll see a couple of consolidations there with their branches and our branches. So a good point. or getting synergies this year, we expect to get synergies really over the next couple of years as we fully join our 2 teams together. .

Jeffrey Stevenson, Loop Capital.

Has there been any meaningful change in the competitive environment of distribution from independent or large regional competitors with residential domain coming in softer than anticipated this year?

Yes, nothing abnormal. I mean, when markets are soft, things get more competitive. I mean that just -- that happens in any market regardless of who you're competing against. So it's a very competitive market right now. Luckily, I mean we know how to compete hard on the, let's say, the large customers in the places that commercial and the places where all the competitors go. And then on the side through adjacent product lines and through going after small customers, et cetera, we're able to successfully gain market share. So I would describe it as a competitive market. As markets soften, they get more competitive. We're seeing that right now, but we know how to manage that, and we're confident we can manage through it to the other side. .

Great. And then, Doug, can you provide more color on the near-term maintenance demand pressure you stated in your prepared remarks. Specifically, when did this begin to show up in the market and types of maintenance projects, customers are temporarily delaying due to higher pricing.

Yes. I mean that is that when you get the price increases up in the double digits, like we saw in the second quarter with fertilizer than your maintenance customers, which are working off of fixed budgets tend to dial back a bit on their volumes. That's a short-term strategy to kind of get through. We've -- as Eric mentioned, fertilizers come down a little bit. So it can quickly come back because they're managing to an annual budget. At the end of the year, they can adjust their budgets accordingly depending on kind of where the prices are at the time.

So it's a short-term phenomenon. We feel like it negatively affected us in the second quarter. if prices come down, it could come back and be a tailwind in the third quarter, we'll see. But that tends to happen with fertilizer and combination products that are used every week, every month by these operators to kind of keep in line with their budgets.

Next question, Matt Johnson with UBS.

Appreciate the time. I guess, first off, I think so organic daily volume was down, call it, almost 2% in the quarter. I think last quarter, you guys had mentioned it was down in April as well. I guess just given kind of all the noise and macro volatility that we've seen over the last few months, I guess, what did you -- out of demand, or I guess the value sold say, progress through May and June and then into July?

Yes. No, great question. As you know, in the first quarter, volume was down 4% in the first quarter. Some of that was a push of the spring from the first quarter to the second quarter with weather. In April, we saw negative volumes, but improved from that. So we feel good. Okay, we're seeing the spring come through. In May, actually, the volumes were improved over April. And so we saw a nice trend. June, however, kind of with the other way, lost momentum. And based on the kind of June and July, I think we're seeing where the real market is. I mean with that spring moving from the first quarter to the second quarter, it's hard -- it's kind of hard to tell where the market is. Now that we have a full first half and actually another month that we can see what's going on.

Now we're seeing more clearly where the market is and that's -- and we've talked about that, that we feel that the remodel has kind of taken a step down, and we're at a new level. So that's how it progressed. Kind of give us a little bit -- it was hard to tell how much was kind of momentum and how much was just kind of spring coming back through. And as it turned out, that momentum got lost in June and July. .

That's great. Appreciate that. Now I guess, changing topics a little bit, but just on greenfield expansion, I think at the Investor Day, you guys had talked about accelerating this opening maybe 5 to 10 new locations per year. But now I mean, clearly, demand -- end market demand has pulled back. You guys have talked about taking some actions on SG&A. I guess, how are you guys thinking about opening new greenfield locations right now? And just, I guess, how are you thinking about branch count more broadly as we move into the back half of '26?

Yes. No, good question. As we mentioned, greenfields are going to be a more meaningful part of our strategy going forward. We've typically done 3 or 4 years. We expect to do more 5 to 10 a year. Today, we've done 6 greenfields combination across the country. Obviously, with the market being down, we're very selective in that sense. Specific markets in greenfields for specific reasons. And so we're very careful there that we're not overdoing it in a market that's down, et cetera. But yes, we are moving ahead on that pace of 5% to 10%, and we expect to maintain that over the next several years. But obviously, careful in a market like this where the markets are down in certain markets we can always delay or decide to move ahead depending on the strategic need. Six so far this year, we may have a couple more through the year, but we're going to be very careful given the environment we're in today.

Next question is Shaun Calnan with Bank of America.

I wanted to follow up on the fixed budgets impacting maintenance cement. Are these typically reset at calendar year? Or is it more staggered and dependent on like who the customer itself. And I guess the crux of my question is, does this kind of put a ceiling on the agronomic sales for the remainder of the year?

Agronomics is typically steady. And so I don't think different customers have different ways of budgeting and customers may be on an annual, they may be on a 2-year contract. They may be and that may fall in the calendar year or et cetera, it would be hard to answer that specifically. So the phenomenon we tend to see is price increases in 2 to 5 range aren't going to effect. They're planning those in, right? They plan for price increases.

When you get commodity like fertilizer that goes up into the double digits, that's when they tend to modify their settings, if you will, to kind of get by. I mean, at the end of the day, they got to keep the lawns green, the grass is green, golf courses have to maintain excellent turf for players, et cetera. But they can move things around. So I wouldn't say it's a ceiling, but it's -- in the short term, if you have double-digit increases, you can't bank on that additive to a 2% volume increase.

Yes. there's 2 kind of high seasons, spring application and fall application season and we get to the fall, we're back in single digits. The demand impact reduced demand would be less.

Yes. So it can move demand around during the year depending on -- they come up, they come down, et cetera. In this case, we think the second quarter was affected. Fertilizer comes back down. Again, that could come back in the third.

Okay. Great. And then it sounds like you guys are pretty confident that there will be more M&A this year. Can you talk about the size of those deals, what you think they could be? Are these going to be larger, smaller deals? And then how we should think about how that's going to impact share repurchases from here? .

I can take the first part of the question. So we typically don't talk about exact size deals. We are in active discussions with a number of companies, however, and we do expect to close more deals this year. With that, we think the results will fall in line with a more typical year for us in 2026 and beyond. .

Yes. And on the share repurchase question, you can see what we've done so far year-to-date. We're not done. We kind of have that line of sight for the next a little under 6 months for the year on M&A. Obviously, growth remains the first priority, but we're going to be opportunistic like we have been. And we still plan to stay in the range. We started the year even a little below that 1 to 2x leverage range. So we expect to be higher than that to close out the year. So we're going to continue to take advantage of where the stock price is and repurchases and continue to return capital to shareholders. .

I would like to turn the floor over to Doug Black for closing remarks.

Okay. Thank you. So we appreciate everybody's interest today in SiteOne. I want to take an opportunity to thank our suppliers for supporting us and our customers for allowing us to be their partner. I'd like to thank our associates. We have a tremendous team, and they're working hard to all success for all of our stakeholders and look forward to catching up at the end of the next quarter. Thank you.

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and thank you for your participation.

Good morning. Welcome to the SiteOne Landscape Supply 2026 Investor Day. I'm Travis Jackson, SiteOne's General Counsel and Secretary. Thank you for joining us here in Atlanta and via webcast. We're glad to have you with us today.

Before we begin, please note that today's presentation will include forward-looking statements. Please refer to the cautionary statements and risk factors set forth in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings for additional information concerning factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in today's presentation. Additionally, we'll be discussing non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. A reconciliation of these measures can be found in today's presentation slides.

For everyone's safety, please take a moment to note the nearest emergency exit. In the unlikely event of an emergency, event staff will provide additional instruction. We ask that you keep aisles clear to ensure an unobstructed exit if needed. For those online, we will have 2 Q&A sessions during the program. You may submit a question at any time by clicking on the Ask a Question link in the live stream.

It is now my pleasure to welcome to the stage, SiteOne's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Doug Black.

Thanks, Travis, and welcome. That was fun last night. Last night, you got to meet the team. And today, you're going to get to hear from our team about SiteOne. And so we're excited to tell you our story, where we've been and where we're going over the next 5 to 10 years, okay? So we'll start off. I'll give an overview of the company and our industry. Then we'll have Jerry, Shannon and Carl talk to you about organic growth, how we're going to drive organic growth over the next 5 years. Then Stephanie, Shawn and David will talk to you about our EBITDA margin expansion opportunities. We'll stop. We'll take some Q&A, and take a break. Then we'll come back with Daniel to cover acquisitions, acquisition growth. Joe will cover our culture and our talent. And Eric will come back and do a financial overview for you. We'll wrap up with a Q&A session at the end, and then I'll summarize. So we've got a full slate, full agenda for you. We've got a break in the middle, and here we go.

SiteOne, many of you have seen this chart before. We're the largest and only nationwide wholesale distributor in the landscaping space in the U.S. and Canada. $36 billion is a new number. I'll come back to that. We've spent a lot of time sizing our total addressable market, and we believe that, that is the number. And so when you look at our company, we're 3x larger than #2, larger than 2 through 10 combined, but we only have 13% market share. So this is a very fragmented market still, even though we've been at it for 10 years, and there's plenty of runway going forward for us to grow. We serve residential and commercial professional landscapers. We have a full product line.

And one of the things that we -- and you can see how we cover the country in terms of our branches and our 5 distribution centers, like you saw yesterday. One of the things we like about our business is that we're balanced. We're balanced about across product categories, and we're balanced in end-use segments. And so that balance gives us resiliency as we're going through softer markets like we are going through today. And so we look to maintain that balance as we go forward.

We're building a great company here. So we're not just here to make money, which is part of what we're here to do, but we're here to build a great company. And we really -- our vision is to master these 5 objectives: A great place to work for our associates. You've met our team. I wish you could meet all our associates. We've spent a lot of time making sure that this is the best place to work for those associates to come, thrive and grow. Superior quality and value to our customers, right? That's what allows us to grow and be healthy and gain market share. The distributor of choice. As a distributor, we've got supplier partners that are important, and it's important that they win as we win. And if we cause them to win as we grow, then they're going to support us even more. And so we know that's an important part of our vision, and we take that seriously.

Of course, return to shareholders. We're a public company, and we aim to achieve leading financial performance in terms of performance and growth. And then finally, being a good neighbor in our communities, right? We give back to the less fortunate around us. And this is not really checks to charities. This is our associates being involved in the community to help the less fortunate in ways that they're passionate about, and we support that very strongly. So this is what we're building at SiteOne. And the reason I put this up here, it's not just mom and apple pie. This is what we live because we want to be a company that endures, that stands the test of time, that 20 years from now, we're still talking about SiteOne and what we're doing to grow.

We break that down to our associates in ways that they can digest and they can act on. So these are our value elements. We call it the SiteOne DNA. And this is our culture, always safe, critically important, taking responsibility for your own safety, but also the safety of your teammates. Customer obsessed. You'll note it's not obsessed with serving our customers. It's obsessed with making our customers successful. These are landscapers, and so we can do much more than just provide them products, right? We can help them to win in their business.

Team players, this is a team sport. So selfish prima donnas don't do well at SiteOne. We have team players, professional. We do everything with integrity. We take the harder right. Bad news travels fast at SiteOne. We're accountable. We have a lot of owners that still work for us. We buy companies, we bring on teams, but accountability is important in terms of our execution and our ability to succeed, continuously improving, right? We'll talk to you about new technologies that we're rolling out, new strategies. We need our associates to embrace those to drive those. And so that's part of our DNA. That's what we teach them all the way down to the front line.

And then talent focus. We're highly focused on bringing on great associates and developing them for the long term. So overall, having fun, serving our customers and winning in the marketplace. And if you go to a SiteOne branch, which I encourage that you do, you'll see this in our associates, and they'll be able to talk to this DNA because it's real, and we drive it all the way down. Joe will talk to that when he goes through the culture piece.

What's our strategy is to take the best of a large company but also the best of our local companies and combine the 2 so that we have -- can leverage our scale, leverage our technologies and our talent, but also be fast and flexible in different markets. These markets are -- it's different in Los Angeles than it is in Boston. And so we need to tailor our strategies to those markets. And of course, we add acquisitions that fill out those local markets, but supported by a strong center. And then we drive execution with our initiatives, category management, supply chain, like you saw yesterday, sales force performance, operational excellence, marketing and digital. We've got terrific initiatives across those to drive the pillars of our value creation, which are organic growth, and organic growth kind of always comes first, margin expansion, which we'll talk to you about that, and then acquisition growth. And so we've got many ways to grow and add value. And so we look to lever those strongly over time.

Our team. It takes a team to execute a strategy. And 95% of a great business is execution. And so you can see our team there on the left, you can see how tenured -- you saw how tenured our team was last night, well, it's even more tenured in the field. And you can see industry experience and years with SiteOne, how many of our leaders out there and sellers and branch managers have been customers themselves. So they know the customer. They were a customer. That's where -- we don't recruit our customers, but our customers do come to us when they're tired of being landscapers. In the middle, our functional support teams, and we call it field support. We don't use the word corporate at SiteOne. That's our field support teams. You can see we bring associates from all kinds of world-class companies across the globe to provide the functional expertise that it's going to take to win. Again, you can see large and local, the combination is dynamite. And then our leadership team, which you also met last night, comes from all types of world-class companies, all here to the landscaping industry, very focused to build a world-class company that can raise this industry up.

And you can see our track record, right? We're proud of our track record, 12% compounded growth in sales, 13% compounded growth in EBITDA. But you can also see the ups and downs of the COVID period, right? COVID with the prices going way up, we approached 12% in terms of our EBITDA to sales. And then with the last couple of years of price deflation and soft markets, it's been tough sledding, if you will. But the good news is that we've got a plan to recover those margins, which we started last year, and you can see the progress that we made last year. So if you look at the next 5 years, we're even more excited because we can drive organic growth. Even in a soft market, we can drive organic growth, we can drive acquisition growth, but we've got significant margin expansion opportunity over the next 5 years as we recover our EBITDA percentage and drive tremendous value. So if you look at that 13% over the last 10 years of EBITDA growth, Eric will cover in the end, we plan to drive EBITDA growth more in the 17% to 20% range over the next 5 years, aided by that EBITDA margin expansion recovery. So excited about the future.

Talk a little bit about SiteOne, how have we built and how are we thinking about building SiteOne. And again, we're building a great company here. Carved out of John Deere, so it was John Deere Landscapes. So in the early day, in 2014, I came here in 2014, the early period was all about building our -- we didn't have functional teams. We didn't have a supply chain. It was all direct to branch. We didn't have our systems. We didn't have our ERP. We didn't have siteone.com. We had to basically build everything kind of from scratch. We had the branches, we had the associates, but we had to build the systems, et cetera. And then we started our acquisition growth path. We also added hardscapes to the mix. We were already heavy into the other product lines, but hardscapes was kind of a missing element. And in that period, we rebranded to SiteOne and of course, did our IPO in May of 2016, 10 years ago.

With that built, we went into the -- we didn't know it, but we were heading into the COVID period. So the next period was continuing to drive growth in hardscapes and nursery. Why hardscapes and nursery? Because that's where we were less penetrated. We were also growing our irrigation and our agronomics and landscape supplies. But the fastest growers, primarily through acquisition, were hardscapes and nursery. Building our private label brands, which we had LESCO, but we had to build other brands to support LESCO in the other sectors, really driving the digital adoption. So we had the digital product. We improved it during this period, but drove adoption. Fine-tuning our commercial and operational excellence and then navigating the volatility of COVID, prices way up, prices way down going through that period. So this is a period of kind of maturing as a company, if you will. We kind of put it together. We built it. It matured. We went through some volatility, some good times, some tough times. The team kind of battled through that. And I think what we have today is a much stronger company that's more mature in our capabilities and our initiatives.

So what's the next 5 years look like? We expect to accelerate our share gains. We believe we're taking market share, and we have been over the last 2 years, and we think we'll continue to get better at taking market share smartly as we go forward. Steady acquisition growth. So we're going to continue to acquire. There's still plenty of runway on the acquisition front, and we're going to take advantage of that. Our technologies, we're advanced in our technologies, but we're going to continue to build on those. Obviously, AI can add to that, and we're looking to continue to drive technology to be the market leader. SG&A leverage. We're confident during that building stage and through the COVID up and down, obviously, we did add SG&A. We're confident we can leverage that SG&A going forward. Drive the 13% and finish the project, if you will, of becoming a truly world-class company. And we won't be done at 2030, but at 2030, we'll be, I think, a much different company, much stronger company to head into the future from there. So that's the evolution of our company. That's how we think about it.

I'm going to switch to the industry. So let's take a look at the industry. Here's what we think the industry is comprised in terms of end market. And again, this is the industry. It's not SiteOne. So we think it's a strong maintenance component, almost 40%, if you will. Then you have the new construction, which is split between residential and commercial. And then repair and remodel. Again, a good balanced industry. You can see 60% residential. So it is -- residential is important in the landscape space, but a strong commercial component and then sports fields, like golf courses, et cetera, rounded out. And then you can see the product categories, right, agronomics being the largest, working your way down around landscape supplies, hardscapes and then finishing up with irrigation and lighting, which is the smallest component of the industry. So pretty nice balance when you think about our industry.

Let's talk about the TAM. So we have revised our TAM. We took this opportunity to bring in Kearney to do a deep study of the landscaping space. And some of the numbers changed. I'll talk about agronomics. We have gotten into adjacencies over time, which are important adjacencies. For instance, in agronomics, adjacencies would be pest control or handheld power equipment, et cetera. And so those aided to the increased number there in agronomics. If we look at hardscapes, we've gone into important adjacencies like bulk stone, like vertical stone. We carry landscaping stone, but we also carry stone that masons would use for vertical walls or even veneers. And so that drove that total addressable market up.

And then landscape supplies, we've gotten into adjacencies like erosion control, synthetic turf. And so when we took a hard look at landscape supplies, that market is bigger today. So when you add it up, we feel like our addressable market is 36% -- $36 billion. We've got a 13% market share. Again, we're the mega leader, plenty of room to continue to grow in this market.

The market trends. Net, the markets are very positive for us in the landscape space. When you look at the customer trends, we all know about the labor shortage. It's gotten a little better with the softer markets today, but there's really going to always be, I think, a labor shortage in the U.S. for landscaping workers. We make that a yellow arrow, but even though that might constrain demand to some extent, it also plays in our favor as a wholesale distributor with our customers having labor being their highest cost and most kind of precious commodity, we can do a lot to serve them and help them be labor efficient, right, to gain market share. And so it actually works in our favor to serve our customers, help them on their biggest problem, which is labor, and help them to be more efficient.

Hispanic influence is real in the landscaping market. And as we grow our capabilities in our branches, bilingual capabilities, that works in our favor. There is some private equity consolidation of our customers. It's primarily in the commercial maintenance part of the space. So it is a bit limited in that. But again, that's -- you want -- smaller customers are better than larger customers, but we have a national accounts group and kind of capabilities that can allow us to serve those private equity-backed companies, we think, better than our competition. So it works in our favor. And then steady adoption of technology. As younger landscapers get into the business, they're expecting the technology, and that works in our favor.

If we look at the market, outdoor living is still a strong place for investment, right? People invest in their backyards, right? And they would still have the stay-at-home effect. So outdoor living hasn't gone away, and there's demand, and we think there's pent-up demand currently if things -- some of the market elements get better, that there's demand there to go after. Regulation helps us because that spurs remodel and replacement in terms of technology. Increasing use of professional landscapes. As home incomes grow, folks tend to stop doing it themselves, and they go to professionals, and that works in our favor. And then the one negative there, as we all know, is single-family affordability. And we'll see how that plays out over time, but that's a bit of a headwind. Again, overall, this is a terrific industry to be in that we can take advantage of.

Just a little bit deeper here, the growth characteristics. The maintenance, which is almost 40% of the market, we expect that to grow steady, 2% to 3% I think GDP growth. These are nominal figures, by the way. And that's our agronomic products, and our landscape supplies products are tied to that. Now we can grow faster and have grown faster than this in taking market share, but that's going to be steady. New construction, we expect in a normal market, 3% to 5% growth. And again, a couple of percent inflation built into that. And I think we all know the drivers of single-family homes.

And then repair and upgrade, right? We believe that repair and upgrade naturally grows a bit faster than new construction, and that's the penetration of the market and outdoor living trend, et cetera, and the elements that drive that. When you look at those elements that drive remodel, obviously, today, consumer confidence is weak, interest rates are a bit high, existing home sales are weak. So the components for remodel today are not tremendously strong. But long term, we feel like this is a high growth. And if you look at our 10-year history, our products that are related to remodel would have been growing faster than the other products. So we've looked back at our history, and we feel like going forward, when we say a normal market, these are kind of the growth characteristics of that normal market.

One thing to remember is that this is a great industry for wholesale distribution, right? We have thousands of suppliers. Most of them much, smaller than SiteOne, trying to reach hundreds of thousands of customers. And so the role of the wholesale distributor in this industry is strong, and we expect to be the strongest player, taking full advantage of that role, helping our suppliers to reach our customers. And you saw some of that yesterday in the DC, how we do that. So it's a nice market for us to be creating value in.

We are the mega leader in the market. And you can see how we line up against our competitors. We're a full-line product provider, which is unique in the space. We expect other competitors to copy that over time. But you can see our competitor set, most of our competitors, if you go below the first couple, are more specialized in either agronomics or irrigation or hardscapes. And so there still is a lot of specialization in the industry that we can acquire and fold into SiteOne. And we feel like we have significant advantages in terms of our scale, our full product line, our culture, our technology, our acquisition capability. I'll come back to those as we go through the talk here.

Our customers, right? We spent a lot of time also on our customers. You'll see some new numbers here in terms of the purchases, et cetera. But essentially, this industry is very fragmented. And you can see the small customer that has 1 or 2 associates, 1 to 4 associates, typically purchases less than $75,000 a year, is 34% of the industry, right? And then medium customers make up kind of the other half. Together, make up half of the industry. You can see the medium customer has kind of 10 to 20 associates, if you will. You can see their average purchases.

Then you get up into large customers. They could have up to 100 associates on their teams. Right now, they're starting to branch out and go multistate, et cetera. You can see what they comprise and then the major customers. We are more weighted toward the major and large customers than we are toward the small customers, and that's an opportunity for SiteOne that we'll talk about. We feel like we can level this up over time and have kind of equal market share across. And we're not going to do that by lowering our share of the large and major. Obviously, we'll still be growing at those categories, but we expect to grow a lot faster, and we are growing a lot faster with the small and medium customers. And so we'll talk to that. But it's a very fragmented space, which again lends itself to wholesale distribution and to SiteOne.

So the takeaways of the market analysis are: It's a fragmented space. It's a good space for wholesale distribution. The long-term trends for landscaping are very robust. Our customers, scarcity of labor and Hispanic influence are really the biggest components of our customers' challenges or trends. And so we take advantage of that, and we are underpenetrated with those small customers. So there's an opportunity. Competition, we respect our competitors. We've got good competitors. They're going to continue to copy SiteOne, but I'd call the competitive environment overall stable. And so we think we have room there to compete and win. For acquisitions, there is competition for acquisitions, but we feel like we're the acquirer of choice in the market, and we'll talk to that. And then technology. We believe we're the technology leader, and we're going to stay the technology leader. As we move forward, and you can -- we'll show you what we're working on there.

Our strategy. We're a full-line provider to professional landscapers in the U.S. and Canada, right, very focused. And so while we have a broad product line, we have a very focused customer set, and I think there's power in that focus. We do, do a bit of light assembly with our GreenTech and irrigation. We do some grinding of mulch. So we'll do some light manufacturing here and there, but we don't plan to backward integrate to be a manufacturer, and we don't plan to forward integrate to become a customer. So our strategy is to compete in the middle. I talked a little bit about this, but it's large serving local, right? So the best of functional expertise, the best tools, customer obsessed, working with our local teams that are talented, experienced, passionate, also customer obsessed to achieve consistent execution. There's a lot of teamwork at SiteOne, and you'll see that if you go around and visit the branches.

Value proposition, full line of products, excellent customer experience. We help you with your business. We help you to grow when you're a customer, and then we have a consistent competitive price, and we'll talk to all those. And best acquired companies. So we focus on buying well-run companies that can join our team, bring great talent and can pull us forward.

Customer benefits, obviously, are very important. This is what drives organic growth. And so we focus on 3 elements: the full line. A personal connection no matter how big or small you are. We know you. We probably know your family. We know what you do for fun. We know what you do for a living, and we serve you well. And we're going to help you grow your business is the third element. And you can see the table stakes in the middle. That's what everybody has. But you can see the differentiators there. In terms of personal connection, we have customers FIRST that we train, which is friendly, inquire, respect, solve and thank. And so we teach all our associates that platform. We create trusted personal relationships. We'll talk about our CRM, where we can keep track of you personally.

And then our effective kind of pickup and delivery. So we're very convenient. And then you get into those differentiators in terms of our expertise, our SiteOne Universities, Partners Programs, et cetera. Our team will run through all of these. We feel like we've got lots of differentiators that allow us to be different from the competition, gaining market share.

So just to sum it up, what is the SiteOne advantage, right? First of all, we have scale. We're the largest purchaser of all our product lines in the wholesale space. And so we can leverage that with our partners to get an advantage, right? We have a low-cost supply chain, and you saw evidence of that yesterday. We can drive it even lower, and we'll talk to you about how we're going to do that, but we are the low-cost provider, and we aim to have low-cost service and delivery right across the network.

Customer value. This is important because you can't gain market share if you're not offering value. And so we focus here heavily. Our culture, our line of business expertise, our bilingual capability are key. Our convenient locations, we have almost 700 locations that we continue to add to our network, the full product line that I talked about to simplify the customers' operations and sourcing, technologies that help them run their business and then our Partners Program to train them, educate them, provide that business assistance. So it's all important in terms of delivering that customer value.

Supplier value. We talked about being the distributor of choice. We have a kind of world-class supplier portal. We do forecasting. We do planning with our customers. And so we can lower their cost, we can lower our cost together. We also do joint marketing and demand creation with our suppliers. And then our acquisition capability. We've done over 100 acquisitions. We're kind of battle hardened there. We know how to court owners. We know how to bring on companies into the family and to add those synergies when they join us. So that hopefully gives you an overview of SiteOne. And again, you'll hear a deeper explanation of everything I just talked about throughout the morning today.

We want to start off with organic growth, and I want to kind of set the context for organic growth, and then I'll hand it over to Jerry to get into the details. But let's look at the history of SiteOne, our organic growth history. And it really comes in 2 segments, if you will. 2015 to 2019 were kind of the normal years, if you will, right? This was pre-COVID. We feel like this was normal landscaping growth, and we do not -- we don't feel like we were gaining share during this period. You can see we were growing at 4% or 5%. We think the market was growing at 4% or 5%. Stable market. Inflation, you can see a couple of percent throughout. So this is where we think the landscape market is in the kind of a normal period, right?

And then we have the last years, which have been anything but normal. We had the big COVID run-ups in terms of price. You can see the volume and price going through the roof there. You can see the correction in 2022, which was masked by kind of 18% price increases. And then you've seen the post period, right, where, we think over the last 2 years, '24 and '25, the market has been down. We've been able to grind out 1%, 2% volume growth in '24. 1% volume growth last year in a down market. And obviously, price went negative 3% in '24 and was flat last year, is going to be more normalized this year, right? So this has been a period of deflation, soft markets. And tough times kind of hone your skills. And it's been a period where we've really honed our skills in terms of organic growth, market share and quite frankly, managing price and margin, et cetera. So it sets us up, we believe, for success going forward, and we certainly feel like we're a stronger company today having gone through these kind of tough periods.

Obviously, 2026 is also turning out to be a tougher year. So we're not out of the woods yet, but our ability to grow in a tough period and to expand our margins, which we did last year, gives us a lot of confidence in the future.

And so with that, I'll hand it over to Jerry, and we'll dig into organic growth.

Thanks, Doug. And good morning. I'm excited to -- well, I'm Jerry Justice, I'm the Division President of the East, first of all. I'm excited to dig in and introduce you to some of our customer types. I'll spend a little bit of time about and introduce you to who they are, what some of their critical needs are, and then I'll go into a little bit of detail about the investments that we make to deliver superior quality service and value to them.

I'll start with the small customer. And many of these, as you saw on the other slides, are Spanish speaking. Many of these customers, they don't have turf degrees. Many don't have business degrees. And you can think of these as many of them just ended up in this business. And we're glad that they did, but we have to meet them where they are. Many of these small customers are the job site foreman. They're also the accountant. They're also the sales department, the collections department. They're the sales department. They do everything, right? And so we have to have the knowledge, the technical expertise to solve their problems. We have to be close to them. We have to have convenient locations. They have to be on the job. We need to keep them on the job. So when they come in our stores, we have to have the technical expertise. We have to be able to solve their problems. We have to have the inventory in stock. We have to immediately push it over the counter or load it in the back of the truck and send them back to the job sites where they can make money.

Some of the same, I would say, services we provide to the small customers are also important to the medium-sized customers. But this is where it gets a little bit complex, right? This is where they go from one crew to multiple crews. This is where instead of us just training them, now we need to help train their crews. And so similar services that we provide, but this is when they would get a dedicated sales associate. And this dedicated sales associate would spend time getting to know them to make sure that they understand all the things that SiteOne can do to help their business and to help them grow. This could be examples, for instance, like delivery. This medium customer is someone that is trying to stretch resources. And so they may have heavy duty trailer and they need to get a piece of equipment from point A to point B, but they also need to get 4 pallets of flagstone to a job site. And so our seller can say, "Hey, we've got you covered. We have delivery. You make sure that your Bobcat gets from point A to point B, and we'll make sure your flagstone gets where it needs to go."

This is also a customer, again, stretching the resources where credit becomes important. They may need to buy $30,000 worth of sod, and they don't have $30,000. And they know they won't be paid for 45 days. It's okay. We have credit solutions, we can get it taken care of. It's also worth mentioning for both of these customers are the ones most likely to be at their dining room table at 9:00 on a Sunday, trying to schedule the crew or trying to figure out what they're going to do on Tuesday and realizing that they need 100 feet of 2-inch pipe, and they don't have it and trying to make the schedule work, wondering where they're going to get it. Well, with siteone.com and our digital solutions, they can quickly log on and see, "Okay, SiteOne has it. And a matter of fact, I'll go ahead and secure that material right now and make sure and let them know I'm coming by on Tuesday morning to pick it up."

Moving over to large customers, and this is certainly where it gets complicated. This is when multiple lines of business, multiple crews, and they also have shifted over to probably offering and bidding on commercial projects. And so we still have the same services of training, but now we have to keep their teams up to speed on all the lines of business. We have to train multiple people with the commercial projects, there's a lot of bidding. Once they get the commercial work, they have to go back and make sure that the job costing that they did was accurate to tweak it for the next time that they're going to bid. So similar situations. But obviously, we have a dedicated sales associate. But this is also where these larger customers, they're to the point where they have an office. They have office staff. They have a laydown yard for equipment and trucks. They have a warehouse, maybe mechanic space. And so now is where we could approach them with consignment solutions. And I'll get into that in a later slide in more detail.

But Project Services, which I'll touch on another slide, is another service that we provide that helps our commercial contractors to bid as many projects. It helps them find projects to bid, and it also helps them keep track of their expenses as the projects are over so that they can tweak for future use. The major customer, best way for me to describe major customers, it's multiple large customers in multiple cities, across multiple states that are owned by the same people and have the same leadership team, right? So they're complex, but then there's another element of complexity across geographies the same way that we are. And for this customer, many of the same solutions that we provide, but this is when we probably have our national accounts team that's plugged in with their home office and is helping to coordinate the efforts of sales -- across our sales team in the different states.

And it's worth pointing out both of these customers, so large customer and the major customer, billable hours is very important to these customers, making the very most of wage is very important for these customers. This is when no doubt, pennies adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in efficiencies. So these customers are rifle-focused on efficiencies for sure.

Now I'll change this over to an evolution. So customers evolve through this, right? They start out small, they grow, they transform, and I'll walk you through how that looks and how SiteOne helps them, but how it also benefits SiteOne in the process to be there and be their partner through this process. So let's say you have a maintenance customer, and I'll give what happens with many maintenance customers across our branches today. Pre-emergent season starts, it's early spring, and every day, that maintenance customer drives into our branch, and they pick up 10 bags of pre-emergent fertilizer, put them in the truck. They drive out to the job sites, apply that product. The next day, back in again.

Well, fast forward, customer grows. And now that 10 bags they need every day turns into 2 pallets. And so that changes. Logistics changes, and now they have multiple crews, but we can help them. This is the point where we can provide seller support. We have professional agronomic sellers that can help them with their offerings, make sure that they're using the right products and that they're being as efficient as they can. This is also where we could introduce other ways of replenishment or other ways of fulfilling those orders. For instance, if that 2 pallets a day, over 11 days, it's 22 pallets. We could offer them a solution. 22 pallets is a truckload. If you have a shop, you have some storage capabilities, we can order directly from the manufacturer straight to your shop. And that's at a lower cost. An example like this, it could be $3,000 in savings on material to get that directly through the shop.

Now if that product is in your shop, there's also efficiencies. And again, this is when the customer starts to pay attention, there's efficiencies. If you can store it there, your crew comes in the morning, they put the 10 bags in the truck, and they leave. Bypasses the supply house, and saves the fuel, the truck, and they can get more done, efficiencies, et cetera. And by the way, if you can't -- and many can't take full truckload quantities into their shop. If they can take less than truckload quantities, our agronomic sales center comes into play. We can deliver 6 pallets, 11 pallets, 5 pallets. Whatever you're going to need that week, we can bring it to your shop, stack it up. You can -- they can put tarps over it, outside if they need to try to store this stuff. But then, let's say it's not $3,000 in savings, but it could be $1,500. It's still saving money from going directly to the store and buying it every time. But they still get the efficiencies, which is probably the biggest dollar amount, is their crews coming to the shop and not having to stop by a supplier. And so picking up those efficiencies.

And by the way, when we help this customer do this, they take market share. And when they take market share, we naturally take market share. As they grow, we grow. And we also build an incredible amount of loyalty through this process of helping them do this. And by the way, it's worth mentioning that the agronomic sales center, this is a proven model. This is a double-digit EBITDA margin model. So we win either way. We're happy to grow with them. We're happy to take market share. By the way, as that capacity shifts to this also a high profitable model, it frees up capacity in our branches to get more new customers -- and more new small customers in the door and create and continue to graduate through the process.

Flipping over to an installation customer. Similar, let's say, it starts with one line of business. They install irrigation, maybe they add sod. They want to grow. We want them to grow for the same reasons. We can introduce them to one of our full concept branches. In that full concept branch, we have sales reps for nursery. We have sales reps for hardscapes. We have inventory for those products. We have knowledge, know-how, training. We can get them started on any line of business that they choose to grow in. And the same goes as they take market share, we take market share. Both of these are profitable models.

Here's a way of sort of showing you the different types of branches that we have and how they work together to -- as individual branch teams to form a high-performing market team or an MSA team. If you'll note, 9 standard locations, and the standard location for us, it's irrigation, agronomics, lighting and landscape supplies. Three full concept, which is all the products that we have available plus nursery. And then we have 2 stone centers in this market, which is your hardscapes materials and bulk products. And then one agronomic sales center, like, from the last slide. And this is an actual market. This is a real market. These are real stats.

It's worth noting 36% delivered sales. It's also interesting to see that where the mix of agronomics business is, mix of large customers and a mix of smaller customers. Almost half the revenue is going through one location, and the rest is split amongst the others in the small locations. It's also worth noting that we're covering all of the market. We're covering all of the customer types. And with a setup like this, we're also covering all the overhead. This is a very profitable business.

I promised I'd hit on these value-added services again. And so Project Services going back, this is something for commercial contractors, larger customers. This is not only a website, but it's also a team of associates. We provide quick and accurate takeoffs from material takeoffs and material lists, from plants, landscape plants provide prices for our customers. So we can turn irrigation estimates for them, we can turn designs for them, but it's a way to keep them bidding projects, give them accurate numbers so that they can go out and bid with confidence. Also in this service, there's open bids for contractors. So if they're on our Project Services, there's open bids. They can go, and we share bids with them to bid and grow.

And the Project Services team is also -- it's a team of folks. We have a system of -- we keep track of all the bids. We keep track of all the jobs. We keep track of who's bidding those. We keep track of who's winning those bids. It's a lot of intelligence that we have that we bring together and allows us to do a couple of things. It allows us to chase projects, not just chase customers, right? We're chasing projects, who was awarded, keep going until we make sure that we put our presentation in front of them in our numbers. It also gives us the opportunity to bundle projects. We can sell all these products. We can discount certain things and move things around in our favor to try to win more of these projects.

Training, we literally do thousands of trainings every year. I mean, from SiteOne Universities with hundreds or maybe 1,000 associates -- customers showing up to continuing education units that they require for their certifications or the licenses. One-on-one trainings will teach customers how to do things in the field on their job sites. And of course, we have plenty of how-to videos on siteone.com.

Consignment, I touched on as well for the larger customers. And if you're not familiar with this, is if they have a warehouse and they have a building in the -- if they have a room in there or a cage in there that's lockable, then we can put our inventory in their warehouse. And we stock our inventory. They use it. So again, back to the same principle of the material is in the store. The material is in here. And so you don't have to go to our branch. It's there. And by the way, it keeps them out of our branches, but also keeps them out of our competitors' branches, too. And then they can replenish that with their cell phone. They can go through Carl will get into that later. They can replenish that with their cell phone. So a big way to help those, again, driving efficiencies.

And then lastly, business solutions. This is just other things that our customers have to spend money on that's not materials. So you just think cell phone plans, fuel, website design, et cetera. And we just connect them with a trusted partner. That way, it's easy for them. They know it's a trusted partner, and they oftentimes get discounts that's more than they could go out and negotiate on their own.

High level of how we cover sales and marketing from these customer types. I touched on national accounts earlier. The other major large customers, we really have 3 primary commission sales roles that cover these, key account managers and account executives. Those are focused on high share of wallet customers, customers that already buy a lot from us. And then we have business development managers that go after the low share of wallet customers, right? So the customers that are large, they just don't buy from us as large yet. They don't spend large money with us yet. And the key here is really putting the right talent on the opportunity, leveraging the might of SiteOne.

And with the smaller customers, that's where marketing kicks in, connects with those customers, drives them into the branches, helps create loyalty programs that gives our customers a reason to turn right into a SiteOne versus turn left. If all things were equal, that would make them choose us. And then also Shannon and the marketing team help us with intentional touches, right? So from an inside sales team, but also the branch teams, to make sure that we have a system, a systematic process of touching our small and medium customers and new customers when they come back and win back customers that have lapsed.

Shifting over to -- in a little more detail, I guess, into this coverage strategy with the major and medium customers is really we want to do 2 things, of course, drive growth, but also reduce the cost, reduce the cost of our sales. And so it's really a 2-pronged approach. And so drive productivity primarily with our key account managers and our account executives and then to drive growth with BDMs. And so a few of the key productivity drivers with the key account managers and AEs is to continue to get more efficient and become more efficient as our sales support reps. As they become more efficient, it frees up time for our key account managers and our commission sellers to go spend more time in front of their customers face-to-face. Repeatable, proven sales processes, right? Follow repeatable, proven sales processes drives productivity.

And then lastly, industry-leading technology solutions. Salesforce, AI tools to again drive growth. And together, all of these working in concert to increase the book size that our sellers have, continue to improve the retention of those customers and, of course, drive growth. And on the BDM front, our business development manager front, we do believe that these productivity drivers -- well, they'll transfer over to our business development managers as well and get efficiencies. And we also plan to increase the number of BDMs that we have in the marketplace over the next 3, 4, 5 years, and of course, to drive share gain.

In terms of technology, Carl will spend more time on siteone.com. It's a key differentiator for us. I'm sure the people in this room know what Salesforce is and how that can help us obviously be more efficient, make sure we're contacting our customers and then the incredible reporting that we have that connects to our point-of-sale service that we can really, really get some good reporting and put it in front of them. That allows them to go and sit down with customers and have real meaningful conversations about how we can drive efficiencies in their business. And then lastly, AI. We're highly focused on how AI can drive productivity. Initial focus areas here is meeting recording capabilities. And you can imagine how that could not only help you keep notes, but also follow-up tasks, next steps, sales coaching. And then further as we reach critical mass with something like that, the market insights that we can gain from what's going on in the new construction and what's going on in different markets. So exciting stuff there.

And then winning with the large and major. And so this is where everybody competes. This is where the competitors are coming. And so a little more into this strategy, a few different elements of it. And from a sales side, to continue to get efficiencies in the sales team, to have some of the lower-skilled duties be done by siteone.com or our sales support team to keep the sellers focused on higher skilled duties. Sourcing continue to penetrate and get growth in private brands and local sourcing to drive down cost of goods. On the replenishment side, you've seen some of the fewer touches, fewer touches, more from direct ship, fewer touches. And really these -- and these customers should be using these branches for convenience. Our standard branches around should be for convenience use.

And then the execution is really our sales teams being well connected with the leadership teams of these large customers. Meeting -- coming together on a regular basis and talking about how we can work together to drive cost out of our businesses and win together. And the punchline here really is the lower SG&A in terms of our cost to serve and then lower our cost of goods to provide the absolute best price, and I'd say, cost to purchase materials for our customers.

Okay. And I will turn it over to Shannon to walk through our strategy with small customers.

Thanks. Thank you, Jerry. All right. For those of you maybe I didn't get a chance to meet last night, my name is Shannon Versaggi, and I lead the category, marketing, digital and pricing teams. So as Jerry mentioned, marketing plays a really important role in winning that small customer. Our strategy is to develop programs that engage the small customer across multiple channels, everything from our Partners Program to product marketing campaigns, all the way through merchandising events. Our job is to create programs that support that small customer and create loyalty.

So I'm going to walk you through a few of our key focus areas. We'll start with the Partners Program. Partners Program is our loyalty program, and it's been around for a while, but it was in need of a refresh when we relaunched it back in 2023. We were able to lower the threshold of points needed to unlock benefits for our customers, which was a really big win for small customers. We also introduced points promotions. We can now do 2x the points on a specific purchase or 3x the points on a certain purchase. We work with our suppliers to fund those promotions, or we can prioritize our own private brands. But of course, the Partners Program is not just a points program. As Jerry mentioned earlier, we offer business solutions. These are high-value discounts on programs like marketing or website design, project management, communication tools and even products that our customers use all the time, like fuel or phone services. The success of this program, you can see through the numbers, up to 82,000 members, and that makes up about 70% of our sales, and over half of those customers at this point are small customers.

So on to our customer life cycle strategies. This is really about one-to-one outreach executed by a team of account representatives. The goal here is to reach out to our customers, make them feel valued, make them feel visible. And we do this really across a couple of different priorities. One is new customers. So our account representatives reach out to our new customers to introduce them to all the services that SiteOne provides. Many times, we sign them up for a digital account. Many times we sign them up for the Partners Program. And our small customers, in particular, feel valued and recognized when we take the time to reach out and welcome them specifically to SiteOne.

Another focus is contacting customers we see starting to decline. These customers, it's very easy to reach out, and often we can resolve an issue quite quickly and reengage them. These customers, it's amazing. Sometimes all it takes is a phone call, and they get back involved. We also are able to, through just a few questions, really be able to figure out what the size of these customers are. So when we do come across the larger customers, we hand them off to our sales teams for that white glove service.

Product marketing. I always call this the bread and butter of marketing. This is that traditional marketing that you guys are used to, right, driving traffic and sales into our branches and online. We work with our media agencies to target small customers and deliver creative that is relevant and on brand. Our goal is to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time. We've gotten pretty good at this over the last few years, so much so that we have a significant return on ad spend, and we don't believe we're anywhere near a point of diminishing return.

Moving over to private brands, very much related to product marketing. A lot of our product marketing campaigns support our private brands. I'll talk more about private brands in a few minutes, but marketing is here to support the growth, expansion, launch and overall growth of these particular brands. Every year, we do a brand equity study where we focus on looking at unaided awareness and how that's growing year-over-year. You can see looking at the numbers that we continue to improve that unaided awareness across all of our private brands.

Winning the Hispanic customer. As Doug mentioned, this is a growing force and will continue to be that within our industry. These customers represent small customers, but also can be a little bit larger. Beyond having bilingual associates in our branches, which we do find to be probably the largest factor in servicing that customer well. And by the way, we are currently at 70% of our branches have a bilingual associate. We also thought it made a lot of sense to align our brand with a passion point for this particular segment, soccer. So earlier this year, we launched a partnership with United Soccer League, which is the largest and fastest-growing nonprofessional and professional soccer organization in the country. This partnership includes bilingual brand building, both in games and in broadcast. It includes hospitality opportunities for our customers. And we are a preferred supplier for these stadiums all across the country.

Beyond that, we are still making sure all of our campaigns are bilingual. Our merchandising is bilingual, and we've been running awareness campaigns with this customer audience for the last few years. As you can see, our unaided awareness with the Hispanic landscaping contractor has grown year-over-year. And at this point, we have the highest unaided awareness across all of our competitors.

Merchandising. We used to joke, and many of you may understand this, that if you've only been to one SiteOne branch, you've only been to one SiteOne branch. But over the last few years, as we've focused on bringing our brand to life consistently across our branches, that joke doesn't quite work so well. We are right now upgrading and merchandising about 75 branches a year. That includes improved wayfinding signage, impulse fixtures, end caps and overall displays that make our branches far more shoppable, especially for that small customer. Our end caps and our signage helps to educate them, and I'm always amazed at watching an impulse fixture at work. I can't count the times I've been in a branch, and I've seen a customer pick up something off of an impulse fixture as they walk towards the counter. That would have been an item that maybe they've gotten to the job site without, they hadn't seen it on the impulse fixture. And did I mention these are higher-margin items? So really a big win for both us and the customer.

Training and industry events. So we -- this is an area I think we can really stand out. For example, our SiteOne Universities, Jerry mentioned these earlier, are world-class. We offer training to thousands of contractors every year, partner closely with our suppliers to offer product training and also those continuing education units that are so critical to their state licensing. National and local industry events. We go to all of our line of business trade shows and see thousands of customers at these events. Beyond that, we offer customer trips that drive incremental loyalty and sales. We've had customers that have gone on these same loyalty trips for years and consider them the best in the industry. We've got customers that refuse to miss any of those events on a regular basis.

All right. So to sum up the overall customer growth strategies, we really build strategies that focus on winning customers with targeted strategies that fit that business with where they are. Large customers get that white glove service with a dedicated seller who ensures their pricing is right and that they're driving efficiency in their business. For smaller customers, marketing provides support and our branches provide that world-class service. We offer bilingual capabilities and programs to help these customers grow and make them happy and like they are being successful. We believe these focused strategies will allow us to grow 200 to 300 basis points in market share annually.

So now I'm going to shift focus a little bit and start talking about our line of business and product strategies, starting with the irrigation business. So this business includes valves and fittings, sprinklers, pipe, controllers and wire. There are really 3 major suppliers that supply our core products in this area, and those are Hunter, Rain Bird and Toro, and they make up about 40% to 45% of the business. The balance of the business for categories like wire and pipe as examples, those are much more smaller regional suppliers.

One of the areas we focus on here -- first, I'm going to say, that is a high barrier to entry in this industry. It requires significant inventory levels and a breadth of product assortment. So where we focus really to begin with is we look for areas of opportunity to target legacy system upgrades and ensure we have the program to support those replacement opportunities. As an example, we do a controller trade-in program every year. This is where our customers can bring in their customers' old controllers, we recycle them, and we give our customers a discount on a newer controller that they can take back to their customer with the latest innovation. That's just one example of where we can add and build incremental demand for our product lines.

Smart water-efficient system upgrades are important and are specifically important in certain states and growing in importance everywhere. This is really about educating our customers on the latest regulations through training and communication and ensuring we have those products that meet those new regulations. Technical support is important for large complex commercial jobs that GreenTech organization helps us deliver. And as Jerry mentioned, we can support those larger commercial projects with our value-added services like Project Services, Jerry mentioned this earlier, but this is where we can deliver takeoffs and provide visibility to open bids for our customers.

And finally, this is a really important business, online. We have been developing our overall online capabilities for this space. And at this point, irrigation is our largest online business. We'll continue to focus here, and there's really an opportunity to go after that smaller customer, which we'll be doing later this year.

The agronomics business. This is really about fertilizer, pesticides, seed, equipment, ice melt and pest control. We work with our top suppliers. You guys have probably heard Syngenta, Envu, BASF, Nufarm to make sure we have most relevant, high-performing products. We've got some competitors that are vertically integrated in this space to sell direct and out of large hubs that probably makes up about 10% of the industry.

Overall, this industry has seen steady demand, but we've been able to actually grow above the market over the last couple of years. So we want to keep focusing here on things like LESCO, our private brand. You've heard us mention this several times. This is really all about driving innovation. We will continue to invest in research and development to ensure LESCO has the newest and latest products. We'll also be focused on leveraging our size, to lower cost and deliver more efficiency in our local market assortments. Ongoing line reviews and clear assortments by market help take cost out of programs and deliver the exact products our customers need in those markets.

We also, as Doug mentioned, recognize adjacencies in this category, specifically around equipment and pest control. We've been selling some equipment for years. You all have probably seen the iconic green LESCO spreader on the back of contractors' trucks. We've since expanded into larger pieces of equipment and equipment like handheld power equipment that our customers use every day. In addition, we saw quite a bit of crossover between our turf care customers and pest control. So we've introduced pest control assortments into our branches to help supply those customers.

I'd like to -- at this point, I'll move to the next slide to talk a little bit more about these agronomic sales centers. So Jerry mentioned these, and I want to go into a little bit more detail. When our maintenance customer grows, it requires a little bit of a different approach to win their business. So we are moving to ensure we have the capabilities to support this customer as well. The goal here really is to lower the cost to serve, ensure we have significant room for significant levels of industry -- inventory and make sure we have dedicated sellers with that line of business expertise. Currently, we have 13 of these locations with a high return on sales, and we're targeting over 40 of these by the year 2030. This initiative allows us to better serve that large customer and has become a foundation to our agronomic strategy going forward.

The hardscapes business. So this business includes products like manufactured hardscapes products, think concrete pavers or wall block, natural stone, bulk products such as decorative aggregates or construction aggregates. There are a few MHP manufacturers that we partner with, Belgard, Keystone, Techo-Bloc, Unilock. These suppliers will go after large commercial projects and sometimes can go direct. Natural stone, on the other hand, most often comes from small regional quarries. There are a few national distributors in this space that we compete with, but beyond those few, it really is more regional in terms of competition.

So we're focused on simplifying our offering with in-stock programs that are based in trends and colors. We can also improve the profitability by removing and only having a few suppliers per market. We also are consciously optimizing our product mix, really encouraging more of our customers to buy natural stone and our private brand Solstice, which are more profitable. We also sell the whole system, right? The whole goal is to sell the system when selling the hardscapes project. Hardscape projects often come with accessories like adhesives, polymeric sands, sealers and cleaners, which are very high-margin items. And we're encouraging our teams to sell the whole project. Rarely would you have a hardscapes project that didn't include lighting, maybe some drainage or mulch, which again can help sell the profitability of the project. Sometimes selling the entire project helps our new acquisitions as well. As an example, when we acquire a stone center, we can very quickly add additional lines of business, like lighting, to help them improve their profitability and drive growth quickly as well.

Landscape supplies. This is a category that includes everything from erosion control, things we call consumables, to think, bagged mulch, drainage, edging, synthetic turf, which is growing very quickly, and our long-handle tools. This is a really big line of business for our private brand Pro-Trade. Both synthetic turf and long-handle tools are great examples of where we've used that Pro-Trade brand. In other cases, we have some big supplier partners, like, take Drainage as an example, where we partner with ADS and NDS on opportunities around marketing, merchandising and promotions. Drainage is another great example of where we can work with our suppliers to create that incremental demand by educating consumers on the benefits of adding digital to any project.

As I mentioned earlier, erosion control will be selling through our agronomic sales centers, and then merchandising strategies are really important for these categories. Many of these particular products help complete the project. So they have been integrated throughout our merchandising strategies in our branches. And finally, this is another channel or another product line where the online channel is incredibly important. So we are always building out capabilities to better support and target that small customer online.

Nursery. Well, this is pretty much what you can imagine, right? This is trees, shrubs, color and accents. What makes this line of business a little bit different are our suppliers. Our suppliers are growers, which are small regional nurseries. And one of the most important things they need to understand is what we need grown, right? This is a little bit different. In that, you can't just ramp up manufacturing of plants. Many of these plants take years to grow, some up to 7 years to get to sellable size. And so one of the most important strategies we have here is really around long-range planning. We partner with our best suppliers or our best growers to build out that long-range plan, and we can take cost out of our programs, which you'll hear a little bit more about from Shawn, and we become a preferred distributor for that particular grower. We're also focused on our private brand in this space. You're going to hear more about Portfolio in a minute, but this is all about delivering unique genetics in premium sizes.

And finally, we have an opportunity here to grow our direct business. This requires combining basically orders from a number of different growers, and that's a level of coordination that our competitors can't do quite as easily. We also have the opportunity to take freight costs out of these particular sales due to the fact that we can combine our direct orders with an order from our location, getting to full truckloads. In the end, we never have to touch this product when it's a direct sale, which makes it a very profitable channel for us.

Last but not least, is our lighting line of business. So this is pretty much what you'd expect, lighting fixtures, wire, lamps, transformers and holiday lighting, which is a very quickly growing aspect of this line of business. There's a very low barrier to entry in lighting. And so we see a lot of online pure players compete in this space. While increasingly competitive, we have an opportunity to differentiate with our 2-brand strategy. We've leaned into Hunter FX as one of our brands, which is a very well-known, well-respected brand and then our private brand, Pro-Trade.

The other thing that we're starting to focus on here is holiday lighting. With our acquisition, most recently, of Reinders, which already had some success in this space, we plan to invest more here going forward. As I mentioned, we think lighting goes along with a lot of other projects. So we partner closely with Hardscapes to make sure those projects are sold together. And as I mentioned a minute ago, this is a very hot category online. So we're using our online channels to ensure we have a great shopping experience for that small customer.

Okay. So I've talked through all of our lines of business. I want to take just a minute and talk through our private brands. These are a huge priority for us. And you can see the top 2, LESCO and GreenTech, they're fairly well established. They've been around for a little while. LESCO was a part of an acquisition years ago, was established in 1962 and is one of the most recognizable brands in all of turf care. GreenTech was established over 50 years ago in a spec product used in water management systems for large commercial or institutional projects. GreenTech drives high margin and provides a key technology for our customers.

Now the next 3 brands, Pro-Trade, Solstice and Portfolio are much newer and are growing at a very rapid pace. So Pro-Trade, we launched that back in 2017, and it is a very flexible category. We're able to use it across a lot of categories, so it's very much a fighting brand for us. And this fighting brand is quickly approaching $200 million in sales. Solstice is our natural stone brand. We acquired Solstice Stone a few years ago and have since expanded to 7 unique natural stone collections. This simplifies selling for our associates, expands into new customer segments and drives margin growth. And then finally, Portfolio. Portfolio, the creative, is my favorite. This is a brand we launched back in 2021, is really, as I mentioned before, about unique genetics and premium sizes. Creating this has helped us to have those long-range production planning opportunities with our growers and again, delivers that margin growth.

So private brands overall are both a winning strategy for our customer as well as us. As you can see here, we've been growing penetration of our overall SiteOne sales, 14%, 15%, and we're aiming for 16% going forward. So it is a highly profitable space for us. These products are only at SiteOne, high quality, very well sourced, so therefore, high margin and definitely going to be a big win for us. As we continue to grow that penetration year-over-year, we expect this to deliver 20 basis points of gross margin expansion as we move forward.

So thank you very much for your time. I appreciate your interest in SiteOne.

And with that, I'm going to bring Carl up to talk through digital strategies.

All right. Thank you, Shannon. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. My name is Carl Sukenik, and I lead digital and analytics at SiteOne. So as you've heard, digital is a key lever for how we will drive organic growth. And we've had tremendous success over the last several years, driving digital. But one thing that has remained consistent over that time and will continue to remain consistent is our vision for digital, to deliver a seamless customer experience that's consistent across channels, dependable, fast and tailored to the customer. We save customers' time and money through making their interactions with SiteOne more convenient, and we enhance the interactions between our associates and our customers, and we leverage our existing assets and lower transactional cost-to-serve. And so as we continue to build best-in-class digital experiences, we differentiate SiteOne from our competition and continue to position ourselves as a preferred distributor in the industry.

So to bring some of these experiences and benefits to life, I'd like to highlight 3 customer examples of customers who have derived significant value from digital and have had success adopting. So the first example is an irrigation installer who is actually a long-time customer of SiteOne. This customer maintains a stock of product at their site that their crews pull from every day to go to jobs. And so knowing this, we worked with the customer, introduced them to our stockroom solution on siteone.com and got them set up and reconfigured their stockroom with scannable bin labels for all the areas where they maintain stock. So now as Jerry referenced earlier, as this customer goes through and they need to replenish their stock room, they simply scan with the mobile app, build a basket, adjust quantities and check out in a matter of minutes. And so since implementing this, we've seen their overall sales with SiteOne increase by 38%.

And I'd also add that this is a service that is available for customer self-service on the website, and we see many use it in that capacity, whether it's to set up their stock rooms or their trucks for replenishment or to simply create order books that they keep in their shop for easy reorder.

Second example is a pest management customer. And this was a new customer to SiteOne. And in this case, the seller knew that this customer's primary supplier did not have the same digital capabilities of SiteOne. And so we introduced this customer to the Lists functionality. And this customer was able to build curated lists of products that were customized to what they wanted to purchase most frequently. And now this customer's employees purchase from these lists very quickly and easily, and we've seen share of wallet with this customer increase, to the point where we are now this customer's preferred supplier and about 95% of their sales to SiteOne are now flowing through digital and this Lists mechanism.

The third example is a maintenance design customer who also does a significant snow removal business in the winter months. This customer works across a number of different job sites with different product needs, working all hours of the night. And that's a lot to keep track of, especially when you're in season. We introduced this customer to the mobile app, and now they place orders on-the-go using the app. They keep track of their deliveries. They keep track of their orders. And we've seen sales with this customer increase 30% in total year-over-year because of this convenience that we're offering. And so as you can see, these are kind of 3 examples of customers that are getting significant value, and we're seeing share shift as a result.

So looking at a quick snapshot of our digital business. So we're most heavily concentrated in our irrigation and maintenance categories. And our digital sales over-index with major and larger customers, primarily due to their overall size and the relative sophistication of their processes. We have 67,000 customers who are using digital in some capacity. Now this could be either purchasing or in a non-transactional capacity such as checking product information, checking local branch inventory, checking their personalized pricing or simply paying their bill online. We have 49,000 customers who are purchasing on siteone.com and 10,000 of those are regular purchasers, meaning that they have truly integrated siteone.com and digital kind of into their business processes. And so you can kind of see the continuum here of how we think about advancing our customers from acquiring self-service accounts, transitioning them into purchasing accounts and then developing that regularity and really integrating SiteOne Digital into their business processes.

So this is an important page and one I'd like to take a minute on. So just to orient you to the chart here. So the green bars is digital sales for SiteOne. And you can see that digital sales have grown from $20 million in 2022 to $420 million in the most recent year 2025. The gray bar is total sales impacted by digital. And so essentially, what this is, is among the customers who purchased on digital, what were their total sales with SiteOne? So in 2025, we had $420 million in digital sales. But in total, those customers comprised $1.5 billion in total sales to SiteOne. And this is an important distinction because we see in the data that when customers purchase on digital, they grow at a higher rate in terms of their total overall sales with SiteOne than customers who don't. And so this growth differential is kind of one of the key drivers of organic growth and value back to SiteOne as a whole that we're creating through these digital platforms and getting more customers onboarded to these tools.

And so we've seen tremendous growth here over the last several years, and that's been due to a variety of investments. A few to highlight. We've advanced our category experiences significantly in those times. We've added additional product information, imagery, taxonomies to make categories like nursery and hardscapes more shoppable online. We've increased the personalization on the site. So this year, we implemented a new search platform, which takes into account both past search history to drive better relevancy, not just among our accounts, but also the users within the accounts. So we're getting our customers to the product they're looking for more quickly. We also have advanced our Lists product, right, which is a personalization tool for customers to be able to create curated assortment. So if you're pest management, you can create a list that's specific to pest management or to hardscapes or to irrigation, whatever your interest area is. And so kind of that degree of customization delivers a lot of value and increases efficiency for those customers.

And then Digital Quotes is a tool that we rolled out a couple of years ago. And this allows customers to more easily process kind of complex, multiline-item orders through our digital platforms. So previously, they would call a seller or send them a list of -- and so there's a lot of back and forth. But with Digital Quotes, they can go online, request the quote, it gets priced, they make edits, and then ultimately approve that quote through online, and then that gets processed into an order. So it saves our customers and our associates time and reduces friction in that process and captures a lot more larger transactions through digital.

And so a variety of benefits when we kind of scale the impact to SiteOne overall. So like I mentioned, we see accelerated organic growth from that growth differential impacting more of SiteOne's overall sales. We can achieve labor savings by increasing the efficiency of those customer and associate interactions. When we flow more orders through SiteOne Digital, we have greater pricing control. And so it allows us to reduce some unnecessary discounts along the way. And so that can have a gross margin benefit. And then as we think about pursuing more direct fulfillment from DC initiatives and our sales through siteone.com, that reduces our handling and transportation costs and can lower our overall cost of capital. So a lot of benefits in total to SiteOne from kind of driving digital and digital adoption with our customers.

So while forecasting to exceed $600 million in 2026 is great, we think that, that's really just the beginning, and we still have a lot of runway ahead of us. So we think about the opportunities here in 3 pillars. So the first is to continue to advance the functionality of the platform. And a couple of areas to highlight there has to do with larger transactions and quotes and complex orders. So Jerry mentioned Project Services, a great tool for our customers doing commercial projects. We're bringing that Project Services experience now into siteone.com. And so now that's going to be connected to Digital Quotes. So as customers submit and get takeoffs back on those projects, they can flow that directly into siteone.com and process that order online. So again, kind of creating a more seamless and connected experience across all those different services that we offer.

The second, we're going to pursue more customer-specific use cases, right? So we've talked about leveling up small customers, but also growing larger customers. And so we have strategies here designed to target those different segments through digital. So first, we're doing more integrations with our larger customer systems, so integrating with their ERP system or their business management software that they run, right? So this is -- the opportunity here is to get closer to how they do business and how they currently operate and get siteone.com integrated into that. And then also, we'll be building select business management features for our smaller customers who may not require a full suite and a full software package, but there are certain point solutions that are going to be useful to them. As Jerry talked about, we want to be a trusted partner to our customers, and this is a way to do it, right? It gives them additional features and functionality that helps them run their business better.

And then stockroom and replenishment, right? We talked about this, but when we can get SiteOne Digital integrated into their stockroom and their replenishment behaviors, that is huge share of wallet growth back to SiteOne. So we're going to continue to pursue advancement there.

And then third pillar, looking at broader assortment opportunities and faster fulfillment. We can offer broader assortment through DC direct and also vendor direct opportunities and then more same-day and next-day delivery use cases for our customers that require that speed. And so as you can see, we're really excited about the progress we've made with digital, but also what the opportunity is ahead of us here, not just to grow digital sales, but also to grow the impact that digital can have on SiteOne overall and the impact that can have on organic sales growth. So with that, thank you. I would like to turn it over to Stephanie to discuss EBITDA margin expansion.

Thank you. Thanks, Carl. For those I haven't yet met, I'm Stephanie Hertzog. There goes my water. I'm the Division President for the West. I joined SiteOne 3 years ago. I get to talk to you all today about EBITDA margin expansion, which, based on my conversations at dinner last night, I think many of you are interested in. I will kick us off talking about our focus branches and pricing specifically. And then Shawn Delfausse will cover supply chain, procurement and delivery, and then David Bannister will close out this topic, talking about AI and automation. So with that, I will jump right into focus branches.

So this chart shows you the percentage of our revenue that is coming from branches that are high performing, on the left side of the chart, and greater than 15% return on sales and from branches that are underperforming, on the right-hand side of the chart, that are at less than 6% return on sales. So look, with 680 branches and continuing to be acquisitive, we are likely to always have some underperforming branches. But the opportunity here is for that to look more like a normalized distribution as opposed to what you see today.

I joined SiteOne after the COVID heyday. It sounds like it was a fun time. And look, financially, it was a strong time for the business, but I will tell you from an operational standpoint, that excessive demand and pricing hid some of the gaps that we had in our operations. And so back then, you could be underperforming from a service standpoint at your branch and still deliver financial performance. That is much harder to do today in today's environment. So we have put a bright white light on those branches that are in the less than 6% bucket. And as we've been reviewing those, what we have found is there is, we believe, there's extensive opportunity for EBITDA margin expansion, and we think it's in our control today to do that even if we have a delayed market recovery.

So we've developed a playbook that systematically is intended to move those branches from the right part of the graph and over towards the left. We made substantial progress on our focus branches last year, and we expect to do that again this year. So I'll tell you a little bit about the playbook. We execute this framework at the branch level to assess the branch. Every focus branch has given a sponsor to help work through the framework. And then we develop a performance improvement plan for each branch. So there are 4 pillars: team, financial, customers and operations.

So let's start with team. You have to have the right leaders, a complementary set of skills amongst your leaders, clear roles and responsibilities and strong collaboration between sales and operations. You can usually tell when you walk into a focus branch. It's not clean and tidy. We're not calling out customers by name. There's not this sense of camaraderie amongst the associates at the branch. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of having the right leadership at the branch because you can have a great plan across these other pillars of the framework. But if you don't have the right leaders there day-to-day making those things happen, it's really hard to turn a focus branch around.

Financials. So again, benefit of 680 branches is we can benchmark any branch against a performing one that's similar. And so we take that entire P&L. We start at the top. We start with revenue. Do they have enough revenue? Do they have the right mix of customers? We can go to gross margin. If the gross margin is low, do they have the right assortment? Do they have the right mix? Are they pricing the products correctly? If the pricing looks okay, are we buying it correctly? And then we can look at -- because 1/3 of our product is delivered, we take a close look at the delivery P&L. How many trucks do we have? Are we pricing deliveries appropriately? And then, of course, SG&A, just efficiency at the branch and at the area level. So we can work through those financials and come out with a strong plan for each branch.

On the customer side, we have gotten much -- we've sharpened how we're engaging customers and how we're measuring performance at the branch. So early last year, we launched our sales and service metrics. These are a handful of metrics that we think are the most important ones to our customers. They are as simple as what percentage of the time do we answer the phone when someone calls a branch, to what percentage of the time do we deliver within the window we have promised the customer? Is the branch doing cycle count so that their inventory is accurate at the branch and on siteone.com? And so we are measuring those on a regular basis. They are front and center. And I will tell you, if you're a focus branch, after you've got the team right, this is the very second thing you need to work on because if you're not providing good service at your branch, it's really hard to pull the other levers like increasing pricing or increasing volumes or selling new lines of business, you've really got to have your service tightened up first.

Customer FIRST execution, you heard Doug mention this. So friendly, inquire, respect, solve, thank. This is the training that we give all of our associates. So we've had sales and service academies the last couple of years where we have trained on those sales and service metrics, customer FIRST as well as a host of other training that we're giving our branch associates and sellers. Management routines. We have taken our best branch managers, sellers, area business managers, area sales managers, and we've said, "How do you do your job? What are your routines? What are the metrics that you measure?" And then have trained the rest of our associates that are in those positions on what best-in-class looks like. And then, of course, we measure customer profitability at these branches.

And then the last pillar on operations. Look, during the COVID days, we couldn't keep our branches staffed. We were constantly hiring. You couldn't have enough people. Today, we have to be much more discrete about how many people do we have in the branch, what volumes are they running. So we've developed labor productivity and staffing models to help our branch managers figure out what the optimal staffing is for that branch. Again, delivery and operational efficiency. So we now have Geotabs in all of our trucks. We can tell which trucks are underutilized, and we can either exit those from the system or move them to a branch that's growing that has a greater need.

And then the last one around branch consolidations. Most of our branch consolidations have come out of our focus branch efforts because we look at each branch and we say, "How much revenue they're doing, how much is their rent, what other branches are nearby and could we be more efficient by combining this branch with another one?" So look, I think these efforts are still gaining in momentum. We've built a lot of the core tools, the reporting for driving a sustained improvement. And we're also using these tools now to make sure that we don't have branches falling backwards. So coming off of a healthy place onto our focus branch list.

Let me give you a couple of examples where this has worked. So this branch is a branch in the Southeast. We acquired it in 2021. It's an irrigation branch. In this case, we decided the branch manager was the right person, but he needed to be trained up in the SiteOne way. So we spent some time training him. We exited some low-margin accounts, but then to balance out that drop in revenue from those accounts, we expanded into some other lines of business. So you can see that the revenue there grew by about $1 million. We also were able to take advantage of the SiteOne buying power. So you see the gross margin improved a lot through the lines of business expansion and the SiteOne buying power that we brought in. And then we looked at rightsizing the staffing. And so we were able to actually keep SG&A flat at this branch and handle the additional volume. So therefore, the bottom line went from 3.7% to 15.8% in 2 years.

And this is another example of a nursery and stone center in the Midwest. So in this case, we changed the branch manager. Got a new branch manager in '23, who upgraded his team and the talent there. He expanded the product offerings to include some higher-margin products like bulk and natural stone. We dialed in the product assortment so we could buy better. And so you can see the top line there increased by about $2 million, our gross margin by about 340 basis points. And in this case, we weren't able to keep SG&A flat, but we were able to get some SG&A leverage. We adopted Mobile PRO. We reinvested in some equipment that got us some increased labor productivity. And so net-net, this branch went from 4% to 10% in 2 years, and we think there's more opportunity for it to grow.

So look, we have a well-tuned review system that allows us to look at these focus branches. That said, we're making some improvements to proactively address some of the more common struggles that we're seeing across the network of branches. So the first one there, gold standard locations. Often, we have the right branch manager and the right team, but if they haven't seen excellence, it's hard to deliver it. They just don't know what it looks like. And so we've developed these gold standard branches in each line of business where our teams can go -- and these branches are delivering high financial performance and world-class service. So they can go and see what that looks like and then bring that back to their branch.

Regional operations excellence and LOB teams. So we are organizing our subject matter experts by area of expertise and -- so that they can share and implement best practices across our regions. Now it's important to note, these are not adds. These are people we had in the organization today. We're just reorganizing them so that, a, they're more consistent in what they're delivering; and b, they're more targeted where we need the help the most.

And then on leveraging data and technology. So look, we have a lot of data. So we are continuing the journey to get that data in a format that's easily accessible and very actionable for our leaders, so they can clearly see where they have gaps and go work on that. And we're also still on our journey on technology adoption. So look, we've adopted tools like siteone.com, salesforce.com, Mobile PRO, our delivery systems, but getting consistent excellent execution is still something that we're striving to achieve. So look, while the turnaround examples that we showed you demonstrate what's possible, these things will help make that repeatable and scalable over time.

Am I on the right -- one too many. There we go. So SiteOne pricing. I'm going to switch gears a little bit and talk about pricing as a strategic advantage. We have a very clear pricing strategy, combined with an excellent team that we believe is giving us a competitive advantage. So on the strategy, it is not to be the lowest price all the time. It is to deliver the right price for the right customer on that project. So sometimes you have a customer who's being sole-sourced for a high-end residential job. Their customer is less price sensitive. They can pass through a higher margin. Then you have another customer who might be doing a government bid job, 3 bids and a buy, the lowest price is going to win, our pencil needs to be very sharp for that customer. So we want to be in tune with the customer situation and price accordingly. And we are really about optimizing margin dollar growth. And that's how our sellers are incented in our branches as opposed to just top line growth.

We have, again, a lot of data and very good data, and it's been cleaned up now. So very clear SKUs. So we are able to see what are those known value items, what are those items that customers are buying repeatedly that have, frankly, very transparent pricing across the market. We want to be very competitive on those products. And then as we create the basket of what we're selling to the customer, we have opportunities to input higher-margin products into that basket. Our field still has a lot of autonomy in regards to pricing. So while we have a lot of data and a strong central team and broad benchmarks, we believe our field is the most in tune with our specific customers in their markets. And so they get suggestions, but at the end of the day, they control the pricing.

Now having said that, we also give them data so that they can see where they may be having margin leakage. So for example, you have a customer service rep at a counter who's doing a lot of overrides. Maybe that's unnecessary. Customer-specific pricing. We get a list of, "Hey, these look like maybe they're a little lower than they need to be." But we also get the, "Hey, these look like they might be a little on the high side." And if that customer went out and got a competitive bid, you might be challenged. So we take all that data into account in the field and adjust pricing.

And then that strategy is great, but without the team we have in place, it wouldn't be possible. We have this great centralized team who is very integrated with our field and our category leaders and our suppliers that are making this happen. So net-net, that enables us to grow gross margin and grow market share. Now one of the things I've really appreciated about this team over the last few years is we've been in a very volatile costing environment. So obviously, a lot of inflation during COVID, deflation over the last few years, tariffs and most recently, fuel surcharges. And so this team has been able to act very quickly as those changes come through, adjusting them in the system, communicating to the field, helping communicate to customers. So we really appreciate the support that we have from that pricing team.

And David is going to talk to you more about AI, but I wanted to mention it here because we think AI is going to be a really powerful tool to help both our pricing team and our field teams that are working on pricing. So look, as strong as that team is and as well in tune as our people in the field are, we do tens of millions of transactions a year. So they can't possibly look at each and every transaction. But we think AI agents can. And so their ability to look at each and every job and understand that specific competitive situation, each line item and where we price it, we think that there's going to be a lot of opportunity when you do that at every branch, for every job, for every customer to have some substantial impact.

Data queries. So we get -- again, a lot of data, a lot of questions out of the field. When you go ask those questions, somebody get -- they may or may not have the ability to look through the data, so they got to go to a central place that takes a couple of days. And so having this at our fingertips where we all have our own analysts and can get the answers to those questions quickly. So for example, where are we overusing customer credits? And being able to get that response in real time, we think that's going to add some value to our field teams as well.

And then just AI optimization. So again, we have different customers, different lists of materials, different competitive pressures. Historically, our negotiation guidance has been generally broad benchmarks in our local seller knowledge. So being able to be more in tune with, for example, that product looks like we need to be -- the win rates aren't as high. Maybe we need to get more aggressive on the pricing, or this other product, we need -- we may be leaving some money on the table.

Product recommendations. One of the main ways that we can get cost down is by substituting in our private label products. And so identifying those opportunities, not just on the big jobs where we know we've got to sharpen our pencil, but on every job that comes through can give us opportunity to raise margins. So a lot of opportunities that AI is going to arm our teams with as we get that in place.

So with that, I will turn it over to Shawn to cover our next topic.

All right. Thanks, Stephanie, and good morning, everybody. I know I've had a chance to meet most of you, but for those that I haven't, my name is Shawn Delfausse, and I have responsibility over our supply chain, operational excellence and IT functions. Yesterday, with many of you, we had the opportunity to deep dive into our distribution operations. This morning, we're going to give you a broader perspective on the opportunities we have across the supply chain.

When we talk about our supply chain, we think about it in 3 key pillars: efficient inventory management, optimizing transportation. When we talk about transportation, that's both inbound movements to our branches and in our DCs and then customer delivery. And then low-cost distribution models. Over the last 10 years, we spent a lot of time building core capabilities, specifically implementing the systems and technologies that we needed, building out the team as well as upgrading the talent across supply chain and then just implementing core capabilities and functionality we needed to support the growth aspirations at SiteOne. So made a lot of progress, delivered a lot of value, but we think there is still significant value we can deliver going forward in supporting our branches, adding value to our customers and driving profitability, and that's what we want to walk through in the next few slides.

So let's start with inventory management. So I'm going to hit a little bit on our turns goals over the next 5 years, and then I'll hit on a topic that came up in Shannon's conversation around sourcing opportunities to expand margin. When it comes to inventory turns, you can see how we compare against the peer group about middle of the pack. As we look forward, and as we have additional sales growth, as we normalize our distribution center rollout, and then also, we've launched a lot of new programs, especially import private brand programs, and as those mature, and then finally, with no major macroeconomic global supply chain disruptions, which is a big assumption given the last 5 to 6 years, we think there's an opportunity to achieve 4.0 turns by 2030, with a longer-term goal of 4.5-plus turns down the road.

A couple of key things I want to hit on that will help contribute towards that. I talked about new programs, especially private brand import. When we launch these new programs, we purposely focus on the customer experience. We want to be deep in our inventories, right, to have the product in stock to drive sales and be successful. As those mature, we will dial in our replenishment and our inventory, and we believe we'll be able to drive more productivity.

The second part of this is our assortment. So we are in the process of defining our assortment for every branch, every item in that branch across all of our product lines. We're about 60% of the way through with the goal of getting to 100%. And there's kind of 2 parts to this in terms of how it supports our efforts. One is, it clearly signals to our customers the items that we intend to be deep in stock. That, in turn, allows them to go to their customers and bid confidently knowing we'll have the products that they need for the job. The second part of this, obviously, as we dial in that assortment, we'll get more efficient turns on those items as well as start working our way out of some of those other ancillary items that we may have stocked previously, helping to drive the turns improvement. Improving turns to 4.0 by 2030 will give us improved working capital and operating cash flow of about $100 million.

So let's turn to the sourcing opportunities. So Shannon hit on this a little bit, and I want to provide a little more color. So we're at different stages of maturity when it comes to our sourcing. We talked a little about it yesterday with some of the efforts we've made in our irrigation, agronomics, some of our landscape and lighting businesses. We're a little more mature on the sourcing side, being able to deliver that at best possible cost. We still have some room for opportunity. But on the nursery and hardscapes lines of business, we still have some more room to grow there. So I want to hit on a couple of key themes there. We've already talked about it, assortment. So we're using data to dial in our assortment on those product lines. As we do that, that allows us to drive both SKU and supplier consolidation. So when we go and negotiate, we can get best possible terms and cost.

And I want to elaborate a little more on the final bullet point around planning. And I think nursery is a great example for that. So if you think about our nursery growers, right, they are planting materials, and then it is years, right, later that they are selling that material. There's naturally risk, timing risk involved with that. They price that risk into their product. As we invest in forecasting capabilities that we now have today to do 1, 2-plus years forecasting, we can partner with them more closely. We know our core items we need to be in stock, and we can better partner with them on making commitments. They're allowed -- that derisks their side of the equation, and they can pass better pricing on to SiteOne. At the end of the day, we believe this will drive meaningful margin expansion through 2030. Eric will outline this in a little more detail later in the presentation.

So we dove into this quite a bit yesterday, but let me summarize on the distribution and transportation, logistics side, where we're focused in terms of driving leverage. We've developed a meaningful distribution center footprint that has capacity, and we're able to flow more programs, additional suppliers through that platform, and that will drive leverage across our business. Number two, even without driving additional product flow through our distribution sites, we have opportunities to optimize, right? One is on the labor side. As we implement engineered labor standards, put in LMS, we'll be driving efficiencies across every process inside the 4 walls of our building.

Additionally, on the storage side of things, we're optimizing our storage capabilities, how can we store more product, flow more product through the current footprint that we have across the network. And then finally, on the transportation side, both inbound and outbound from the distribution center, how can we do things like improving our backhauls. On the inbound side, pooling less than truckload shipments to have more efficient shipments coming into our distribution centers and on the outbound side, driving more cube and utilization there.

We've hit on this -- Carl hit on this a little bit. The third item is enabling drop ship capabilities out of our distribution centers. Really don't do much drop ship today. And there's an opportunity to hit a unique need in our end segments to better service customers that require fast, efficient parcel shipping, and we're piloting that -- and we'll be piloting that over the next few months out of our distribution centers.

And then finally, when we think about transportation, not just in our DC, but our entire network, think about all inbound movements to a branch, to a distribution center, transfers amongst our branches, pretty much everything except the outbound customer delivery side of the business. We want to own more of that freight. We actively manage about 55% of that freight today. Our goal is to get to 75%. That does a couple of things for us. It allows us to drive more freight through our transportation management system. When we do that, we have better visibility to that product. We can plan better as an organization. We've got better visibility to carrier performance and can make better carrier selections down the road. This really allows a more frictionless process when it comes to invoice and payment for our carriers, which simplifies our back-end operations as well as our carriers. And finally, it just allows us to put more volume through our competitive bid process so we can ensure we always have the best balance of cost and service in the market.

So let's now talk about customer delivery. As Stephanie mentioned, over 1/3 of our sales are delivered to our end customer. So we must be best-in-class from a service standpoint and highly efficient in how we do this. If you go back to 2016, we were largely -- put this on the market. It was a manual process. Our customer experience was inconsistent as best as we really didn't give our local teams a playbook to go execute deliveries consistently. We also really didn't give them the data they need to make informed decisions, especially when it came to procurement of fleet vehicles.

So fast forward to today, and our focus has really started around the customer experience. So we built a defined process in how we were going to execute our customer deliveries around the best-in-class system and roll that out company-wide. As part of that, we enabled functionality to provide alerts, updates, proof of delivery, all of the things that we've come to expect in our daily lives when it comes to deliveries. As a result of that, we've achieved a delivery Net Promoter Score of 91% plus each of the last 2 years. On top of that, we added a centralized fleet and delivery team. Stephanie talked about data. We organized our data, and we're now giving better information than ever to our local teams so they can make better decisions about their business, procurement decisions to help optimize their business.

So we've done quite a lot, but I'm probably much more excited about where we're going because we have a significant opportunity to drive additional profitability and improve service within our delivery space. So there's kind of 3 key themes that I'm going to hit on. The first of which, if you think about how we do delivery today, it still is primarily optimized at a branch level or across a few branches, really not optimizing across entire MSA. You saw Jerry put up a slide about a large MSA that we have and how they operate together, and that's probably one of the best examples. We want to enable that in every single market. So we're using our technology, using the experts within that market to create a truly optimized delivery operation, drive utilization of our fleet vehicles, our drivers.

The second part of this is making sure that we are enabling capabilities to hit the end customer segments with the best delivery mechanism. So we talked about our branch delivery. We've hit on the agronomic sales center concept that is going to enable better, more efficient delivers of large orders to our customers in the agronomic space. Drop ship capabilities out of the DCs will allow us to be more effective in our parcel direct-link capabilities, e-commerce, certain e-commerce type orders. And then Jerry also talked about direct from supplier. That today, we leverage that, but it is -- got some friction in the process. We intend to improve that process so we can drive even more, especially in the nursery space.

So across those 3, when you add them all together, there's a significant opportunity for us to go after to reduce overall net delivery expense while also improving the customer experience, and we'll outline that opportunity again a little more later as Eric gives the financial update.

So what does that do to our overall network? So this is kind of when you think about fulfillment from SiteOne, this is how we look today. The backbone is our branches. 90% of what we fulfill is fulfilled delivery or walk-in traffic to our branches. We do some direct ship from supplier, and then we have some agronomic sales center presence that does good bulk delivery in that space, right? But as we enable these capabilities, this will shift and shift to the better as we're able to more effectively service different end segments. So we believe drop ship capabilities I already see will allow us to hit a different segment and grow fulfillment to about 5%. Agronomic sales centers, as we roll those out to more markets, could be in the neighborhood of 15%. These are all for illustrative purposes.

Branches will continue to be the backbone of how we fulfill and service our customers. And then as we create a more frictionless direct from supplier process, especially on the nursery side of the business, that will grow as well. The important note on this is this is not just shifting fulfillment across buckets. This is actually allowing us to more effectively target different segments and serve them better to grow overall market share. So at the end of the day, what we're left with is a dynamic, highly cost-effective, high-service-level fulfillment network that allows us to go gain market share.

So in summarizing, these are most of the initiatives that we've hit on today. In the middle of the slide, you'll see we provide a maturity assessment to give you an idea of kind of where we think we are in terms of optimizing each of these capabilities. In some cases, we're further along, and we're really in the optimization. Some we're still building and realizing. We highlight on the right side the boxes where we think have the most opportunity to drive profitability and value for SiteOne.

So a common theme that you're hearing today, right, we're really excited about what we've done and proud, but we really have our eyes set on going forward and how we continue to support our branches, drive value for our customers, continue to be the distributor of choice for our suppliers and add shareholder value.

So with that, I'm going to turn it over to David Bannister, our CIO. Thank you.

Good morning. David Bannister, Chief Information Officer here at SiteOne. I joined SiteOne just under 10 years ago. And I got to say we've been busy. We've gotten a lot done in the last 10 years, namely selecting and implementing our core technology platforms that run our business. As Doug said, there wasn't much to start with back in 2014, didn't have an ERP. So we implemented that in Microsoft Dynamics. We also implemented our inventory demand planning system in Blue Yonder, implemented a transportation management system, our customer delivery platform, Salesforce as our CRM in 2021. And most recently, we implemented Manhattan's Warehouse Management System in support of our fifth distribution center we opened in Wisconsin at the end of last year.

We've also put great effort into stabilizing and securing our critical systems to minimize technology disruptions to the field. And importantly, we've consolidated and centralized our data and built a rich suite of reports and real-time dashboards to help our leaders make timely and accurate business decisions. But we're not done yet. As Shawn mentioned, we're kind of shifting from build to optimize. It's a similar story in IT. We're going to continue to enhance our point of sale and Mobile PRO to better serve our customers, getting them out of the branches quickly and back on the job site to install our products. Shawn also mentioned unlocking supply chain efficiencies. Obviously, technology is going to play a major role in that through deeper integrations of our supply chain systems. And we're going to continue to leverage our data through advanced analytics to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities and surface those through Salesforce to activate our sellers.

Finally, we're going to continue to develop and execute on our AI strategy. So on AI, obviously, there's a lot of potential that we see for AI across all of SiteOne, which we categorize in these 3 major areas. The first of all being improving our customer experience, the second being increasing associate productivity and the third being in back-office automation. It's a wide scope. There's a lot we can go after, and it's really not hard to spend money on AI right now. But the core of our AI strategy is to take a more targeted, cost-effective approach, by focusing on a small number of high confidence priorities at a time, making sure that we properly execute and realize value before moving on to the next.

So we've identified these 4 initial priorities that are currently in various stages of execution. Jerry talked about adding AI for sales enablement through providing a meeting assistant, which will help transcribe and summarize customer meetings, add those notes into Salesforce, extract action items, help with automating follow-ups. The goal here is to reduce administrative overhead, allowing sellers to spend more time with customers and increase the size of their books. Jerry also mentioned Project Services. Again, this is value-add service for material takeoffs, helps our customers win more jobs. And when they win, we win, they buy more product from us. Doing a material takeoff is currently a very manual effort. With AI, we'll be able to significantly lower the cost of performing a material takeoff while also reducing turnaround time, which will allow us to offer that service to more customers.

Stephanie talked about AI within pricing optimization. Again, here, it's in quickly detecting margin leakage and correcting it. We'll also be including pricing guidance, resulting in more competitive bids and therefore, a higher win rate. And finally, in the next section, Joe is going to talk about our robust associate training curriculum. We're going to augment that with an AI-enabled role play agent, which will allow associates to put their training into practice by simulated face-to-face interactions. This tool provides real-time feedback and coaching. So think about a seller using this to practice a sales pitch or preparing to handle a difficult price objection conversation.

So in summary, we feel good about our systems. We've got great foundational data, and we're excited and ready for AI.

I'll now hand it back over to Doug for Q&A.

Thanks, David. All right. So we're going to have presenters come up, and we're going to take the next kind of 15, 20 minutes. We'll take a break right after this. So if you're looking for a break, it's coming. And just take any questions you have at this point. I would preface this by -- Eric is going to quantify these initiatives and lay out a walk for you. So if you're eager to see that, you'll get to see that at the end of the presentation to see how this all kind of fits together and contributes to our path forward. But at this time, just dig in any questions that you have of anything that you've heard this morning.

This is Charles Perron from Goldman Sachs. First, I guess my question is for Jerry. Despite several unique initiatives that you guys have put in place in the last few years, I think you noted that the share that you have with large customers remain sub-20%. What are some of the key factors that have limited your ability to capture share with those larger customers? And where do you think it can go over time?

I don't know that limiting our ability with the larger customers -- I mean, we've continued to grow share with them. I mean there's a focus on small and medium. But I don't know that there's factors and maybe there's other comments on that on -- struggling to grow with.

Yes. I think that's just where we are. I mean it's a very fragmented market, 13% overall. We obviously have our highest share with those major customers. We feel like we're winning there. But it is a more competitive -- I mean, there's a lot of other competitors aimed at those customers. And so we think our share gain there will be more of the 100 basis points a year, as Shannon outlined, better than the market. With the small customers, small, medium customers, we're thinking 400 to 500 share gain with those. But there's nothing limiting us there. In fact, we have strength. The strength of SiteOne has traditionally been with those large customers.

David Manthey with Baird. So I'm thinking about also the large customers. One of the key risk factors that investors are concerned about right now is the private equity money that's coming in and rolling up some of these customer groups, the TruGreen and Senske and LawnPro, et cetera. I think, Doug, you said earlier that, that would be a lower gross margin, and I think that makes some sense. But I'm wondering somewhat of what Jerry was talking about with some of these more efficient ways of dealing with larger customers, meaning consignment, digital, some of these other things. Is it possible that SiteOne, given your breadth and your capability, that you can target that group, even though you expect to grow faster in the smaller segment, but that group, in particular -- and it won't necessarily mean degradation in margin. It might mean maybe corporate average based on some of those factors that you can bring to bear?

Yes, absolutely. And Jerry talked to some of those tactics. The average sales centers, shipping direct from our manufacturers, driving out the cost of sales through siteone.com and our CRM. That is our strategy is with those large -- and Jerry mentioned it, and Jerry might want to talk to how this happens. When you're bidding on commercial work, you're also leveraging your suppliers for specific jobs for specific customers, right?

So it's not -- you're not just using the standard cost you negotiated at the beginning of the year. So all of those tactics will allow us to continue to gain share with those large customers without lowering our gross margin, right? We're essentially getting to a lower cost point.

Yes. And I think, Doug, on your slide, it had a neutral sort of. And I think we're very optimistic about what we can do. I mean I think there are a lot of things we're working on that could really, really give us an advantage.

Yes. I would add to that. I think usually there's some short-term pain in the beginning. They acquire somebody, we've had a nice high margin with them. Now they want the cheaper pricing, and it takes a little time to get those efficiencies into the system. But long term, we should be better positioned to service those customers than anyone else. And the data that we can provide them across their network of customers, we should be able to utilize that.

Yes, they start to look more like us.

Keith Hughes from Truist. A question for Stephanie. You had this slide with the branch margin breakout, and you still got a large number of branches with low single-digit margins. Now I know there's probably some geographies where branches probably can never be at the top, just given the reality of that geography. Is there -- when you look at the branch network, is there a minimum margin number they have to hit where you just have to make a decision, you don't want to be in that market anymore?

Jerry can top me off on this. I would say it's not really market specific. I mean I don't think we have any geographies that are just generally underperforming. So we have every line of business and every geography has branches that perform. So we should be able to get them all, maybe not to the 15% or the high far end, but we should be able to get them out of that focus area. I mean sometimes the branch is just so small that it doesn't really make sense, and so that's where you see some of the branch consolidation. But aside from that, I don't know any geographies that are just...

Not geography. It could be the customer mix in a branch. They have attracted a certain customer mix or they've gone after a certain mix and it's not balanced, which creates the margin...

Change that mix to get the margin up.

And I would reinforce that. I've been in some industries where some geographies because of the structure of the -- this would be more manufacturing, the structure of that market just are unfavorable. We really don't see that in wholesale distribution in landscaping across the country. I mean you can find your way to profitability and really even the -- in fact, some of the tougher markets in terms of if you look at pricing competition, we have more of our profitable businesses. And so it's -- we're capable of making very good returns in really all markets. You shouldn't say all, but virtually all markets.

Collin Verron, Deutsche Bank. I just wanted to touch on the sales center strategy. Can you just delve into that a little bit more? How do you plan to increase that 5% of revenues to 15%? And how much of this is shifting sales from the branches to really being a market share opportunity? And then maybe just touch on the current sales center footprint and how much you need to build that out?

Yes. I think it's -- we started the sales center strategy when we bought Green Resource in North Carolina, and they had 5 locations. They were a large agronomics player. And what we found with Green Resource is that we were able to grow our small business out of our branches, and Jerry can probably talk to specifics of this, at the same time, they were growing with a large customer. So we've started to replicate that across the country.

Those branches do -- will get fed with some of that large business that we're serving out of our smaller branches, right? So right now, we're kind of serving those customers. It's not as cost effective. And so we're not as profitable. So there'll be some cannibalization of that. But the net growth is pretty powerful as we add new growth to the agronomic service center.

But also when you pull that large business out of a small branch, it allows them the freedom to fill that up with small customers, small, midsized customers, which is the way they should be growing and the way we do it in North Carolina. So we think what we get is our cost to serve goes down steadily as we're putting in these branches. And again, these are leased branches, et cetera. So there's not a large capital expenditure with these branches.

But we're growing on both sides of the equation. We're growing with the larger customer because we're more competitive, we're more focused. And we're growing with a smaller customer because our branches get the premium to do that. Jerry, you've seen that in action.

Yes. And I would add, there's also margin expansion opportunity here because we believe there's margin expansion opportunity because we have customers that we're selling to some of these larger customers through the smaller locations. And we're selling at, in some of these cases, margins that we would like to be able to push them through more of a sales center.

So we have markets where we're taking care of that. And as we stand those up, those revenues and those services will flow through the sales centers, freeing up, like I said, capacity for the branches to bring on more small customers. And those margins better fit through those sales centers versus the standard branch today.

Andrew Carter, Stifel. So I want to go back to the question on consolidation of your customers. I mean, do you see that the industry could become significantly consolidated? Do you see the larger guys as they get scale, massively outperform? And I guess I'd go a different way with that. Do you see any risk that as some of these commercial guys get larger, they can just go direct to supplier and kind of put in some of these capabilities themselves, therefore, kind of commercial becomes melting iceberg for some parts of the business?

Yes. We take the consolidation in context. I mean there has been consolidation going on in the landscape industry for 5 to 7 years. But there is a high influx of small customers always feeding this industry, right? So the industry fundamentally, the fragmentation of it is moving very slowly. Let's put it that way. The PE active involvement tends to be very focused on commercial maintenance.

Now there's the TruGreen and the big residential players that are already a big size, et cetera. But the commercial maintenance space, as they roll that up, we still have to service those customers. I mean those customers operate the same way that they've always operated. It's a very structured. They have 2-year contracts. It's a very kind of steady demand. And so with our national accounts team, we can marry up with them, get them very competitive prices.

A lot of that would come out of these agronomic sales centers for the maintenance side of that business. So we don't feel like there's a large risk of them going direct. It would be very difficult for them to do that with their business system. And we line up -- we compete in agronomics with manufacturers that are integrated. I think you mentioned that, Shannon.

So we kind of already compete with manufacturers, but we have manufacturing partners that are just as strong as they are, and they're just flowing through us. And with our size, with those partners, we're buying the bags that the product goes in. We're getting involved with buying the urea that they use. We have setups where we can replicate that kind of manufacturer direct, right? So, no, I think we're very strong, capable of competing in that space as these roll-ups happen.

And with our national accounts group, we're highly coordinated. It really gives us an advantage over our local distributor competitors when you service a BrightView or a Yellowstone or some of these big folks that expect consistency, and we can offer that.

And I'd add that.

The private equity roles. I mean their biggest cost for those commercial maintenance providers is labor. And so that seems to be where the PE firms are really spending their time with these companies is how do you optimize the labor on each job, not so much. So if anything, we can help them because we can deliver the product to the site or to their shops, as opposed to their guys having to come through our branches. And so those are the opportunities to work together on the labor front, more so than on the cost of the products.

Lynn, Ryan over here.

Ryan Merkel, William Blair. My first question, Doug, you mentioned accelerating share gains. Are you delivering 2 to 3 points of share gain when you look at '25 and '26? And what are the 1 or 2 initiatives you're most excited about? And then the second question was on digital. It looks like it's really accelerated. If you look at like the last 2 years, maybe 50% growth this year. So what's sort of unlocking that growth? And then what kind of growth should we expect going forward for digital?

Yes, a lot of questions there. We believe we're taking share, right? And when you look at '24, '25 and what we're doing today, I'm excited about all those initiatives we talked about. Digital, obviously, is high up on the ability to gain market share. But so with Salesforce, so is our small customer efforts, et cetera, so are some of our product strategies. So we focus on a lot of ways to gain share. And keep in mind, we're gaining share in those adjacencies like synthetic turf and erosion control, where we're just a minor player with lots of ways.

So we believe in multiple strategies to gain market share, and we think it's consistently paying off because they've matured, and you can see the digital curve. Digital should continue to grow, right? We believe that it's not unreasonable to expect kind of 30%, 30%, 40% digital down the road, and that would be online sales when you look at Watsco or some of the more advanced Ferguson, some of our peers and other industries are certainly there, and we plan to get there in terms of landscaping. So yes, we're excited about that. And we think we're going to just continue to gain strength. You can see as digital ramps up, it's just -- our customers become stickier, and it helps us.

And we have some areas today that already have 30% going through digital.

We do. Yes. And so yes, we've got multiple ways to get there. Some of those will work better than others invariably. So the key to life is Plan B, right? So we want to have plan A, B, C and D to gain market share.

Jeff Stevenson from Loop Capital. I just wanted to follow up on digital with a question for Carl. Just on the slide regarding digital sales growth and total sales impact, I wondered if you could dive more into how your digital strategy has helped increase your share of wallet with large customers who are early adopters and the long-term opportunities to drive share gains with smaller customers as well.

Yes, definitely. That growth differential that we see is something that we're very proud of and a key reason why we invest and continue to invest in digital. I think with large customers, there have been a couple of key features that we've launched, things that allow them to access digital for larger projects like digital quotes that's been helpful to them. And then also some of the direct integrations that I talked about, particularly with business management software that they operate.

And so again, just getting closer to their business operations has been helpful in driving adoption with them. With smaller customers, I think it starts with just the blocking and the tackling on the site every day, right? So quality product information, accurate pricing, accurate inventory and just continuing to build that credibility and then also building that credibility with our field, our branches, our sellers so that they can evangelize that to the small customers day in and day out in the branches.

It's a little bit more challenging to onboard small customers just because there's so many of them, and they're disparate. But I think we're doing a good job of building that credibility and kind of leveraging our field to carry that message forward.

This is Matt Johnson from UBS. I guess we could talk about the focused branches. It seems like this is something that's gone on for maybe 1 or 2 years at this point. And it seems, I think, in the slide, maybe 1/4 of your branches are still below 6% EBITDA margins, and you guys have pointed to some pretty concrete early wins, I think, and it could be things as simple as just realigning priorities at the branch level.

But I guess on a go-forward basis, I would imagine a lot of those, I guess, easy conversations have already been had. So I guess how do you think about just the improvement of those remaining branches moving forward and kind of what the trajectory that could look like moving forward?

Yes. I think overall -- I'll take it and then you can jump in there. It's going to be a multiyear effort, right? I mean we made -- we really started this in -- aggressively in '24, once we kind of saw the results coming out of COVID. Last year, we made good progress. But we're expecting 2, 3 years of just steady improvement with those focused branches, move us more toward that normal distribution curve.

And so we'll make progress this year, and that's going to help us. This is part of the walk in our return on sales going up is the focus branch should be a consistent contributor to that over the next 2 to 3 years including this year.

I would just add, it tends to be a multiyear effort. So for example, last year, we made great progress. A bunch of those branches are still in that lower column there. So we've got to make that same amount of progress again this year and maybe even one more year before they really graduate and get out of that bar and into the other bar. So it tends to take some time to move those efforts.

Some things are quick and easy, right? You got to cut -- you've got too many people at the branch, cut one, okay, fine. But when you're talking about growing -- changing your customer makeup, adding additional lines of business, adding additional products, those things just tend to take a little bit longer.

Yes. Sometimes the more simple the business is, sometimes it can flip really quickly and sometimes it takes more time.

Matt Bouley, Barclays. Very similar line of questioning, and I think you were basically starting to answer it there around the focus branches. My question was going to be around -- by definition, there's always going to be a lowest quartile, I guess, as we have this distribution. But what's the difference between the lower-performing branches where it seems like you've got a pretty good line of sight and the lower-performing branches where you just know it's going to be a lot harder?

Kind of what is that difference? And within that, is the fragmentation of the market also part of it. And so, just simply consolidating that market may also be what it ultimately takes for the more challenging branches?

I'll take the first stab at it. Again, it tends not to be a market issue. It starts with the team issue. So obviously, if you have to replace the leader, you're into a year there, right? Because you get the new leader on board. New leader's got to come on board, catch the falling knife, turn it around, rebuild the team, move it forward, right?

So when it comes to team changes, especially leader changes, it's going to take longer than others. If you have one, which is the example you showed with the acquisition, you have the leader. It's just the training. It's just -- those go faster, much faster, right? So the team is an element that creates some slowness and some stickiness, right?

And by the way, you can replace a leader with a leader that you're not -- your batting average isn't going to be 1,000, right? So you can also have double replacements, which take you more time. The second is product mix and customer mix. Those are going to take longer.

If you're a mix -- if you're too indexed toward large customers, you don't have enough small, you're going to have to get marketing involved. That's going to take some time. The ones that are just have too much in staff, the SG&A cuts can come pretty easily, right? So that would be the factors. I mean, Jerry and Stephanie, you can add to that.

But those tend to be the factors that cause you to take a couple of years to turn a branch instead of just kind of quickly. Also the size of the branch, a larger branch that's a focused branch is going to take you longer to change than a small standard branch just by the complexity of the product mix.

If you get a full-line branch that's underperforming, you've got to make changes in nursery, hardscapes, irrigation, that's a harder lift than just a standard branch doing irrigation agronomics and you can change a couple things and get it right.

So does that make sense? So -- and look, these branches are across product groups, are across geographies. If they're all in one place or whatever, it might be a little easier. But we just -- we have a lot of work to do. And as we described it, we went through the COVID, everything looked great. They came out of that. They weren't.

We know how to fix them, and we're focused on them. We're confident we can get there. I think we've used our time. I know we've earned a break here. If you take a break, we'll start again at 10:30. We've got about 12 minutes to get a break, get a drink.

Awesome. Good morning, everyone. Look, we really appreciate this group taking the time to come and learn more about SiteOne. I had the opportunity to meet with most of you last night. But for those I didn't have the opportunity to meet, my name is Daniel Laughlin. I recently rejoined the company at the first of the year after having been part of the inaugural strategy and development team formed in 2013. I'm thrilled to be back leading the team and excited to walk you through the future of Acquisitions and Greenfields at SiteOne. Before we talk about the future, I think it's important to understand the past. Since spinning out of John Deere in 2013, we've completed 108 acquisitions totaling roughly $2.1 billion in annualized sales.

Our average acquisition operates at roughly $20 million in annualized sales. And historically, you can see we've had a relatively normal distribution across smaller to larger deals. You can see 5 of our largest transactions account for close to 30% of the $2.1 billion in annual sales. I'm also happy to say we started the next 10-year stretch off nicely with a large deal in Q1 with Reinders, which has been mentioned previously today, and we'll touch on a bit later. There continue to be several large acquisition opportunities in the market. However, we're really excited about what we refer to as the mid-majors, which are those deals between $10 million and $75 million in annual sales.

So we're super proud to have established ourselves as the acquirer of choice in the landscape supply industry over the past 12 years. There's a number of key elements why we believe we're the acquirer of choice. I won't walk you through all these in detail, but I would like to briefly touch on some of them. For starters, we provide owners the autonomy to run their business within the context of the broader SiteOne strategy. We're solely focused on the landscaping industry. This is very attractive to our owners who've been doing that their whole careers. We're a very financially strong organization with a great reputation and a long list of references from former owners, many who continue to work with the SiteOne team.

Trust and integrity are huge parts of our acquisition process. We really pride ourselves on that. We do what we say we'll do, and we're incredibly transparent throughout the deal process. As many of you know, the landscaping industry is a tight-knit community. We hear the positive feedback often from owners who've had friends or family or competitors partner with us. When we talk about our integration approach, we're super careful and intentional in the changes that we make. We like to take the time to learn businesses as we look to increase sales and profitability over time. Flexible deal structure is something we pride ourselves on as well. We typically try to find win-win situations for owners, and we've been very experienced in providing these flexible deal structures over time.

A quick highlight, approximately 85% of our deals have been sourced outside of the competitive process. This is really a tribute to our stellar reputation and the relationships we've developed with owners over the years. So who do we target for acquisitions? It's really pretty easy. We look for strong owners with strong teams. We want to partner with market leaders. These are the companies that are highly regarded in their line of business by our shared customers. We focus on high-performing companies with accretive financial performance and the ability and desire to grow. And we also target businesses that fill in gaps in our market coverage and enhance our position and share of wallet with our customers.

So part of being great at acquisitions, obviously, is being able to realize synergies post close. As we talked about a little bit today already, the past several years have been a little choppy for our industry, but I'd like to walk you through how we have historically captured synergies and higher levels of return on invested capital from our more tenured acquisitions in a more normalized environment. If you look at the left side of the chart, you'll see our more tenured acquisitions from 2014 to 2019. This group of acquisitions included 45 companies, which represent about $1.2 billion of the $2.1 billion in acquired revenue. And as you can see, it has a healthy mix across all lines of business.

Our average -- excuse me, our average beginning after-tax ROIC for these deals was approximately 11%, and we've been able to increase that to 16% through 2025. The main drivers of this improvement include 3 primary levers: expanded sales growth through cross-selling and line of business expansion, gross margin enhancement through purchasing synergies and product mix and then SG&A leverage through the consolidation of people, processes and branches.

So now talking a little bit about the future. We remain excited about our M&A opportunities, and the next 2 slides really outline the continued meaningful white space in which we can grow. With all the growth we've had over the last decade, it's really hard to believe we still only offer all our product lines in 30% of our top markets. There are over 100 -- I'm sorry, there are 100 markets where we lack scale in nursery, hardscapes or both. And there's an additional 35 top markets where we have little to no presence.

Viewing this through a slightly different lens, the map provides a nice visual outlining the MSAs where we don't have our full suite of products. As you can see in the map, the West Coast and Pacific Northwest remain a significant opportunity in nursery, which we're excited to grow through our Devil Mountain business, a large California acquisition we purchased in 2024. Additionally, finding a large agronomic business on the West Coast is a huge opportunity for us, along with the multiple opportunities in top markets that you can see throughout the map to fill line of business gaps in both hardscapes and nurseries.

Lastly, we continue to have opportunities to buy best-in-class irrigation and agronomic distributors like Reinders, which we spoke about a couple of times today already. Reinders is a fifth-generation $100 million business that we closed in the first quarter. This acquisition highlights our ability to further strengthen our position in markets where we are already the market leader. So another growth lever for us that we're really excited to discuss today is enhancing our greenfield strategy. Historically, our greenfield programs have been driven by our local teams and supported at the company level, averaging around 3 to 4 greenfields per year.

Moving forward, we'll be much more intentional and anticipate doubling this effort by greenfielding 5 to 10 branches annually, primarily focused on our agronomic sales centers and standard branches. Greenfields historically have and will continue to deliver above-average return on sales and return on invested capital because of the relatively inexpensive nature to greenfield a branch. Equally as exciting is that these efforts typically allow us to enhance our sales and service metrics and reduce our cost to serve because new locations can lower the burden for neighboring branches and allow us to serve our customers more efficiently.

To be clear, M&A will continue to be our preferred entry point into the markets. However, we're really excited to accelerate our new complementary greenfield programs to allow us to gain market share faster where we do not have attractive entry point through M&A in the short term. So after 12 years of acquiring top landscape distribution companies, I'm very excited to say the industry remains highly fragmented. We continue to focus on high-performing companies. And if you look at the right side of this chart, you can see we've honed in on and have active relationships with 260 targets, which we believe are the best of the best in the industry. All these companies may not look to sell over the next decade, but many will. And when they do, we're confident we'll have the opportunity to bring them into the SiteOne family.

As we previously discussed, these deals that fall between $10 million and $75 million in annual revenue represent not quite 40% of the estimated annual revenue where we have active relationships and it represents a huge opportunity for us moving forward. It's also important to note as well that we know we will continue to discover more best-in-class distributors in that $10 million and below revenue range as we continue to collaborate with our teams across the country and develop new relationships with owners. We have an incredible team of leaders that nurture and develop these relationships daily. So we're super confident in our ability to deliver acquired -- I'm sorry, all this gives us confidence in our ability to acquire $200 million to $300 million each year of annualized sales on average over the next decade.

So as you can see, we remain extremely excited about our acquisition and complementary greenfield strategy. As I wrap up, I think it's important to summarize a few things. One, we're the market leader with a strong reputation as the acquirer of choice in our industry. With only 13% market share, acquisitions continue to play a significant role in our growth story. We have deep experience in successfully integrating and capturing synergies with an acquired companies all -- across all lines of business. We'll greenfield actively to complement our acquisition strategy, which will continue to enhance our ROIC. And we expect to add in excess of $2 billion in acquired sales over the next decade, similar to the previous decade.

So I'd like to thank this group again for coming out today. And at this time, I'll pass it over to Joe Ketter, our Executive Vice President of Human Resources, to talk about culture and talent.

Thank you, Daniel. Good morning. First, I realize I'm the last thing standing between you and Eric's financial overview. So I'm going to try to keep this tight and as efficient as possible. So bear with me. Again, my name is Joe Ketter for those of you I've not met, I have the pleasure of leading our HR and safety teams here at SiteOne. And I'm excited to have a few minutes this morning to talk about something that we view as a unique and critical driver of our SiteOne performance, and that's our culture and talent. In a business like ours, the success depends on local execution and strong customer relationships, our people and the culture that they operate in are not just part of our story, they are a key competitive advantage.

At SiteOne, we are building what we believe is a true great place to work. But that's not just an engagement story. We view it as a key strategic operating advantage. It all starts with safety. Safety is deeply embedded and personal at SiteOne. It reinforces both our care for our associates and our operational discipline. As Doug mentioned earlier, we have a strong values-based team-oriented culture that really sets the tone for how we operate and defines how we operate and drives consistency across our business. He also highlighted our unique blend of talent, which includes strong industry talent in the field and strong functional expertise supporting local execution. This combination allows us to scale effectively while we stay close to the needs of our customers.

We are utilizing industry-leading strategies to attract, develop and retain the high-performing talent necessary to execute our strategies. The result is we've become a true employer of choice in our industry, which strengthens our ability to hire and retain the high-performing talent to win and drive our continued growth. As I mentioned, safety is critical at SiteOne, and it's a great example of how our culture can drive positive outcomes. As you can see, we do outperform the broader wholesale trade benchmarks when it comes to key safety metrics like recordable and lost time incident rates. But more important than those rates is how we go about doing it. It all begins with leadership commitment.

As you've noticed, probably yesterday and this morning, every SiteOne meeting starts off with safety. Each of our communications that go to all associates addresses safety first and initially. Calls are conducted each time we have a lost-time accident. Those calls include senior executives like myself, Doug, our presidents, along with local leaders and members of our safety team. And those calls are focused on figuring out what happened, identifying root causes, brainstorming solutions and making sure that we implement the action plans to avoid those incidents in the future. Safety is also integrated into our operations. Branch managers receive daily safety topics that they address each morning in their daily huddles. And there's aligned accountability at every level with coordinated goals and defined safety activities that are included in our incentive plans at all levels of the organization.

And finally, we ensure strong local engagement with safety champions for each of our branches. Safety isn't just really about compliance and avoiding incidents at SiteOne. It's about creating a culture of caring that ensures that every one of our associates return home safely to their families every night. As we continue to grow, building a sustainable talent pipeline is obviously important. To do this, we attract talent through our strong employer brand and our unique and clear value proposition. We hire talent by utilizing our specialized SiteOne recruiters and our efficient tech-enabled hiring processes. Over nearly 1/4 of our annual hires now come through associate referrals, and we are outperforming all industry benchmarks in terms of recruiting performance.

We've added bilingual capabilities and customer-facing roles at over 70% of our branches, and we continue to reduce our overall cost per hire. We retain this talent by consistently investing in their ongoing development and by providing a large variety of career growth opportunities. Over 700 annual promotions demonstrates the strength of our talent pipeline. So while labor availability can be challenging in our industry, we believe that our strong employer brand, our recruiting capabilities and our culture have allowed us to build the necessary talent pipelines to fuel our ongoing growth. We view talent development as a driver of performance, and it all starts with a structured performance management process that ensures that individual goals are clear and aligned with the goals of the organization. Rewards are then based on actual performance against those goals. So as a result, they're tied directly to our business outcomes.

Career ambitions and development plans are reviewed and discussed annually through our talent and succession and performance review processes. We invest heavily in leadership development through vehicles such as our Leadership Academy, where over 360 of our top leaders have spent 3 days with Doug, myself and our leader of learning and development, learning how to build and lead a high-performing team. An additional 700 branch managers have attended 2.5 days of branch Manager Academy, where they learned specifically how to build and lead high-performing branch teams. And finally, we -- we're conducting lead training for all of our leaders, which focuses on how to listen, how to demonstrate empathy, advocate for and truly develop your associates.

We are also building skills and capabilities through customer-focused programs such as customers first, which you've heard referred to a few times today for all of our associates and sales and service training, where we have spent time developing our area leaders, our sellers and our branch managers on how to deliver an exceptional customer experience and drive sales performance at their locations. And finally, role-based development tied directly to our key product categories. These commitments reinforce our culture while improving both our customer experience and our associates' performance.

At the field level, we've built robust certification programs that are designed to upskill our associates in each of our key product categories. Over 5,300 certifications have now taken place across 7 key product categories. The training is delivered by dedicated experienced product category experts and includes a blended approach of on-demand instructor-led and hands-on training. These certifications also come with pay increases for our associates that tie directly to their skill development and the added value that they're going to bring our customers. These programs create deeper expertise in our branches, improve our customer experience and help us retain our high-performing specialized talent.

Our approach to retention is very focused and intentional, and it all begins with ensuring that we hire for our culture fit, utilizing interview guides that are based largely on our DNA. And then we focus on thoughtful, thorough, leader-led onboarding programs that utilize our role-specific onboarding guidelines. Those 2 items alone have led to our 30-day retention rates now being over 95%. Providing a safe and supportive environment is also critical, where all new associates feel valued, respected and feel like they can be their best and perform at their highest levels.

And then finally, we offer real development opportunities and clear career paths for advancement. We pair this with our pay-for-performance model, which ties to our financial performance, safety activities, customer and sales performance and your personal strategic goals. These incentives are aligned from the frontline associates all the way through our senior leaders. So we hire for culture, invest in growth and reward on performance. And the result is stronger engagement, lower turnover, more consistent alignment, which leads to improved execution and performance across our business and our high performers are then recognized and meaningfully rewarded.

When you look at our engagement outcomes, you can see that this model is working. Based on our latest engagement survey, which was conducted this past fall, 81% of our associates participated in that engagement survey. Our administrator, Willis Towers Watson, stresses we should be incredibly proud of that response rate given the decentralized nature of our business. 95% of those respondents recommend SiteOne as a safe place to work. 94% told us they feel they're treated with respect, 87% believe strongly in the goals of SiteOne. 83% recommend SiteOne as a great place to work. And finally, 86% are considered engaged in their work.

Willis Towers Watson defines world-class as scoring in the top 15th percentile. Not noted on the slide, but we are also encouraged by the engagement scores of our acquired businesses. While the results vary by company, the overall engagement score for our acquired businesses remains above 80%. These engagement scores are important leading indicators of retention, productivity, quality of execution and most importantly, growth. SiteOne culture and talent are not separate from the business. We view them as too central of how we operate. You might even say we refer to them as our special sauce. They enable consistent local execution, strong customer service, performance against our objectives and most importantly, scalable long-term growth. And we believe that gives us a clear lasting competitive advantage as we continue to grow. Thank you for your time, and I will now turn it over to Eric Elema, who will be providing a financial update.

All right. Good morning, everyone. Finally, the numbers, right? I've met most of you, and I'm assuming I met a lot of people that are live streaming today. But those of you who have not, I am SiteOne's CFO. I've been the CFO since the start of the year. A lot of you dealt with John Guthrie through the years, and he was a great mentor and it's an excellent opportunity to be up here today. So I'm going to take you through the financial performance and outlook that aligns to the strategy you've heard today. My objective over the next several slides is to show you the track record we've built, the levers we have to drive our margins and returns higher and the framework that gets us to our 2030 targets.

Before I get into the details, here are the key messages I want to convey. Since IPO, we've delivered double-digit sales and EBITDA compounded average growth. This demonstrates our consistency through multiple market cycles. Our addressable market has expanded, as Doug covered earlier today. And our share is still relatively small, setting us up for significant growth, both organically and through M&A. We see a clear path to improve EBITDA margin and our return on invested capital. We will not only benefit from the recovery in price, and we've seen that captured today and where we've been recently, but also through our self-help actions and accretive acquisitions going forward.

We also are committed to a disciplined capital allocation strategy. A stronger market will only accelerate everything we're doing on the self-help front. Our M&A strategy is long tested and proven. And our integration playbook has gained maturity, and we're able to integrate companies faster and better, and particularly companies of scale that we've acquired through the years. So this overview frames where we were in 2019 before the pandemic, last year's results and our 2030 targets. We believe we have the path to become a 6% to 8% organic grower by 2030 with the benefit of share gain. Net sales have essentially doubled from $2.4 billion in 2019 to $4.7 billion last year, and we're targeting $7 billion to $8 billion by 2030. This assumes a contribution of over $1 billion to sales from new acquisitions at the midpoint of this range, which is consistent with our track record.

Gross margin has expanded 200 basis points since 2019 with an achievable target from our perspective of 36% to 37% from our commercial initiatives. EBITDA has grown from roughly $200 million to over $400 million, and we're targeting a range of $900 million to just over $1 billion at our 13% EBITDA margin target. That represents a compounded average growth rate from 2025 to 2030 of 17% to 20%. Looking back, you can see our strong track record of growth represented by this chart. Net sales have compounded at 12% since IPO with more than $3 billion of sales growth over that period.

On the organic side, we've averaged 6% organic daily sales growth. M&A has added roughly $1.9 billion to net sales growth over this time period. The important takeaway here is that our growth algorithm is balanced and consistent through organic and M&A execution. We also believe through the actions we've described earlier today, we are better set up to continue to outperform the market going forward. EBITDA has grown on average stronger than sales, including the end market pullback the last few years with 13% compounded average growth -- a 13% compounded average growth rate and roughly $280 million of adjusted EBITDA growth since IPO.

EBITDA margin climbed to nearly 12% in 2021 with the benefit of strong demand and the pricing environment and then declined as the market softened and price deflation occurred. Gross margin expanded 350 basis points over the period with about 130 basis points related to product mix from acquisitions. Accounting for this product mix impact, SG&A deleveraged approximately 150 basis points, driven primarily by post-pandemic price deflation as well as focused branches, negative end market demand and the growth investments that we chose to make as we built the foundation for a larger company and rapid growth.

Despite the weak end market environment, we are set up to achieve SG&A leverage going forward, like we did last year as a result of our commercial and operational initiatives. As markets gradually improve, SG&A leverage progress will only accelerate. Our unique market position and strategy provide us the confidence to grow the business from $4.7 billion last year to the target of $7 billion to $8 billion by 2030, with an underlying compounded average growth rate of 8% to 11%. The components break down into 4 main drivers. Market volume is expected to grow 1 to 2 points on average over the 5-year period, which is at or below the growth we experienced during the time frames that Doug covered earlier today.

Our assumption is the market is going to be down this year. Unfortunately, it looks a lot like last year. But we're expecting gradual improvement next year. And then as we progress forward from 2028 and onward, we see the potential for market growth slowly returning towards our experience -- our historical experience and getting into positive contribution from the market. Our above -- I'm sorry, pricing. Pricing is expected to contribute roughly 2%, which is right on the average where we consistently experienced from 2015 to 2020. It was like clockwork, 1% to 3% right down the middle. And this year, while there has been some pricing increases that may push us a little to the higher end of that, we're finally in a year where we're not dealing with deflation, flat pricing or something out of our historical norm.

Our above market or market share gain growth is expected to achieve 2 to 3 points on average, a rate where we have demonstrated the last couple of years. We believe the market was down at least a couple of points last year, and we delivered 1% volume growth. And M&A growth, as Daniel walked you through, is expected to contribute 3 to 4 points on average, which is lower than our historical performance but at a similar contribution on a dollar basis. We see the opportunity, if you look back over the last 10 years of acquired annual sales, looking forward the next 10 years, a similar dollar amount. These components are achievable from our perspective and where we've demonstrated before in our history. And now we have a couple of years of share gain momentum that we expect to continue.

And now to the important topic of margin expansion. We believe we are well positioned to increase EBITDA margin from around 9% today to 13% by 2030. The expansion opportunity breaks down into 2 themes: the self-help initiatives, which we believe are not dependent on the macroeconomic conditions, where we have momentum and account for the majority of the expansion to the target and also the improvement in the end market environment. First, self-help. Private label expansion is expected to contribute 80 to 120 basis points, continuing our recent experience of nearly 20 basis points of contribution annually, as Shannon covered earlier. This includes an assumption of private brand growth increasing roughly 100 basis points per year of total company sales. Delivery optimization is expected to add 40 to 80 basis points over the time period or roughly 10 basis points a year annually.

Our delivery improvement initiative is a multiyear program that represents a significant opportunity to align the cost of our fleet and delivery personnel with the associated delivered revenue. We are driving cost-out actions and making delivery more efficient and optimized. And also included in this delivery margin improvement is the standardization of pricing for the delivery service as well as ensuring all deliveries are consistently built, particularly for the heavier products like hardscapes, landscape supplies and nursery products.

Procurement efficiencies and small customer growth are opportunities that we expect each to drive margin improvement in the 20 to 40 basis points range. Shawn covered our strategies to leverage our purchasing scale in hardscapes and nursery. And Shannon took you through the significant opportunity to grow with small customers. We believe both of these strategies will be key contributors to gross margin expansion. You also heard from Stephanie regarding our Focus branch program and the opportunity that remains to improve our underperforming branches. The program has gained maturity and is being executed systematically to improve margins.

In 2025, we improved the collective margin of these branches significantly. We believe there are multiple years of self-help improvement opportunities related to drive down the percentage of underperforming branches of our total footprint. Focused branch optimization is going to be a meaningful contributor to margin expansion in the near term and over the 5-year period. Completing the incremental margin improvement story is return to market growth. With a low single-digit market growth assumption contributing to a mid-single-digit trending towards a high single-digit organic growth rate, we believe we can more effectively leverage the business and accelerate SG&A leverage.

This also includes an assumption of improving focused branch sales performance as a result of better end market demand. In summary, we believe we can return to double-digit EBITDA under a flat market scenario, reaching approximately 11% to 12% by 2030 and achieve the 13% target with the benefit of historically more typical end market demand returning in 2028 and continuing forward. The bulk of the margin expansion opportunity from our perspective is under our control. We also have pricing initiatives that Stephanie covered that we expect to benefit margin expansion and are not quantified in this bridge to 13%.

Moving on to return on invested capital. The chart on the left provides our performance history back to 2019. We benefited first from the significant increase in demand and then the rapid rise in prices during the pandemic time frame. Return on invested capital then declined below the 2019 level. The chart on the right highlights the significant impact that price deflation had going from 3% positive price contribution in 2019 to deflation of 3% in 2024. This translated to over 2 points of the decline in return on invested capital as a result of the negative impact on sales and margins.

In addition, we acquired Pioneer in 2023 as well as some other -- excuse me, made some other acquisitions in 2022 during a period of higher earnings that subsequently underperformed in response to the market pullback. The combined impact of Pioneer in these 2022 acquisitions lowered return on invested capital by nearly 2 points. In 2025, with prices improving from negative 3% to flat, and the turnaround progress we made with Pioneer in these 2022 acquisitions. We increased return on capital by approximately 60 basis points. In addition, a number of our self-help initiatives beyond these acquisition turnaround provided a net benefit of approximately 40 basis points to return on invested capital.

From our perspective, this highlights the opportunity to improve return on invested capital in the near term through self-help and the recovery of pricing without the benefit of market growth. Looking forward, as EBITDA margin expands from 9% towards 13%, we expect return on invested capital to increase accordingly. We believe a reasonable target is to exceed 16%, and that would be at a level of margin expansion without the benefit of a positive market. As highlighted earlier, we are focused on growing organically and completing accretive acquisitions. We also increased the level of share repurchases last year and expect to continue our balanced capital deployment approach.

Our disciplined capital allocation strategy, which I'll cover in a few slides, will help us accelerate the improvement and get back to the return on invested capital levels we have already achieved in the past. At a 13% EBITDA margin, we believe return on invested capital will reach 20%. The strength of our balance sheet and the capital structure provides us the flexibility to drive our growth strategy. We have consistently maintained our leverage in a targeted range of 1x to 2x. We had available liquidity of roughly $500 million at the end of the first quarter. We recently extended the maturity of the ABL revolver to 2031, and the maturity date of the term loan isn't until 2030.

We've also returned capital to shareholders, repurchasing $98 million of shares in 2025 and another $20 million in the first quarter. We had $194 million remaining under the repurchase authorization at the end of the first quarter, and we'll continue to be opportunistic with respect to buying back shares at this time. Our credit ratings also reflect the financial strength of the business. We have a consistent track record of generating free cash flow. Since 2019, free cash flow has grown on a compounded average of approximately 14%, which is above the EBITDA growth for the same period. We have been converting net income to free cash flow well above 100% the last few years and achieved this result most years dating back to 2019.

Our capital-light working capital-efficient business model enables us to turn earnings growth reliably into cash. And the consistent cash generation allows us the flexibility to execute our capital allocation priorities and maintain a strong balance sheet. Turning to capital allocation. We've deployed capital of approximately $1.4 billion since 2019, and our priorities are clear. Acquisitions have been the largest investment at approximately 71% and our highest return growth lever. Capital expenditures were 16%, funding organic growth, new locations and technology investments and share repurchases were approximately 13%, returning capital opportunistically while managing leverage.

Also note, we didn't commence our share repurchase program until late 2022. Over the past 3 years, share repurchases were approximately 24% of the capital allocation. Looking forward, we expect this framework to continue over the near term with CapEx running roughly 1% to 1.4% of sales, strategic acquisition investments estimated to be in a range of $150 million to $250 million to acquire $200 million to $300 million on average of annualized net sales and share repurchases of approximately $100 million to $200 million while staying within our 1x to 2x leverage target. We will continue to be disciplined, focused on growth, a strong balance sheet and returning capital opportunistically. Wrapping up with the financial outlook for 2030.

As I noted earlier, we are targeting $7 billion to $8 billion by 2030 of annual sales, an 8% to 11% compounded average growth rate from 2025. EBITDA is estimated to be in a range of $900 million to a little over $1 billion by 2030. The base business is expected to contribute 14% to 15% and M&A adding 3% to 5% of compounded average growth to get to a 17% to 20% compounded average growth rate over the period. Cumulative free cash flow is expected to be approximately $2.1 billion to $2.3 billion over the 5-year period and return on invested capital is expected to exceed 16%. The other assumptions are conservative and relatively consistent with our history with working capital of 16% to 18% of sales and effective tax rate of approximately 25%, which excludes any benefits from stock-based comp activity.

In closing, most of the improvement in EBITDA margin and return on invested capital is within our control. We are built to achieve these targets. I'll now turn the presentation back to Doug for closing comments.

You. All right. Thanks. How they coordinated you. Great. So there you go. SiteOne, you've been able to meet our team. You've heard from our team. You've heard a bit about our history and about our industry, where we're positioned and the opportunities that we have going forward. And so we're excited. And these aren't just Doug Black's goals or Eric Elema's goals, et cetera. You can see these goals run deep into SiteOne in order to drive ourselves forward, build a great company and perform for all of our stakeholders from our associates to our customers, to our suppliers, shareholders and communities. So just to sum it up, the landscaping industry is a great industry for wholesale distribution. It lends itself to wholesale distribution, and we're glad we've got an attractive industry to operate in.

We're the clear market leader, and we have advantages over our competition that we intend to leverage going forward to grow and perform. We've got well-developed organic growth strategies, and we wouldn't have been able to say that 4 or 5 years ago. And they've been kind of battle-tested and we can leverage those to outperform the market, which we have over the last couple of years going forward. Significant margin opportunity to expand our margins. And you can see that a lot of this is self-help, right? If we get that market that comes back, then you'll see us perform up toward that 13%. But without the market, we can certainly move forward and post strong numbers, which will enhance our growth going forward.

We have market-leading technologies, and we aim to continue to build and advance those technologies going forward as we leverage AI and our other systems. We've got a well-established growth engine with acquisitions. We feel that will be steady, that $200 million to $300 million adding to the company going forward to enhance our growth. And then finally, and most importantly, you've got a strong management team. And that's what makes the difference, right, a committed team that's focused on building a great company to ensure that the ups and downs that we navigate to deliver value going forward.

So at this point, we'll bring the last set of presenters up, and we'd love to take any questions that you have on what we've presented here today.

Carter, Stifel. So a couple of questions. Number one, on FY '26. I heard during the presentation, you did say volumes down like last year, similar what you said, pricing at the high end. So number one, are you kind of reiterating there? And then I guess you were kind of pointing to kind of a soft market continuing through '27, what you're building the plan around. Is that right? And therefore, to get there, it's a very, very meaningful step up, maybe a catch-up in '28 through '30.

Yes. In terms of guidance, we'd rather wait until the end of July to comment specifically about Q2. But just suffice it to say that we're still very confident in our annual guidance for the year, which has EBITDA margin built into that. And in terms of the second question.

Yes, it's about if '27.

Yes. What we -- as Eric mentioned, we believe the market will be down this year. We've incorporated, I think, modest improvement, I think flat market in '27. And then we think it returns to a more normal market in '28 and forward. We don't have a better crystal ball than any of you, right? And we don't tend to make long-term forecast, but that's just the assumption that we've got built into 2027. We'll see how this year develops and we'll have a much better view of '27 when we get to that place. But that's what we've kind of got built into our outlook. So we don't know if that's conservative or aggressive, but it certainly -- we think it's our best view at this point.

Dave Manthey at Baird again. I think last night, Doug, you said we should bring our tough questions. So we are bringing them. When we look at the forecast and we think about what that implies for contribution margins, I'm calculating, if my math is correct, something in the high teens all in, including acquisitions. Ex-acquisitions, it would probably push that number into the 20s, north of 20% contribution margin, which is much higher than we've seen recently. And you've outlined a number of factors that, as you said, seem to be well within your control.

But I think the hard question here would be, if you looked at the range of opportunities the company has over this next 4- or 5-year period, what are the items that you would say you feel the least confident about? You said most of [ them are ] conservative. Just look at it. Is it pricing? Is it your ability to execute some of these initiatives? Which would you say are the ones you're a little bit less confident about?

That's a good question, less confident. We're confident in the things that we can control. We see the opportunity and the largest ones kind of working from the bottom of that bridge that I had confident in private brand. We've got momentum there. Confident that focused branches contributed last year. It will get tougher, I guess, over time to contribute at the rate they have, but there's an excellent opportunity to drive that. Small customer growth, we're seeing the traction in that. And I guess the component that we can't control is where the market goes. And that could, I guess, stunt the progress to some extent. But on a flat market, we're going to get positive organic growth.

If the market was to go down further, stay negative or there was some sort of recession or pullback further in the housing market, I guess that would be somewhere that would take us off that long-term trajectory.

Yes, I'd say that our confidence indexes on the range we provided there for each of those initiatives, right? And then so we feel like all those initiatives are going to pay off, but they could all pay off at the low end, which puts us at the end of the 12 period at kind of 11%, let's say, range. But yes, I mean, we're pretty confident. I think the biggest swing factor is the market, right? Does the market get worse? Do we have a prolonged recession? We're not really in a recession. Do we go into a recession? I mean those were the things that we can't control and that would be the biggest, I think, risk factors for this plan is the market.

Yes. And I'd add, like we went into this year with some confidence in February and rates were moving in the right direction, and we thought we would have a flat market and things change quickly. So now it's 2 years of pretty good -- I don't know if I want to call it surprises, but 2 years of shocks between liberation day and Middle East conflict and what's next.

Could you remind us on the focused branches, the improvement you expect to see in profitability because of that? Is it similar to what you've seen in the first round of improvement? Is it different? And does it get -- does the degree of difficulty increase? I'm trying to just gauge the confidence in that number given that you've already sort of been through this one time. Does it get harder as you move forward? Or are you just equally as confident you can improve in that.

Yes. I think that each of these focused branches have plans to improve the margin. They're all unacceptably low. And it may seem like it's lower-hanging fruit to take a branch that 0% to 1% return on sales to 3%, 4%, get a couple of hundred basis points and if that's the average. But I don't think there's anything more challenging from taking a 0% to 2% return branch from a 3% to 5% branch and improve it. All of them are below 6% and the goal is to get off. And the plan is when they set the plan annually is to improve them off the list and then it doesn't stop there. So you can get to 7%, that's great, but that's below the company average. And we want everyone to be performing at or above the company average.

Yes. I'd say it's a lot tougher to move focus branches in a down market than it is in an attractive market, right? So I think if there's risk, there's timing risk there, right? If markets get weaker or they continue to be weak, if '27 is down again, I think it will be tough, tougher to move those branches. If the market comes -- if market is flat in '27 versus down this year, it gets easier. If the market is up in '28, it gets easier, right? So I think with focus branch, the primary risk would be, does it take us longer? I think over the 5-year period, I don't think there's a lot of risk, right? But in '26 and '27, I think there's some risk depending on market weakness that could delay the timing of kind of focused branch recovery. Does that make sense?

Ryan Merkel of Blair. How do we think about the cadence of the margin improvement? And if the market is flat in '27, can you still do 100 basis points of expansion?

Yes. I think that's more challenging. You can see last year, we had a negative market and we expanded 50 basis points. That would be more of a run rate with a negative market, no market help. The 100 is when we start to get into positive market volume growth.

I figured. I just thought I'd check.

Yes, for sure.

Yes. So in down fat market, you think 30 to 50 basis points in an up market, market comes back, that's where you get the 100 basis points movement.

And then, Eric, one of the slides, you had incremental branch EBITDA at 14% to 15% that's a little lower than I would have expected. Talk about some of the assumptions there. Why isn't it higher like 20% is typically what we see at the other distributors?

Yes. other than just a bit of conservatism built in at a higher rate would have implied a CAGR that's over 20% growth to the lofty target. So I would say that the expectation would be higher, but at a higher rate than we're up over 20% and a higher than 13% return on sales.

Yes. We believe without gross margin improvement, without any kind of special initiatives, the growth in these types of distribution businesses, the drop-down is around 15% or so to the bottom line. The reason it's more toward a 20% is because we've got these other initiatives that is kind of juicing those drop-downs.

Keith Hughes from Truist. In that margin waterfall, private label is kind of on par with organic growth and the focus branch improvement. Under your plan, 100 basis points a year, you'd be in about 20% on this. Does that require you to launch private label in more categories? Or maybe said another way, which categories are going to take ahead? I didn't feel like it's going to be LESCO. It's going to have to be something else to get that on.

Right. It's really around the 3 that are growing the fastest, right? So we expect LESCO to outperform the market, but be more of a kind of pedestrian grower contributing. We expect GreenTech to be the same way. But Pro-Trade is the biggest grower. We are going to continue to move into new categories. We've just recently moved into erosion control and synthetic turf with Pro-Trade. So those are big runners for us that can kind of take us for a couple of years. But yes, it does assume that we go into more categories with our Pro-Trade brand. And then Solstice and Portfolio are expected kind of to grow rapidly as well from a smaller base. So it's those 3 brands that we expect to drive that growth. And those are the brands that have the most margin differential in terms of added to the company.

And -- the other thing about Pro-Trade, it is our fighting brand, right? So it's actually high margin, but it's very competitive price, right? So that's allowing us to take market share and contributing to our gross margin walk.

One follow-up on that, your private label, how much higher gross margin do you get than most of your competitors?

We don't like to quote specifics, but if you do the -- you can figure that out if you do the -- take the 20 basis points and do some backwards.

Is it -- let me ask it this way. Is it through whether it's Pro-Trade or LESCO. Is the improvement over the competitor, is it similar? Or are there certain ones that are just dramatically higher?

The Pro-Trade, Solstice and portfolio would be significantly higher margins.

Maybe a question for you, Daniel. Talking about the M&A strategy, you talked about a focus on the mid-major as one to target along with the smaller ones. But you also have on the chart that's like some larger companies that are out there. Would you guys consider expanding into acquiring some of these larger companies above the $75 million, I think, revenue target that you highlighted more aggressively over time? And what leverage would you be willing to go if, let's say, a larger portion were to come through?

I'll save the latter part for Eric and Doug. Absolutely, we go after some of the larger companies that they come available. We try to have relationships with all those companies. To the extent they do come available, we'll be a player in those deals for sure.

Yes. I mean the one thing about acquisitions, sellers sell when they're ready to sell, not when we're ready to buy, right? And if you try to speed that cycle up, then you're overpaying, right? And so we believe in a disciplined long-term approach, especially with those larger companies, right? And we know who they are. We court them. Reinders is a good example of that, where we had a relationship with Craig Reinders. We thought over some period of time, they would decide to sell the business. They decided to sell the business. They called us. We had kind of a limited auction. We went in there that we were the most attractive home. And now we have Reinders.

So we already have one of our large ones. Remember, there was 5 in the last 10 years. So we're off to a good start for the next 10 years. But yes, there's attractive opportunities in that large space, but we'll work with them. And when they're ready to sell, we'll be ready buyers. We expect to get most of it in the mid-majors as we have in the past. And again, we're courting them and as they come ready. And then there's a long tail of small that -- some of those we don't even know yet and that we'll be able to mine that as we go forward.

Got it. And for the leverage part, is this something you'd be willing to go above 2x for, let's say, a longer period of time just to be able to realize those synergies on those acquisitions?

I didn't understand.

Sorry, the 2x leverage, 1x to 2x range like if a bigger deal were to come through.

I'd say for now, that could be something we'd evaluate if the opportunity arose and we make that thoughtfully. But I would say our standing guidance is we plan to stay within the 1x to 2x.

Yes. And we think with our cash flow, we're a self-funded engine when it comes to acquisitions. Obviously, we have cash left over that we're using to purchase shares. We keep a very strong balance sheet just for that reason, right? We could have a year where we have -- and look, I'm not forecasting this, but we could have a year where 2 or 3 of the big ones come due. Well, we want to be able to do those deals. I mean we will do those deals, right? But we craft our balance sheet so that we can do those deals and still keep our leverage. As you saw the other -- the competitors there, this is an industry that doesn't have huge fish to purchase, right? They're mostly very adjustable size to go after.

Matt Bouley, Barclays. Thanks again for all the great detail today. I wanted to ask a question on the return on invested capital outlook. So greater than 16% and the potential path to 20%. It seems like the EBITDA margin, of course, is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. My question is more around the denominator and kind of how do you grow that numerator more than the denominator here while you're doing all these acquisitions. Maybe the way the answer to the question would be kind of talk about sort of what led to the increase in invested capital over the prior years and how you're kind of thinking differently about the future on limiting that increase in invested capital to sort of allow the returns to kind of get you to those targets?

Yes. Like you said, the margin is doing a lot at a much higher margin. And you can see at nearly 12% where we were. I recognize the denominator is growing. We are buying back shares. It's not something we were doing before then. It just started late 2022. So at the height of that chart that I had up, you can see we weren't buying back shares there. And also stress the accretive acquisition investment aspect of our strategic investment. So that's going to benefit the return on that denominator more than it has, especially recently.

Plus you've got the self-help aspect of that, right, where you're kind of turning around our focused branches, et cetera, which tend to be pretty high return parts of that.

And we'll be more opportunistic from a buyback front in the current environment.

Jim Sheehan from State of Georgia. When you think about your acquisitions over the last 4 or 5 years, which deal would you say was most disappointing for you? And what would you say lessons you learned from that, that you're applying to the pipeline going forward?

Right. Great question. Some of the deal -- as Eric mentioned, well, first of all, let's talk about Pioneer. We bought Pioneer. We knew Pioneer was a turnaround situation. It had 30 locations in Colorado and Arizona, fast-growing markets and we went for that deal. It's as -- this is why we don't do turnarounds for living. Pioneer is -- it's long term, got great characteristics, and we're fixing the business and we're improving the business rapidly. But it's taken a lot of work. And the lesson learned is, going forward, stick with our core strategy, which is buying well-run companies that pull you forward. That being said, Pioneer has given us a great strategic position in those markets.

So we're glad we did it. It's been a lot of work. We're on our way on that. The -- we did some deals in 2022 peak market, we paid lower multiples, but the lower multiple didn't take in account the fall from that peak market to today, right? And so we're fixing those. Those are part of our focused branch efforts. And so it reminds us that you got to watch -- when you're doing acquisitions, you got to watch market cycles, right? And low multiples don't necessarily take care of market risk at a peak of a market, right? So I think that's the lesson learned there.

By and large, these are all deals that fit in our network, and they were high performers, they'll be high performers again. Some of those were done during the worst possible time, and they weren't integrated. And it reminds us how powerful our pricing team is. When costs move, our pricing team is right on top of that. And with these acquisitions, they don't have pricing teams, right? And so if you buy them in a volatile period, they won't have the ability. COVID was a 100-year flood and some of these even great entrepreneurs that had strong businesses couldn't handle the ups and downs of COVID, right? And so we kind of saw that. But yes, those would be the lessons learned.

The good thing is all things are fixable, and we can drive those forward. They're part of the reason that we're going to expand our margins going forward and the return on invested capital comes back.

I wanted to go back to digital again, which is one of the initiatives I'm probably more excited about. The potential is massive. I saw in the slides that it said you could offer more products. So I'm curious what those products are and like how big that could be? And then you mentioned same-day or next-day delivery. Are you doing that today? And is that coming from the branches? Or are you doing that from the DCs?

Yes. I think in terms of products, Carl, you might want to -- why don't you cover the products, and I'll cover the same day next day.

Yes. I think regarding the product, there are adjacencies, I guess, in our business that we could add on. I don't know that we've gotten into specifics as to what those are, but they're certainly adjacent things that our customers consume along the way. So those would be things that we wouldn't carry in the branch. We carry them in the DC and could ship direct from there. And then same day next day.

Yes. That's something that we're planning to do. Obviously, customers can pick up at the branch same day, next day. But that's -- we're talking about a more traditional online to very small customers where we can offer that primarily out of the DC would be the strategy there. And we're standing that up with our break pack area and we're looking to kind of pilot that and grow that over the next several years. So that's work in progress.

Andrew Carlson, Ashler Capital. In your long-term guide, do margins for your peers or competitors stay where they are today? Or do they get more or less competitive over time? And how does that impact your ability to get to 13%?

We don't know what our margin. There's not a lot of competitors that we have the financials for unless we acquire them. But I don't think our strategies impact the competitors' margins. We're obviously, we're gaining market share in certain spots, right, which could impact bottom lines of some competitors. But our strategies aren't putting any competitors out of business. And we have good competitors that are -- will copy us, right, to kind of improve their bottom line.

So I don't think our strategies will have a significant impact on our competitors other than -- they'll be growing their sales a little less, and we'll be growing our sales a little more. But we're not putting people out of business at the share gains that we're talking 2% to 3% points of market share is very manageable, especially if the market is growing.

Including adjacencies.

Think about that we have 13% market share, right? So we're growing 2% or 3%, but we're growing it on a 13% base, right? If you take the rest, the 87%, that's growing. There's plenty of growth there for our competitors. So we feel like we can execute our strategies still have good competition that are competing hard as well and doing well. Some of our competitors will do well just like we will. It's a very, very fragmented market with thousands of distributors, right? So that's the beauty of it. There's lots of small competitors.

We have some online questions.

I think just to build on that market share, you guys laid out 2% to 3%. How does that compare to some of your larger competitors and their comments that they're also taking share? And how are you advantaged against some of your larger competitors?

Yes. Like I mentioned, we compete hard against the larger competitors. Most of the competition there is in for that large, the customer, the commercial business, et cetera. I'm sure some of our competitors are gaining market share. Again, it's a highly fragmented market, and there's lots of competitors. So there's room for more than just one consolidator in this industry, right? We're a consolidator. There are other consolidators in the market. There's plenty of room for competition for a strong #2 or #3, #4, et cetera, right? And there's some good companies in those sets. And they're using strategies similar to us, not only to compete against us, but to compete against our other smaller competitors.

So we feel good. We've been competing against the competitors that are in our competitor set for that whole 10-year history. I think we know them pretty well. They know us pretty well. We feel confident in our ability to gain share.

And then just one more from online. If you think about kind of siteone.com, what categories or lines of business are driving that growth? And how do you think about kind of your technology capabilities as a competitive advantage versus other competitors?

I got Yes, the growth today is, as Carl outlined in the chart, irrigation and agronomics kind of led the growth. But partially, that was because of our data and our ability to service the nursery, the hardscapes, the harder to serve product lines. Now that we have our data in place, I think you'll see those product lines catch up to irrigation and agronomics. So -- and I mean, Carl, you might add to that. I mean we're seeing that today as nursery and hardscapes are growing rapidly. And over time, we think all those products lend themselves to digital. And so there's no reason why they won't ramp up.

Customer size, the larger customers were the faster movers than the smaller customers. But as our product gets better, it will attract customers of all sizes. Carl, maybe...

Yes. No, that's exactly right. We've invested a lot in our product data, specifically in nursery and hardscapes, kind of unique categories requires different taxonomies to get to the product that you're looking for. And then that combined with our quotes feature where we have customers who are purchasing kind of large jobs across more lines of business kind of in one transaction, that lends itself also to building a complete basket across more of those lines of business. So yes, what Doug said is that nursery and hardscapes are playing catch up at this point and growing on a percent basis at a faster rate.

Great. Any other questions?

I think there's more in the back of the room. Andrew, you got one.

I want to come back to the waterfall on Slide 108. The self-help on the left, is it completely independent of the end market side? And I think at what level on the end market side or organic growth, would you start to face sales deleverage, i.e., your margin would be stuck in the mud despite what you're doing internally?

Yes. I think the way we laid it out was this doesn't include any market growth, but it doesn't assume that the market goes down further. It includes our assumptions around this year and then maybe a more flat market next year. If there was a further decline in the market, that could have a negative impact on what we define as self-help contribution.

Yes. We obviously -- if we went into a full-blown recession, obviously, that would impact negatively margins, right? So not expecting that, but our assumptions are down market in '26, flattish, '27, '28, some recovery. Things get worse, obviously, we're pushing against those assumptions.

Okay. Well, great. Well, thank you for your attention, your time. We've enjoyed hosting you here at SiteOne. We feel good about our story. We look forward to keeping in touch as we move forward. And I hope everybody here has a safe trip home. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Greetings, and welcome to SiteOne Landscape Supply First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Eric Elema, Chief Financial Officer. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We issued our first quarter 2026 earnings press release this morning and posted a slide presentation to the Investor Relations portion of our website at investors.siteone.com. I am joined today by Doug Black, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Daniel Lafon, SVP, Strategy and Development. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today's press release, slide presentation and the statements made during this call include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. Such risks and uncertainties include the factors set forth in the earnings release and in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Additionally, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures which we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. A reconciliation of these measures can be found in our earnings release and in the select presentation. .

I would now like to turn the call over to Doug Black.

Thanks, Eric. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased with our first quarter 2026 performance as we overcame the weather and market-related softness in sales volume and delivered 14% adjusted EBITDA growth compared to the prior year period with meaningful gross margin expansion and tight SG&A management. Furthermore, during the quarter, we acquired Reinders, a strong fifth generation market leader in irrigation, agronomics and landscape lighting in the Midwest, which will contribute to our growth this year.

We have seen volumes improve in April with the oncoming of the delayed spring season. However, with the recent increase in macroeconomic uncertainty, we believe that our end markets could continue to be soft this year. On the other hand, we expect pricing to be stronger which will benefit organic sales growth and gross margin expansion. With the benefit of our commercial and operational initiatives, we remain confident in our ability to gain market share and expand our EBITDA margin in 2026.

Coupled with a solid pipeline of potential acquisitions, we believe that we are well positioned to deliver solid performance and growth for our shareholders in 2026 and in the years to come. I will start today's call with a brief overview of our unique market position and our strategy, followed by the highlights from the first quarter.

Eric will then walk you through our first quarter financial results in more detail and provide an update on our balance sheet and liquidity position. Daniel Laughlin, will discuss our acquisition strategy, and then I will come back to address our outlook and guidance for 2026 before taking your questions. As shown on Slide 4 of the earnings presentation, we have a strong footprint of more than 680 branches and 5 distribution centers across 45 U.S. states and 5 Canadian provinces.

We are the clear industry leader approximately 3x the size of our nearest competitor, we estimate that we only have about a 19% share of very fragmented $25 billion wholesale landscaping products distribution market. Accordingly, our long-term opportunity to grow and gain market share remains significant. We have a balanced mix of business with 66% focused on maintenance, repair and upgrade, 20% focused on new residential construction and 14% on new commercial and recreational construction.

The only national full product line wholesale distributor in the market, we also have an excellent balance across our product lines as well as geographically. Our strategy to fill in our product lines across the U.S. and Canada, both organically and through acquisition further strengthens this balance over time. Overall, our end market mix, broad product portfolio and geographic coverage offers multiple avenues to grow and create value for our customers and suppliers while providing important resilience in softer markets.

Turning to Slide 5. Our strategy is to leverage the scale, resources functional talent and capabilities that we have as the largest company in our industry, all in support of our talented, experienced and entrepreneurial local teams to consistently deliver superior value to our customers and suppliers. We've come a long way in building SiteOne and executing our strategy, but we have more work to do as we develop into a world-class company.

The current challenging market conditions require us to adopt new processes and technologies faster and to be even more intentional in driving organic growth, improving our productivity and mastering the unique aspects of each of our product lines. Accordingly, we remain highly focused on our commercial and operational initiatives to overcome near-term headwinds, but more importantly, to build a long-term competitive advantage for all our stakeholders. These initiatives are complemented by our acquisition strategy, which fills in our product portfolio, moves us into new geographic markets and adds terrific new talent to SiteOne.

Taken all together, we expect our strategy to create superior value for our shareholders through organic growth, acquisition growth and EBITDA margin expansion. On Slide 6, you can see our strong track record of performance and growth over the last 10 years with consistent organic and acquisition growth. From an adjusted EBITDA margin perspective, we benefited from extraordinary price realization due to rapid inflation in commodity products during 2021 and '22.

In 2023 and 2024, we experienced significant headwinds as commodity prices came down. In 2024, we also experienced further adjusted EBITDA dilution and from the acquisition of Pioneer, a large turnaround opportunity with great strategic fit and from our other focus branches, which resulted from the post-COVID market headwinds. In 2025, pricing improved from a 3% decline in 2024 to flat, and we achieved excellent progress with Pioneer and our other focus branches both of which contributed significantly to our improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin despite the soft end markets.

In 2026, we expect pricing to be up 2% to 3%, and we expect to continue achieving improvements with our focus branches. Accordingly, with the benefit of our other commercial and operational initiatives, we expect to continue expanding our adjusted EBITDA margin despite the continued market softness. For the longer term, we believe that we have significant room to improve our adjusted EBITDA margin as we execute our strategy and reach our full potential as a business.

We have now completed 108 acquisitions across all product lines since the start of 2014, adding approximately $2.2 billion in trailing 12-month sales to SiteOne, which demonstrates the strength and durability of our acquisition strategy. These companies expand our product line capabilities and strengthen SiteOne with excellent talent and new ideas for performance and growth.

Our pipeline of potential deals remains robust, and we expect to continue adding and integrating more companies in 2026 to support our growth. Given the fragmented nature of our industry and our current market share, we believe that we have a significant opportunity to continue growing through acquisition for many years to come.

Slide 7 shows the long runway we have ahead in filling in our product portfolio, which we aim to do primarily through acquisition, especially in the nursery, hardscapes and landscape supplies categories. We are well connected with the best companies in our industry, and we expect to continue filling in these markets systematically over the next decade.

I will now discuss some of our first quarter performance highlights as shown on Slide 8. Net sales were $940 million, essentially flat year-over-year, with organic daily sales down 1%. Due to the timing of winter storms, the spring selling season was delayed in March. Additionally, we believe that the increased macroeconomic uncertainty and higher interest rates are negatively affecting an already soft new residential construction market and the more resilient repair and upgrade market.

These factors resulted in a 4% decline in organic sales volume for the quarter, which was partially offset by 3% growth from pricing. Gross profit increased 3% and gross margin improved by 90 basis points to 33.9%, driven by effective price realization and continued progress with our commercial initiatives including strong growth in private label products and with small customers. SG&A as a percent of net sales increased 70 basis points to 37.2% and due to the organic sales decline.

That said, we were pleased to have kept our base business SG&A flat versus prior year on an adjusted basis. During the quarter, as we benefited from the 2025 branch consolidations and closures and continue to execute our operational initiatives. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter increased 14% to $25.5 million versus the prior year period, and adjusted EBITDA margin expanded 30 basis points to 2.7% despite the flat sales, demonstrating our ability to successfully navigate the market headwinds with disciplined execution of our strategy and initiatives.

In terms of initiatives, we made good progress during the quarter, executing specific actions to improve our customer experience, accelerate organic growth, expand gross margin and increased SG&A leverage. For gross margin improvement, we achieved positive organic daily sales growth with small customers and grew our private label product sales by over 40% during the quarter. Both contributing to our strong gross margin expansion.

These 2 initiatives not only help us expand gross margin, but also help us gain market share and outperform the market. To further drive organic growth, we increased our percentage of bilingual branches from 67% of branches to 68% of branches during the quarter, while continuing to execute our Hispanic marketing programs. We are also continuing to make good progress with our sales force productivity as we leverage our CRM to focus on disciplined revenue-generating actions from our inside sales associates and over 600 outside sales associates.

We increased our digital sales on siteone.com by over 60% in the first quarter versus the prior year period. while also increasing regular active users by approximately 60%. We believe we are gaining market share with the customers who are engaged with us digitally as we achieved strong positive total sales growth with these customers during the quarter. siteone.com helps customers to be more efficient and helps us to increase market share while making our associates more productive, a true win-win-win.

On the SG&A front, we continued to lower our net delivery expenses during the first quarter, driven by delivery associate and equipment efficiency gains along with improved pricing. Note that our teams have done a good job of working with our customers to pass through fuel surcharges to mitigate the significant near-term increases in fuel cost. We expect to reduce net delivery expense in 2026 and for the next several years as we execute our local market delivery strategy and best practices.

We also continued to achieve improved profitability with our underperforming branches or focus branches during the quarter, though they were also negatively affected by the delayed start to the spring season. As a reminder, we achieved an over 200 basis point improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin of our focused branches in 2025 and are looking for strong improvement with these branches once again in 2026.

In total, we are making great progress on our commercial and operational initiatives, which will help us gain market share drive organic sales growth, improved gross margin and achieve operating leverage in 2026 despite low sales growth. Furthermore, these initiatives will help us expand our adjusted EBITDA margin over the next several years towards our long-term objectives.

On the acquisition front, we've added 2 companies to our family so far in 2026 with approximately $110 million in trailing 12-month sales including Reinders, a strong market leader in the Midwest for irrigation, agronomics and lighting products. Reinders is a good example of a company that we have been courting for many years before they decided to sell their fifth-generation family business late last year.

Reinders family carefully consider their options and chose SiteOne as the best long-term home for their company. We have built a solid backlog of additional companies, and we expect to close more acquisitions during the year, yielding a more typical year in terms of total sales acquired. With an experienced acquisition team, broad deep relationships with the best companies, a strong balance sheet and an exceptional reputation as the acquirer of choice.

We remain well positioned to grow consistently through acquisition for many years, in the very fragmented wholesale landscape supply and distribution market. In terms of our acquisition team, I'd like to take a moment to recognize Scott Salmon who retired from his role last month after leading our strategy and acquisition team for the last 7 years. Over that period, we added over 70 companies with over $1.3 billion in trailing 12-month sales to SiteOne, while significantly improving our integration processes.

Scott has been a tremendous leader and colleague, and we are very grateful for his significant contributions at SiteOne. Fortunately, we have a very strong successor for Scott with Daniel Laughlin, stepping into the role to lead our strategy and acquisition efforts going forward. Daniel is a critical member of our acquisition team meeting some of the most successful acquisitions from 2014 through 2021.

Recently, joined us in January and has been part of a smooth leadership transition. We're very confident in Daniel's experience, capability and deep knowledge of SiteOne and our industry, and we look forward to further executing our acquisition strategy under his leadership in the coming years. as we build on the strong foundation that's been established.

Now Eric will walk you through the quarter in more detail. Eric? .

Thanks, Doug. I'll begin on Slide 9 with some highlights of our first quarter results. Net sales were approximately $940 million, up modestly from the $939 million for the first quarter of last year. There were 64 selling days in the first quarter, which is the same as the prior year period. Organic daily sales decreased 1% as a result of a 4% decline in volume, partially offset by a 3% increase in pricing.

February and most of March, were particularly slow from a sales perspective as winter storms across several regions, limited customer activity and delayed applications, driving a weaker volume result. We saw increased sales activity toward the end of the quarter with better weather conditions. As Doug mentioned, sales volume has improved in April compared to the first quarter. .

Pricing performance was strong and broad-based. While we continue to see deflation in grass seed and PVC pipe, which were down 10% and 8%, respectively, in the quarter, the collective magnitude has moderated versus prior periods and was more than offset by price increases across other product lines. In addition, at the start accordingly, we now expect prices to contribute 2% to 3% to 2026 sales growth, while acknowledging the ongoing global uncertainty.

Organic daily sales for agronomic products, which include fertilizer and control products, ice melt and equipment, increased 2% for the first quarter due to improved pricing partially offset by the later start to the spring selling season, which delay applications. Organic daily sales for landscaping products, which includes irrigation, nursery, hardscapes, outdoor lighting and landscape accessories, decreased 3% for the first quarter due to adverse weather and soft demand in the new residential construction and repair and upgrade end markets.

Geographically, our Eastern regions were more affected by weather, where persistent storms materially disrupted early season customer activity. More broadly, sales were down for the first quarter in 5 of our 8 regions compared to the prior year period. Our central region was a bright spot, achieving double-digit organic sales growth with solid demand and less disruption from winter storms.

Acquisition sales, which include sales attributable to acquisitions completed in 2025 and 2026, contributed approximately $12 million or 1% to net sales growth. Daniel will provide additional details regarding our acquisition strategy later in the call. Gross profit increased 3% to $319 million, and gross margin improved 90 basis points to 33.9% for the first quarter. The year-over-year improvement reflects strong execution of our commercial initiatives, including continued momentum in private label sales and growth with small customers, along with solid price realization and vendor support.

These gains were partially offset by higher freight and distribution costs as well as continued deflation in certain commodity products. Selling, general and administrative expenses increased to $350 million for the first quarter from $343 million for the prior year period. SG&A as a percentage of net sales increased approximately 70 basis points to 37.2%, driven primarily by the decline in organic daily sales during the quarter.

Despite the sales headwind, we continue to tightly manage costs and drive productivity across the business. SG&A in the base business, on an adjusted basis, was flat for the first quarter compared to the prior year period. The effective tax rate was 28.9% for the first quarter compared to 25.5% for the prior year period, primarily due to an increase in excess tax benefits from stock-based compensation year-over-year. We continue to expect the effective tax rate for fiscal 2026 will be between 25%, 26%, excluding discrete items such as excess tax benefits.

Net loss attributable to SiteOne was $26.6 million for the first quarter compared to $27.3 million for the prior year period, primarily reflecting higher gross profit, partially offset by our SG&A. Our weighted average diluted share count was approximately $44.6 million during the first quarter compared to approximately $45.1 million for the prior year period. In the first quarter, we repurchased approximately 155,000 shares for approximately $20 million at an average price of $128.90 per share.

Post quarter end, we repurchased an additional 6,000 shares for approximately $800,000. Adjusted EBITDA increased 14% to $25.5 million for the first quarter and adjusted EBITDA margin expanded 30 basis points to 2.7%, reflecting the improvement in gross margin and disciplined cost management during the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter includes adjusted EBITDA attributable to noncontrolling interest of $700,000.

Now I'll provide a brief update on our balance sheet and cash flow statement as shown on Slide 10. Working capital at the end of the quarter was approximately $1.1 billion compared to $1.0 billion at the end of the same quarter last year. Cash used in operating activities decreased approximately $8 million to $122 million due primarily to a modestly lower net loss and the effect of working capital changes. We made cash investments of approximately $102 million for the first quarter compared to approximately $21 million for the same period last year.

The increase primarily reflects the acquisition of Reinders as well as higher capital expenditures. Capital expenditures for the quarter were $23 million compared to $15 million for the same period last year. due to increased investments in our branch locations. Net debt at quarter end was $585 million, and net debt to trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA was 1.4x which is within our targeted range of 1 to 2x and lower than the 1.5x at the end of the first quarter of last year.

Available liquidity at the end of the quarter was approximately $502 million consisting of $84 million of cash on hand and $418 million in available borrowing capacity under our ABL facility. Post quarter end, we amended our ABL facility and extended the maturity date to April 2031. As a reminder, our priority from a balance sheet and liquidity perspective is to maintain our financial strength and flexibility so that we can execute our growth strategy in all market environments.

I will now turn the call over to Daniel for an update on our acquisition strategy.

Thanks, Eric. As shown on Slides 12 and 13, we completed 2 acquisitions during the first quarter representing approximately $110 million of trailing 12-month net sales. Both of these companies align well with our strategy of expanding our product offering, strengthening our presence in attractive local markets, and adding high-quality teams to SiteOne. On January 13, we completed the acquisition of Bourget Flagstone Company, a wholesale distributor of hardscape products with 1 location in Santa Monica, California.

This acquisition establishes our presence in the Santa Monica market and the surrounding Malibu and Pacific Palisades areas and provides a strategically located site to expand our hardscapes offering in Southern California. Bourget Blackstone brings a long history in the market, strong customer relationships and deep expertise in natural stone and hardscape products.

On March 16, we completed the acquisition of Reinders a leading fifth-generation, family-owned distributor of irrigation, agronomics, holiday and landscape lighting and landscape supplies with 12 locations across the Midwest. Reinders significantly expands our presence in the Midwest and strengthens our capabilities in irrigation and agronomics, supported by a team known for technical expertise, on-site diagnostics and strong customer service.

The Reinders leadership team will remain with the business, preserving its legacy and customer relationships while benefiting from SiteOne scale, resources and infrastructure. I want to thank the entire SiteOne team for their passion and commitment to making SiteOne a great place to work and for welcoming the newly acquired teams when they joined the SiteOne family.

Looking back since 2014, we have completed over 100 acquisitions, representing approximately $2.2 billion of trailing 12-month net sales added to SiteOne. These companies have steadily expanded the number of markets where we can offer a full product line while strengthening our local teams.

Summarizing on Slide 14, our acquisition pipeline remains active, supported by long-standing relationships across the industry in a disciplined, consistent approach to evaluating opportunities. While many factors can influence timing, our focus is unchanged, partnering with well-run businesses that fit strategically aligned culturally, and create long-term value for our customers, suppliers, associates and shareholders.

With a strong balance sheet, a dedicated acquisition team and a proven integration model, we remain confident in our ability to continue executing our M&A strategy in supporting SiteOne's growth in 2026 in the years to come.

I will now turn the call back to Doug.

Thanks, Daniel. I'll wrap up on Slide 15. As mentioned, the spring season was delayed in March, and we have seen improved sales volume and overall positive organic daily sales growth in April so far. However, the recent energy volatility and higher interest rates have increased the macroeconomic uncertainty, and we believe this is having a negative effect on the already weak new residential construction end market and the more resilient repair and upgrade end market.

On the positive side, as mentioned earlier, we now expect to achieve 2% to 3% growth in pricing, which will support organic daily sales growth and gross margin expansion. Overall, we continue to expect low single-digit growth in organic daily sales for the year. In terms of end markets, we are experiencing weakness in new residential construction demand, which comprises 20% of our sales and we expect this market to be down for the full year 2026.

New commercial construction demand, which represents 14% of our sales was solid in 2025 and we believe it will remain flat in 2026. Main activity from our project services teams continues to be slightly positive compared to the prior year, which is a good indicator of continued demand. The ABI Index has improved recently, and our customers remain bullish for the remainder of the year. We believe that this end market will be flat this year.

We believe the repair and upgrade market, which represents 30% of our sales, was down in 2025, but seemed to have stabilized during the second half. So for this year, the repair and upgrade market has been resilient but sluggish with lower consumer confidence. While the long-term fundamentals for repair and upgrade are strong, we believe that repair and upgrade demand will be down slightly this year due to the increase in macroeconomic uncertainty.

Lastly, in the maintenance end market, which represents 36% of our sales we achieved excellent sales volume growth in 2025 as our teams gained profitable market share on top of steady demand growth. We have seen the same trends this year so far, and we expect the maintenance end market to continue growing steadily in 2026.

In total, after almost 4 months of activity, we expect end market demand to be down modestly this year with weakness in new residential construction and repair and upgrade more than offsetting growth in maintenance. Given this backdrop and with the benefit of our commercial initiatives, we expect flat sales volume, which when coupled with 2% to 3% growth in pricing is expected to yield low single-digit organic daily sales growth for the full year 2026.

We expect gross margin in 2026 to be higher than 2025, and driven by price realization and our commercial initiatives, partially offset by higher freight and logistics costs supporting our growth. With our continued strong actions to improve our productivity, and by continuing to address our focus branches, we expect to achieve operating leverage in 2026, yielding solid improvement in our adjusted EBITDA margin.

In terms of acquisitions, as Daniel mentioned, we have a good pipeline of high-quality targets, and we expect to add more excellent companies to SiteOne throughout 2026. Lastly, we have an extra week in 2026. Unfortunately, this extra week occurs in fiscal December during a very slow sales period, which is a traditionally loss-making period for SiteOne, as a result, we expect the extra week will reduce our adjusted EBITDA by $4 million to $5 million.

With all these factors in mind and including the negative effect of the 53rd week, we expect our full year adjusted EBITDA for fiscal 2026 to be in the range of $425 million to $455 million. This range does not factor in any contribution from unannounced acquisitions. In closing, I would like to sincerely thank all our SiteOne associates who continue to amaze me with their passion, commitment teamwork and selfless service.

We have a tremendous team, and it is an honor to be joined with them as we deliver increasing value for all our stakeholders. I would also like to thank our suppliers for supporting us so strongly and our customers for allowing us to be their partner. Operator, please open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from David Manthey with Baird.

Thank you. First off, Doug, I'm most interested in your commercial and operational initiatives, of course, in this sort of slow period. Was hoping maybe you could scale the long-term margin improvement opportunity here, say, next 3 to 5 years? What do you think you can drive out of these many efforts that you have going on, and then as it relates to 2026, maybe if you could highlight the top 2 or 3 that will have the biggest impact this year?

Yes. Thanks, David. Longer term, we have a -- we have our path to 13%, and that's been our target for a while, and we feel good that we can get there with the combination of our commercial initiatives driving organic growth, gross margin expansion and then SG&A efficiency levered. And so the biggest opportunities to drive that I would say on the gross margin side, private label is obviously a big one, and we've got great progress going on there.

We're also penetrating with small customers. We have a lower share with small customers than we have with the larger customers. And as we penetrate those small customers, that's a good gross margin driver for us. On the SG&A side, we have our focus branches. That's a big opportunity for us. We made a lot of progress last year. We aim to continue to make progress over the next to 3 years with those lower-performing branches as we raise them up, that's largely SG&A reduction.

And then our delivery efficiency is a big opportunity for us to reduce our last leg of delivery expense. As you know, over the years, we've worked on our inbound freight and our supply chain. We're now putting a lot of focus on our outbound delivery from the branches. And so those are some of the bigger opportunities. And of course, just the general leverage we get by driving organic growth, which the aiders there are our digital is a big driver of our sales force performance efforts.

And then private label and small customers would also contribute to organic growth. So you put those together, we have lots of opportunity. We're mining those this year to drive our business. Longer term, we feel like that can get us up into the double digits on for that 13% objective.

That's great. Maybe I could double-click on the private label. I believe you said it grew 40%, maybe I heard that wrong. But what percentage of total sales are private label as we sit here today? And then could you talk about just what are the key products that are driving the outsized growth there?

Yes. I want to clarify that the 40% were our high-growth private label product lines, which are pro trades the lead there that's in lighting and landscape supplies, portfolios or nursery private label and Solstice Stone is our hardscape private label. When you take those 3, they grew at 40%. If you add in LESCO and our total private label, it grew at 10% in the quarter. So still moving ahead we're approximately 15% private label, and we're looking to increase that by 100 basis points a year.

And so we accomplished that last year and we aim to keep ticking that up over the next 5 to 10 years, quite frankly. Our goal there would ultimately be kind of 25%, 30% private label. And so, we've got a good start this year to being on that same pace heading towards that goal.

Our next question comes from Ryan Merkel with William Blair.

I want to start off with the quarter. Doug, can you talk about what was the impact of weather? You missed the Street by about $40 million. I know that's difficult, but any help there would be helpful. And then how much was macro being weaker in the quarter? You called out new resi construction. Just curious what you saw there.

Right. Well, it's kind of hard to discern because both are happening at the same time. I would say that maintenance is 36% of our business. And that's the 1 that gets the most deferred as we're moving kind of from quarter-to-quarter based on when the spring starts and so as we mentioned, and we've seen the volumes improve in April. We haven't caught all the way back up to where we aim to be for the year, but we've seen that improvement, and that's largely that maintenance and some of the new construction came in seasonally.

On the macro side, we just -- you can see that we've dropped our guide for the market, we would have initially said it was flat. Now we're saying it's going to be modestly down. I think that's -- that quantifies the macro uncertainty. We feel like we're seeing that and that we'll continue to see that throughout the year. Consumer confidence is low, gas prices are up. It's just -- it's not a great environment. And that makes the weakness in new resi a little bit worse.

And we've seen some of that. And it weakens the repair and remodel market, which we've seen some of that. It's mixed. It's not falling off the cliff. We still believe that the remodel market is resilient, but you can certainly see some jobs being deferred and there's weakness here and there in that market.

Okay. That's fair. I know quantifying weather is difficult. So I appreciate that. My second question is on price. You're raising it a little bit, but I thought you might raise it more -- so I'm curious, like is the cadence just sort of 3% across each of the quarters, the rest of the year? And what are you assuming now for PVC and fertilizers because I think there's probably some inflation there.

Yes. Good question, Ryan. When we talked to it last quarter, we were thinking 3 in the first quarter, stepping down to 2%. And then in 1 in the second half, we were comping the increases in June time frame of last year. Our thinking now is through -- we did 3 in Q1. We see continuation with that. It's probably even a little firmer 3 here in the second quarter. And then there's some uncertainty. So we think 2 maybe in the second half gets you kind of midpoint of that 2% to 3%. There is some upside and -- but there is also some uncertainty.

We're still evaluating PBC. We're working closely with our suppliers expecting those price increases here during the quarter and monitoring overall price increases across the rest of our supplier base -- there's just a lot of uncertainty looking out in the rest of the year. So I think 2 to 3 is a fairly conservative point right now for where we sit. Certainly, there is some upside opportunity in the rest of the year and we'll have a better view of that as we progress through the second quarter.

Our next question comes from Mike Dahl with RBC Capital Markets.

Just to touch on kind of the margin breakdown. I think last quarter, you articulated that within the year-on-year composition like the gross margin and SG&A contribution would be relatively dimmer, just given the moving pieces, price better, volume a little worse, a good start to the year on gross margin. Can you just help us understand kind of within your expectations today, how you would think about the breakdown between gross margin and SG&A leverage this year?

Yes, we still expect to get SG&A leverage for the full year. we're looking at Q2 and Q3 for that to occur. Q4, we have the extra week, so that will be dilutive. So we don't expect to get SG&A leverage in the fourth quarter. But to your point, we do believe that gross margin now expected to be higher, you can see what we did here in Q1, expect to expand gross margin in Q2.

We were thinking more flat in gross margin in the second half of the year when the year started. So there's some upside opportunity, I would say, Q3 probably a little better than we thought Q4 unknown. SG&A right, with a little bit of a change in the end market outlook. So SG&A, gets a little bit harder to leverage. We feel like we're doing a really good job managing the cost side of it, but organic, we still believe low single digits. I would say it's probably tilted a little more in favor in gross margin at this point. We thought 50-50 contribution when the year started. And I would say that's shifted up in favor of gross margin.

Okay. That's helpful color. And just as a follow-up on the SG&A dynamics, I mean, with the more subdued outlook on kind of market dynamics, obviously, you have all the initiatives in place, but is there anything else kind of more discrete or incremental that you're now contemplating in terms of further cost-out actions?

Yes. I think we always win if the market is tougher, if volumes are lower, we'll take action manage labor tightly, other expenses more tightly, et cetera. So there are certain actions we can take. But as Eric mentioned, SG&A leverage is certainly more challenging as the volume goes down. So we would expect a little bit more -- less leverage more on the gross margin side for the remainder of the year. If things get tougher, we can certainly fight to maintain that leverage. And we'll continue to manage it tightly in any case and then see how it works out on the volume side.

The other point I would add to on SG&A is the rising fuel cost for delivery goes through SG&A. And we've talked about fuel surcharge that we implemented at the end of March. The charge for that is in sales. So you can see a little bit of a negative impact on SG&A from the dollar side.

Our next question comes from Keith Hughes with Truist Securities.

So talk a lot about inflation on this call. Are you seeing any signs that you're not able to get any of these price increases through on customers given what's kind of a shaping demand environment right now?

Our market is pretty efficient, and it's been traditionally pretty efficient and pass it through price increases. So, so far, we -- obviously, we work with our customers on that. But so far, we've been able to pass through price increases, and we feel pretty confident that we can continue to do that, working with our customers and suppliers to make it as seamless as possible for our customers, but our market tends to be pretty efficient there, and we don't expect that to change.

And I mean there are some categories where there could be a lot more inflation specific PVC pipe. When you get increases from your suppliers, how long does that take to get implemented? Is there usually any drag when numbers go up notably? .

No. It's pretty much concurrently. We're in contact with suppliers. We've been signaled ahead of time and we plan accordingly and provide notice to our customers in advance of those price increases.

Especially with things like pipe and fertilizer and products that move around, the market, there's a good communication in the market where we can give the customers heads up and we're giving a heads up by the suppliers and it happens pretty quickly.

I was going to say we're in the height of the fertilizer season. So this price increase has been in effect since 41. So we've managed through that and nothing significant to call out. I would say it's fairly inelastic and PVC pipe. We'll work through that in the coming months, but I would like to highlight the last 3 years, '23, '24, '25, they've been significant declines in PVC pipe in price. So we wouldn't expect these increases that are being contemplated to be an elasticity issue.

Okay. Just a final 1 on grass seed, still looking for grass seed, whatever price does there, it's still a third quarter reset. Is that still the case?

That's correct.

Our next question comes from Matthew Bouley with Barclays.

So on the gross margin, you have that 10% growth in private label and it sounded like success with smaller customers. So it seems like that would move the needle a bit on margins. You have the 90 basis points there. So question is I want to see if you can quantify how much of the margin expansion is coming from some of these commercial initiatives that presumably are more structural in nature versus if there's any kind of temporary benefit that you sometimes see due to inflation. You had the 3% price just to sort of help us kind of dial in gross margin forecast in a more normal environment.

Yes. we typically don't give a breakdown specific by initiative. And so I don't think we can offer any help there. It's just I would say that private label small customers contributing strongly as is the price realization that we're getting on the other side. I don't know, Eric, anything to comment on that?

Yes. And I think of this quarter is if we look in the light of Q3, Q4 in the line of the basis point contribution, you can see where price has been benefiting us. So we're a little bit better there, but I would say that we've had pretty good run rate now with private label contributing to gross margin expansion for a number of quarters.

Okay. Got it. That's helpful. Yes. Sometimes in the past, you guys have quantified at least the temporary benefit. But I guess the second question is on Reinders just because it's a fairly large deal. Obviously, in the past, some of the bigger deals, you guys have taken a little bit of time to sort of integrate them into the whole system. So -- just any color on kind of the margin profile of this business? And if there is opportunity for you to expand margins further with this business as you do integrate it in the cycle .

Yes. No, Reinders is a strong company. We're excited to have them join. There are pretty significant synergies with Reinders they're in irrigation, agronomics, lighting landscape supplies. And so on those product lines, we tend to have higher synergies. And so there's good synergies there. We'll get some of those synergies this year. We are system-wise, we'll integrate them next year, but we are syncing up with their teams and capturing some of those opportunities. We do expect them to be nice and profitable this year around -- probably around where we are and in the future, there's significant upside there as our synergies fully kick in.

So excited about the deal. It's a strong company. They've got a great team. and we can certainly add value. They actually do a lot of digital. They're 1 of the leaders in the market with digital. And so we're going to take our time integrating with their digital and ours. But it's good to join forces with a company that's more progressive relative to other companies in the industry. And Reinders is 1 of those companies.

Our next question comes from Jeffrey Stevenson with Loop Capital Markets.

Are there any concerns of fertilizer shortages or potential inflation pressures and other commodity products, such as PVC piping could have an impact on maintenance demand similar to a couple of years ago when customers were holding off on certain maintenance projects due to elevated commodity price levels.

Right. Yes. And you're referring to the kind of COVID where prices move significantly in fertilizer. And that did hurt demand in that year exactly which year it was. But the nature of the increase around 5% for fertilizer is not to the magnitude that we feel like it will create any kind of demand degradation.

Fertilizer does move around from routinely a couple of percent here and there. So 5% isn't a tremendous move and we feel like our customers will be able to handle that and it won't affect the applications. In terms of supply shortages, we've got a great supply chain. We've got multiple sources for most of our products, but we don't anticipate, at least at this time, that there will be any shortages in supply that will drive additional inflation.

So we feel pretty good about where we are and the ability of the market to absorb some of these price increases that are obviously, we never enjoy absorbing price increases into a market, but 5% is a manageable level there.

Okay. No, that's very helpful, Doug. And then I just wonder if you could quantify any more of the magnitude of expected new residential declines this year. And then on top of that, kind of what you're hearing so far from builders or in the spring selling season and if I remember correctly, typically, there's an 8- or 9-month lag between when there's a single-family housing start and when that shows up in demand and if that's the case, if there's any improvement and starts as we move through the year, is that going to be more of a kind of late '26, 2027 when it will show up in demand?

Right. Yes, you're correct. I mean we go by completions, not start. And there is a lag there in 6 months, 6 to 9 months, et cetera. So we feel like the new res market is going to be down mid- to high single digits this year. And we're getting mixed. There's mixed messages from builders. Some are more positive, some are less positive. But our view is that we're probably not going to see much improvement this year and it starts to improve this year, that will certainly help us in 2027, but not in 2026.

Our next question comes from Charles Perron-Piche with Goldman Sachs.

First question, as you look to drive efficiency -- as your customers look to drive efficiencies, are you seeing them leaning more into sites, digital and delivery tools and a higher freight cost environment and more broadly, how can you have your investment in technology help you again the current backdrop?

In terms of our customers, yes, we do see them using digital more and as we mentioned, our digital sales are up 60% or we expect them to be up substantially this year and more and more customers are utilizing digital just to make their ordering and interactions and transactions with us more efficient. In terms of fuel prices are up, Eric mentioned that we've implemented fuel surcharges.

We work with our customers routinely to get the product to their job sites at the lowest possible cost. And so yes, our delivery capability gives us a ways of working with our customers and getting it there in a low-cost fashion. And so we have a fair bit. We have about 1/3 of our business is delivered -- and we see that going up as things get tougher and customers kind of allowing us to help them get the materials there and get the job done at a lower cost.

Got you. That's good color, Doug. And shifting gears to capital allocation. You repurchased $20 million of shares in Q1, which is quite high for relative to the other first quarters in the last few years. How does he inform your willingness to do more? And at the same time, can you talk a little bit more about the M&A pipeline and your confidence to close more deals in 2026.

Yes, I'll take the first part of that. we continue to be opportunistic. We're going to look at the whole year and making sure that we're first focused on growth, M&A. We we had good visibility that Reinders acquisition was going to close in Q1 a seasonal slow quarter for us. But obviously, where the stock is, represents a good buying opportunity. We're going to continue to be opportunistic the rest of this year.

We see that balanced capital approach, and we did close to [ $ 100 ] million in repurchases last year. So depending on where M&A turns out, we'll balance that out in how we buy back shares. But we'll continue to be opportunistic again where the price is.

Yes. In regards to M&A, the pipeline is healthy, we're constantly in discussion with owners and confident we can continue to have success for the rest of 2016 and beyond.

Our next question comes from Sean Calnan with Bank of America.

Just first, can you kind of quantify the improvement in volumes that you're seeing in April? And should we expect Q-Q to be the highest growth quarter, just given the shift in sales from 1Q to 2Q? And then the fertilizer pricing increase with April being a big month for that.

Yes. I would just say that volumes have improved. Volumes aren't positive in the first -- in April, but they have improved versus where they were in the first quarter. And in terms of volume by quarter, there's no real gauge that would make the second quarter. I mean, obviously, first quarter is lower. You do some catch-up in the second quarter. It's going to tend to be higher, but we're talking percentage 1, 2 percentages.

And the third and fourth quarter also kind of split by the season. spring season in September, October. And obviously, that's third and fourth. So it's really hard to call volume growth by quarter. What makes more sense to us is kind of half year what it is at the end of June and what it is at the end of the year is a better way to kind of think about volume and because you get the full screen season and you get the full fall season, if you take that book. So we'll see how the spring continues to evolve, and we'll have a better read when we get to June.

Okay. Great. And then when you have expectations for price increases, like we have right now, do you typically see customers try to get ahead of those price increases and pull forward their purchases?

Sure. That tends to happen, especially on fertilizer pipe, but keep in mind, our customers don't have massive storage. So they're taking some product to the extent that they can. And we work with customers on commercial jobs that are already in progress. And so yes, some of that goes on whenever there's a price pass-through, and that's why we give our customers as much lead time as possible so that they can they can adjust and do their purchasing to try to get ahead of it themselves.

Our next question comes from Collin Verron with Deutsche Bank.

I just want to dive into the cost a little bit more. It looks like inventory costs in the COGS line dipped around 3% in the quarter despite the total sales being relatively flat. So can you just walk us through the moving pieces there? Is that the mix improvement toward private label showing up or are there some other factors in there that we should be considering? And how are you thinking about that going forward? Is there any reason that, that year-over-year decline might move throughout the year?

Yes. I think you hit on it it's private label, it's product mix, but we also have the lower. We had -- we were fully stocked for the spring selling season with fertilizer in particular. So I would say that, that continues a bit into Q2. But beyond that, I would expect that not to continue.

Great. That's helpful. And then just on the freight handling distribution expenses, I saw a sizable increase I know it's a small piece of the COGS bucket, but it was just a notable headwind in the first quarter. So can you just talk about what was driving that inflation and sort of the magnitude that you're baking into the guidance for your freight handling distribution expenses in that bucket?

Yes. So there's the rising cost of diesel in there for Q1 that's in March. That's a component. We've got international freight to related to our private label products. We got the increase there. But also keep in mind that we have our fifth DC in the cost there with that not in the Q1 prior year. So we mentioned that too on the last call that we would have an increase in distribution costs. So that's in there as well.

Our next question comes from Matt Johnson with UBS.

Appreciate the time. I guess, first off, if we could just dive into the fertilizer piece a little more. I know it's given the disruption in the Middle East, it sounds like you guys took a 5% price increase there. But could you just give us an update on how much inventory you guys have in your distribution centers. And then, I guess, assuming that urea prices stay at these levels, I think they're up somewhere around 40% to 50% year-over-year. But how should we think about the impact of fertilizer costs for you guys as that starts to come through?

Yes. So urea is up substantially. Keep in mind that it's only 1 component of fertilizer and we can actually move components around and fertilizers. So there is some latitude there and we take advantage of that to try to minimize the effect on our customers, the 5%, as I said, is a reasonable reflection of passing through cost, maintaining our margin. We obviously that price increase is mid-season. So we have -- we stock up for the season. And so we obviously have some product in our branches that we're shipping. And as I mentioned, we -- so far, we've not experienced any supply shortages that would that would not have -- have product available for our customers or allow us to gain market share. So we feel like we're in pretty good shape there, and we think it will be continue to be a successful season.

Yes. I think we're going to get good place on supply. We're working with our category team leaders. So we feel good not only about the season, but into the fall. And as we get later in the year, we'll continue to evaluate those opportunities.

That's great. I appreciate that. And then I guess if we could just talk a little more about the focus branches. I think you guys drove a little over 200 basis points of EBITDA margin improvement at those branches in 2025. I guess given all the kind of disruption and noise in the market right now, how do you guys feel about your ability to achieve a similar result this year at those focus branches?

Yes. Well, we feel good about it. I mean, obviously, if the market turns out to be tougher and we're lower on volume that will affect the focus branches, but we -- we had improvement in the focus branches, good improvement in the first quarter, and we feel very good about our being able to turn those branches improve the profitability even in a soft market condition. So we feel good at this point, the tougher the market gets, the tougher that gets, but we can move the needle even in the softer market there.

Our next question comes from Andrew Carter with Stifel.

I just want to follow back up on Reinder. It's $100 million incremental -- and you said it's similar to company margins, and you also acquired it right before -- right ahead of the spring season. So why shouldn't this be an $8 million or $9 million kind of type contribution to EBITDA for the year therefore, your kind of EBITDA range has some added flexibility.

Yes. You kind of nailed it. That's what we expect. And yes, it provides, I guess, more insurance for our range. Keep in mind that, obviously, we won't reflect the full $100 million. We did miss almost 3 months of that. But yes, we do expect it to be profitable along the lines of what you're saying there. And that helps us have confidence in our range, given kind of softer market conditions and overall uncertainty that we need to keep in mind.

Sounds good. I appreciate that candid answer. I'll pass it on.

We have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the floor back over to Doug Black for closing comments.

Well, thank you all for joining us again today. Before I conclude, I want to highlight an upcoming event we have. We're hosting our 2026 SiteOne Investor Day on June 23 and 24 in Atlanta, we'll be going through a comprehensive update on our performance, our strategy, our long-term initiatives and offer investors an opportunity to engage with our executive leadership team, which we're quite proud of.

And so we look forward to welcoming investors and analysts to our event in June. We appreciate your interest in SiteOne. We look forward to speaking to you again at the end of the next quarter. Again, a big thank you to our terrific associates and to our customers for allowing them to us to be our partner and to our suppliers for supporting us. Thank you.

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

Greetings, and welcome to SiteOne Landscape Supply, Inc. Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Eric Elema, Chief Financial Officer. Thank you. Please begin.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We issued our fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings press release this morning and posted a slide presentation to the Investor Relations portion of our website at investors.siteone.com. I am joined today by Doug Black, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Scott Salmon, EVP Strategy and Development. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today's press release, slide presentation and the statements made during this call include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. Such risks and uncertainties include the factors set forth in the earnings release and in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Additionally, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. A reconciliation of these measures can be found in our earnings release and in the slide presentation. I would now like to turn the call over to Doug Black.

Thanks, Eric. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased to deliver solid results in the fourth quarter with 3% net sales growth, 2% organic daily sales growth and 18% growth in adjusted EBITDA versus the prior year period closing out a good year of performance and growth in 2025. For the full year 2025, we achieved 4% net sales growth, 1% organic daily sales growth and 10% growth in adjusted EBITDA despite flat pricing and lower end market demand compared to 2024. As we enter 2026, we have solid momentum with the benefit of positive pricing, coupled with the strong cost reduction actions that we took in 2025, including 20 branch consolidations and closures during the fourth quarter.

Our teams are executing our commercial and operational initiatives at a high level, and we expect to benefit from the 8 acquisitions that we completed in 2025, along with our first acquisition completed in 2026. While there continues to be end market uncertainty, we entered 2026 with stronger teams, a more cost-effective branch network, good momentum with our commercial and operational initiatives and a robust pipeline of potential acquisitions. Accordingly, we remain confident in our ability to deliver superior value to our customers and suppliers and achieve solid performance and growth for our shareholders in 2026 and in the years to come.

I will start today's call with a brief review of our unique market position and our strategy followed by highlights from 2025. Eric Elema, who was recently appointed Chief Financial Officer, will then walk you through our fourth quarter and full year financial results in more detail and provide an update on our balance sheet and liquidity position. Scott Salmon will discuss our acquisition strategy, and then I will come back to address our outlook and guidance for 2026 before taking your questions.

As shown on Slide 4 of the earnings presentation, we have a strong footprint of more than 670 branches and 5 distribution centers across 45 U.S. states and 5 Canadian provinces. We are the clear industry leader, approximately 3x the size of our nearest competitor. Yet we estimate that we only have about a 19% share of the very fragmented $25 billion wholesale landscaping products distribution market. Accordingly, our long-term opportunity to grow and gain market share remains significant. We have a balanced mix of business with 66% focused on maintenance, repair and upgrade, 20% focused on new residential construction and 14% on new commercial and recreational construction. As the only national full product line wholesale distributor in the market, we also have an excellent balance across our product lines as well as geographically. .

Our strategy to fill in our product lines across the U.S. and Canada, both organically and through acquisition further strengthens this balance over time. Overall, our end market mix, broad product portfolio and geographic coverage offer us multiple avenues to grow and create value for our customers and suppliers while providing important resilience in softer markets. Turning to Slide 5. Our strategy is to leverage the scale, resources, functional talent and capabilities that we have as the largest company in our industry, all in support of our talented, experienced and entrepreneurial local teams consistently deliver superior value to our customers and suppliers. We have come a long way in building SiteOne and executing our strategy but have more work to do as we develop into a world-class company.

Current challenging market conditions requires to adopt new processes and technologies faster and to be even more intentional in driving organic growth, improving our productivity and mastering the unique aspects of each of our product lines. Accordingly, we remain highly focused on our commercial and operational initiatives to overcome near-term headwinds but more importantly, to build a long-term competitive advantage for all our stakeholders. These initiatives are complemented by our acquisition strategy, which fills in our product portfolio, moves us into new geographic markets and adds terrific new talent to SiteOne. Taken all together, we expect our strategy to create superior value for our shareholders through organic growth, acquisition growth and EBITDA margin expansion.

On Slide 6, you can see our strong track record of performance and growth over the last 10 years with consistent organic and acquisition growth. From an adjusted EBITDA margin perspective, we benefited from the extraordinary price realization due to rapid inflation in commodity products during 2021 and 2022. In 2023 and 2024, we experienced significant headwinds as commodity prices came down. In 2024, we also experienced further adjusted EBITDA dilution from the acquisition of Pioneer, a large turnaround opportunity with great strategic fit and from our other focus branches, which resulted from the post-COVID market headwinds.

Over the past 2 years, our pricing transitioned from negative 3% in 2024 to flat in 2025. And we anticipate that pricing will be up 1% to 3% in 2026. Furthermore, we achieved excellent progress with Pioneer and our other focused branches in 2025 and expect to continue achieving improvements over the next several years as we bring their performance up to the SiteOne average. In summary, we expect to drive continued adjusted EBITDA margin improvement in 2026 and beyond as we execute our initiatives and as the market headwinds slowly turn to tailwinds. We have now completed 107 acquisitions across all product lines since the start of 2014, adding approximately $2.1 billion in trailing 12-month sales to SiteOne, which demonstrates the strength and durability of our acquisition strategy.

These companies expand our product line capabilities and strengthen SiteOne with excellent talent and new ideas for performance and growth. Our pipeline of potential deals remains robust, and we expect to continue adding and integrating more companies in 2026 to support our growth. Given the fragmented nature of our industry and our current market share, we believe that we have a significant opportunity to continue growing through acquisition for many years to come. Slide 7 shows the long runway we have ahead in filling in our product portfolio which we aim to do primarily through acquisition, especially in the nursery, restate and landscape supplies categories. We're well connected with the best companies in our industry and expect to continue filling in these markets systematically over the next decade.

I will now discuss some of our full year 2025 performance highlights, as shown on Slide 8. We achieved 4% net sales growth in 2025 with an organic daily sales increase of 1%. Organic sales volume grew 1% during the year as our teams continued to gain market share, which more than offset the decline in our end markets. As I mentioned, pricing was flat in 2025, which was a significant improvement from the 3% decline we experienced in 2024. Pricing was up 2% in the fourth quarter and with most of the commodity product deflation behind us, we expect that trend to continue into 2026, supporting stronger organic daily sales growth. Gross profit for 2025 increased 5% and gross margin increased 40 basis points to 34.8%. The increase in gross margin was driven by improved price realization, benefits from our commercial initiatives and a positive contribution from acquisitions, partially offset by higher freight and logistics costs to support our growth, including the establishment of our fifth distribution center during the fourth quarter.

SG&A as a percentage of net sales decreased 40 basis points to 30.1% as our strong actions to reduce SG&A in the base business were partially offset by the addition of acquisitions with higher operating costs. SG&A for the base business decreased 50 basis points compared to 2024 on an adjusted EBITDA basis, as we continue to optimize our branch network, reduce our net customer delivery expense and closely manage labor and expenses in relation to sales volume. We reduced the cost of our branch network further in the fourth quarter and expect to continue achieving SG&A leverage in 2026. Adjusted EBITDA in 2025 increased 10% year-over-year to $414.2 million and adjusted EBITDA margin for the year improved 50 basis points to 8.8%, reflecting positive organic daily sales growth, gross margin improvement, solid operating leverage and good contributions from acquisitions.

Given the challenging markets, we were pleased to achieve solid adjusted EBITDA margin expansion and expect to continue driving our EBITDA margins toward our longer-term objectives in the coming years. In terms of initiatives, our teams are executing specific actions to improve our customer experience, accelerate organic growth, expand gross margin and increase SG&A leverage. Gross margin improvement, we continued to increase sales with our small customers faster than our company average, drive growth in our private label brands and improve inbound freight costs through our transportation management system. These initiatives not only improve our gross margin, but also add to our organic growth as we gain market share in the small customer segment as well as across product lines with our private label brands like WESCO, Row Trade, Solstastone and portfolio.

In 2025, we increased our mix of private label products by over 100 basis points from 14% to 15% of total sales. Further drive organic growth, we increased our percentage of bilingual branches from 62% of branches to 67% of branches, while executing Hispanic marketing programs to create awareness among this important customer segment. We're also making great progress with our sales force productivity as we leverage our CRM and establish more disciplined revenue-generating habits and processes among our inside sales associates and our over 600 outside sales associates. Our digital initiative with siteone.com is also helping us drive organic daily sales growth as our results have shown that customers who are engaged with us digitally grow significantly faster than those who are not.

In 2025, we increased digital sales by over 120% and while adding thousands of new regular users. Siteone.com helps customers be more efficient and helps us increase market share while making our associates more productive, a true win-win-win. With siteone.com and our other digital tools, we are accelerating organic growth, and we believe we are outperforming the market. With the benefit of dispatch track, which allows us to more closely manage our customer delivery, we improved both associate and equipment efficiency for delivery in 2025 and while more consistently pricing this service.

As a result, we reduced our net delivery expense by over 40 basis points on delivered sales, which represents approximately 1/3 of our total sales. This is a major initiative, and we expect to make significant progress again in 2026 and over the next 2 to 3 years. In 2025, we focused intensely on our underperforming branches or focused branches to ensure that they have the right teams, the right support and are executing our best practices to bring their performance up to or above the SiteOne average. We were pleased to achieve an over 200 basis point improvement in the adjusted EBITDA margin of our focus branches in 2025.

Going forward, we expect to gain a meaningful adjusted EBITDA margin lift for SiteOne in the coming years, as we continue to improve the performance of these branches. Further progress in 2026 in the face of continued soft markets, we consolidated and closed 20 branches in the fourth quarter of 2025 and plan to serve existing customers through our remaining branch network at a lower cost. Taken all together, we executed well in 2025 and are gaining momentum with our commercial and operational initiatives to drive organic growth, increase gross margin and achieve operating leverage in 2026 and beyond. On the acquisition front, as I mentioned, we added 8 companies to our family in 2025, with approximately $55 million in trailing 12-month sales added to SiteOne. With the market uncertainty and with all our acquisitions being small, 2025 was a lighter year than typical in terms of acquired revenue.

Given our current backlog and discussions, we expect 2026 to be a more typical year in terms of average deal size. With an experienced acquisition team, broad and deep relationships with the best companies, strong balance sheet and an exceptional reputation as the acquirer of choice. We remain well positioned to grow consistently through acquisition for many years, in the very fragmented wholesale landscape supply and distribution market. In summary, our teams did a good job in 2025 managing through the headwinds, executing our strategy, leveraging our breadth of commercial and operational initiatives and creating momentum as we move into 2026. After 3 years with no price benefit, we are pleased to be entering 2026 with positive pricing and we are confident in our ability to continue outperforming the market and expanding our adjusted EBITDA margin as we grow.

We are excited about our future and we continue to build our company and deliver superior value for our customers, suppliers and shareholders for the long term. Now Eric will walk you through the quarter and full year in more detail. Eric?

Thanks, Doug. I'll begin on Slides 9 and 10 with some highlights of our fourth quarter and full year results. We reported an increase in net sales of 3% to $1.05 billion for the fourth quarter and an increase of 4% to $4.7 billion for fiscal year 2025. There were 61 selling days in the fourth quarter and 252 selling days in fiscal year 2025. Both were the same number of selling days as the prior year periods. In fiscal year 2026, we have an extra week which will result in an increase to 256 selling days. Unfortunately, as Doug will describe in our outlook, the additional 4 days of sales occur at the end of fiscal December, when there is little landscaping activity which we expect will result in a $4 million to $5 million EBITDA headwind for the 2026 fiscal year.

Organic daily sales increased 2% in the fourth quarter compared to the prior year, driven by improved pricing, our sales initiatives and solid demand in the maintenance end market, especially for ice melt products. For the full year, organic daily sales increased 1% due to steady growth in the maintenance end market and execution of our sales initiatives, partially offset by softer demand in the new residential construction and repair and upgrade end markets. Price increases contributed 2% to organic daily sales growth this quarter. Price increases due in part to tariffs have now more than offset the price decreases we are experiencing with select commodity products.

We have positive pricing in almost all categories while commodity products like grass seed and PVC pipe, which were down 12% and 10%, respectively, this quarter, are becoming less of a headwind. For the full year, we estimate the pricing impact on 2025 organic daily sales was negligible compared to the 2024 fiscal year as deflationary impacts earlier in the year were offset by modest price inflation in the second half. Our current outlook for 2026 is for prices to increase by 1% to 3%. Organic daily sales for agronomic products, which includes fertilizer, control products, ice melt and equipment, increased 11% for the fourth quarter and 7% for the full year, due to strong volume growth and solid end market demand.

In the fourth quarter, the strong agronomic sales growth was driven by the sales of ice melt products, which benefited from an increase in snow events during the quarter compared to a low number of events in the prior year period. While snow events are good for sales of ice melt, they generally have a negative effect on overall organic growth. Organic daily sales for landscaping products, which includes irrigation, nursery, hardscapes, outdoor lighting and landscape accessories, decreased 1% for the fourth quarter and 1% for the full year due to softer demand in the new residential construction and repair and upgrade end markets.

Geographically, 7 of our 9 regions achieved positive organic daily sales growth in the fourth quarter. We achieved solid growth in our Midwest markets due to the strong sales of agronomic products, we continue to see pressure in markets like Texas and California that have been affected by softness in new construction demand. Acquisition sales, which reflect sales attributable to acquisitions completed in 2024 and 2025, contributed $12 million or 1% to net sales growth in the fourth quarter. For the 2025 fiscal year, acquisition sales contributed $111 million or 2% to net sales growth. Scott will provide more details regarding our acquisition strategy later in the call.

Gross profit for the fourth quarter was $357 million, which was an increase of 6% compared to the prior year period. Gross margin for the fourth quarter increased 80 basis points to 34.1%. For the 2025 fiscal year, gross profit increased 5% and gross margin increased 40 basis points to 34.8%. The increase in gross margin for the fourth quarter and full year reflects improved price realization benefits from our commercial initiatives and a positive contribution from acquisitions, partially offset by higher freight and logistics costs. During the year, we added a fifth distribution center near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and we increased international sourcing to support the growth of private label products.

Selling, general and administrative expenses, or SG&A, increased less than 1% to $366 million for the fourth quarter. SG&A as a percentage of net sales decreased 100 basis points in the quarter to 35%. As discussed during last quarter's earnings call, we consolidated and closed 20 branch locations in the fourth quarter. which negatively impacted SG&A by $6 million, of which $4.5 million is reflected in adjusted EBITDA. In the fourth quarter of 2024, we took similar actions to consolidate and close 22 locations, which negatively affected SG&A by $16 million, of which $4.5 million was included in our adjusted EBITDA results. These actions reflect our continued efforts to optimize our branch footprint and lower our cost structure to match the current environment.

As a reminder, in most cases, with our consolidations and closures, we typically can serve customers from other branches in the same market, and therefore, we expect to retain most of the sales. For the quarter, base business SG&A as a percentage of net sales was roughly flat, reflecting our ongoing operating cost management actions, which helped offset higher incentive compensation expense. For the full year, SG&A increased 2% to $1.4 billion and SG&A as a percentage of net sales decreased 40 basis points to 30.1%. Base business SG&A as a percentage of net sales decreased 50 basis points for 2025 compared to the prior year. This improvement reflects our continued efforts to increase productivity and better align our operating costs with the current market demand.

Our effective tax rate for fiscal 2025 was 22.5% compared to 22.4% for fiscal 2024. A small increase in the effective tax rate was due primarily to a decrease in the amount of excess tax benefits from stock-based compensation. Excess tax benefits of $3.8 million were recognized for the 2025 fiscal year as compared to $3.3 million for the prior year. We expect the effective tax rate for fiscal 2026 will be between 25% and 26%, excluding discrete items such as excess tax benefits. Net loss attributable to SiteOne was $9 million for the fourth quarter compared to a net loss of $21.7 million for the prior year period. Net income attributable to SiteOne for fiscal 2025 increased to $151.8 million compared to $123.6 million for fiscal 2024.

The improvement in both the fourth quarter and full year was primarily due to higher net sales, improved gross margin and the achievement of SG&A leverage. Our weighted average diluted share count was $45.1 million for the 2025 fiscal year compared to $45.6 million for the 2024 fiscal year. We repurchased 322,000 shares for $40 million in the fourth quarter and 817,000 shares for $97.7 million at an average price of $119.62 per share for the full year. Adjusted EBITDA increased 18% to $37.6 million for the fourth quarter compared to $31.8 million for the prior year period. Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded 50 basis points to 3.6%. For the full year, adjusted EBITDA increased approximately 10% to $414.2 million compared to $378.2 million for the 2024 fiscal year. Adjusted EBITDA margin improved 50 basis points to 8.8% for the 2025 fiscal year. Adjusted EBITDA includes adjusted EBITDA attributable to noncontrolling interest of $1.1 million and $4.2 million for the fourth quarter and full year, respectively. Now I'd like to provide a brief update on our balance sheet and cash flow statement as shown on Slide 11. Working capital at the end of the 2025 fiscal year was $1.01 billion, compared to $909 million at the end of the prior year.

The increase in working capital was primarily due to higher cash on hand and strategic purchases of inventory to support our growth. Cash provided by operating activities increased to $165 million for the fourth quarter compared to $119 million for the prior year period. The increase in cash flows from operating activities for the fourth quarter reflects higher net income and improved working capital management. Cash provided by operating activities for the full year was $301 million, compared to $283 million for the prior year. The increase in cash flow from operating activities in the 2025 fiscal year was primarily due to the improvement in net income. We made cash investments of $30 million for the fourth quarter compared to $37 million for the same period in 2024. We made cash investments of $83 million in the 2025 fiscal year compared to $177 million in the prior year. The decrease in both the fourth quarter and full year is attributable to lower investments in acquisitions.

Capital expenditures for the quarter were $15 million compared to $10 million for the prior year period. Capital expenditures for the 2025 fiscal year were $54 million compared to $41 million for the 2024 fiscal year. The increase in capital expenditures for both the fourth quarter and full year reflects increased investments in our branch locations. Net debt at the end of the 2025 fiscal year was $330 million compared to $412 million at the end of the prior year. Leverage decreased to 0.8x our trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA compared to 1.1x at the end of the prior year. We had available liquidity of $768 million which consisted of $191 million of cash on hand and $578 million in available capacity under our ABL facility at the end of the 2025 fiscal year.

On Slide 12, we highlight our balanced approach to capital allocation. Our primary goal regarding capital allocation is to invest in our business, including the execution of our acquisition strategy. We're also committed to maintaining a conservative balance sheet as demonstrated by our leverage ratio. The extent we have excess capital after achieving these objectives, the share repurchase authorization provides us with a mechanism to return capital to our shareholders. In the 2025 fiscal year, we executed our capital allocation strategy, investing $93 million in CapEx and acquisitions, and conservatively maintaining leverage at 0.8x net debt to adjusted EBITDA, which allowed us to complete share repurchases of approximately $98 million. I will now turn the call over to Scott for an update on our acquisition strategy.

Thanks, Eric. As shown on Slide 13, we acquired 3 companies in the fourth quarter bringing our total for the year to 8 for combined trailing 12-month net sales of approximately $55 million in 2025. Additionally, we have acquired 1 company in 2026. Since 2014, we have acquired 107 companies with approximately $2.1 billion in trailing 12-month net sales added to SiteOne. Turning to Slides 14 to 17, you will find information on our most recent acquisitions. On October 1, we acquired Red's Home & Garden, a wholesale distributor of nursery and hardscape products in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. The addition of Red's Home & Garden provides a strategic entry into North Carolina's Appalachian market allowing us to offer all of our product lines in a new market.

On November 13, we acquired CC Landscaping Warehouse, a wholesale distributor of nursery products bulk materials and landscape supplies in Bradenton, Florida. The addition of CC Landscape and expand SiteOne's product offering in this fast-growing Florida market. On November 20, we acquired French Broad Stone Yards, a 2-location wholesale distributor of hardscape products in Arden and Brevard, North Carolina. This acquisition expands our Hartsgage presence in the North Carolina Mountain region. Finally, on January 13, we completed our first acquisition of 2026, adding Bourget Flagstone Company, a division of Bourget Brothers building materials and a wholesale distributor of hardscape products with 1 location in Santa Monica, California.

Summarizing on Slide 18, our acquisition strategy continues to create significant value for SiteOne by adding excellent talent and moving us forward toward our goal of providing a full line of landscape products and services to our customers in all major U.S. and Canadian markets. As we've discussed, the high-performing companies we acquired in 2025 were smaller than our historical average. As Doug had mentioned, given our active discussions, we would expect the average deal size to be more typical in 2026. Overall, with our strong balance sheet and a robust pipeline, we remain confident in our ability to continue adding outstanding companies to SiteOne for years to come. I want to thank the entire SiteOne team for their passion and commitment to making SiteOne a great place to work and for welcoming the newly acquired teams when they joined the SiteOne family. I will now turn the call back to Doug.

Thanks, Scott. I'll wrap up on Slide 19. As we move into 2026, there continues to be uncertainty with interest rates, consumer confidence and the overall economy, which could affect our end markets. On the positive side, we are expecting pricing to increase in 2026 for the first time since 2022, which will support higher organic daily sales growth. In terms of end markets, we expect new residential construction, which comprises 20% of our sales to be down in 2026. Continued elevated interest rates, lower consumer confidence and high home values are constraining demand. This market was down in 2025. And with continued weakness in housing starts, we are expecting it to drop further in 2026.

New commercial construction, which represents 14% of our sales, was solid in 2025, and we believe it will remain flat in 2026. Median activity from our project services teams continues to be slightly positive compared to the prior year, which is a good indicator of continued demand. While the ABI index is showing weakness, our customer backlogs remain solid, and we believe the commercial market will remain resilient for the full year. We believe the repair and upgrade market, which represents 30% of our sales, was down in 2025 but seemed to have stabilized during the second half. Existing home sales continue to be soft, and there is a high degree of uncertainty associated with repair and upgrade. However, the long-term fundamentals for this end market continue to be strong.

We estimate that repair and upgrade demand will be flat in 2026. Lastly, in the maintenance end market, which represents 36% of our sales, we achieved excellent sales volume growth in 2025 as our teams gain profitable market share on top of the steady demand growth. We expect the maintenance end market to continue growing steadily in 2026. In total, we expect end market demand to be flat with growth and maintenance offsetting a decline in new residential construction. Given this backdrop and with the benefit of our commercial initiatives, we expect to achieve positive sales volume growth which, when coupled with positive pricing, is expected to yield low-single-digit organic daily sales growth for the full year 2026.

We expect gross margin in 2026 to be higher than 2025, driven by our commercial initiatives and the contribution from acquisitions, partially offset by higher freight and logistics costs supporting our growth. Our continued strong actions to improve our productivity and by continuing to address our focus branches, we expect to achieve operating leverage in 2026, yielding solid improvement in our adjusted EBITDA margin. In terms of acquisitions, as Scott mentioned, we have a good pipeline of high-quality targets and we expect to add more excellent companies to the SiteOne family throughout 2026.

Lastly, as Eric mentioned, we have an extra week in 2026. Unfortunately, this extra week occurs in fiscal December during a very slow sales period, which is a traditionally loss-making period for SiteOne. As a result, we expect the extra week will reduce our adjusted EBITDA by $4 million to $5 million. With all these factors in mind and including the negative effect of the 53rd week, we expect our full year adjusted EBITDA for fiscal 2026 to be in the range of $425 million to $455 million. This range does not factor in any contribution from unannounced acquisitions.

In closing, I would like to sincerely thank all our SiteOne associates who continue to amaze me with their passion, commitment, teamwork and selfless service. We have a tremendous team, and it is an honor to be joined with them as we deliver increasing value for all our stakeholders. I would also like to thank our suppliers for supporting us so strongly and our customers for allowing us to be their partner. Operator, please open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from David Manthey with Baird.

First question here, more of a statement. I mean, we're in the shoulder season, obviously, but really encouraging results. So that's great to see. But focusing on the year that we just closed up, by my calculations, I think you did over 20% EBITDA contribution margins on just 1% organic growth in 2025. And if I look at the guidance you've given for EBITDA and low-single-digit organic growth, I think that implies something in the mid- to high teens, maybe even higher than that in 2026 again. So first question is just, is that your intent? And then I have a follow-up.

Yes. I think those are the kind of the basic numbers, and we're able to get that, obviously, because we're improving our gross margin, at the same time, we're getting SG&A leverage. And we -- as you know, we have the focus branches that we're able to improve. And so that gives us more than, say, a typical drop down to the bottom line on pretty modest sales. And we expect that to be the case in '26 as well as '25. Eventually, that will play itself out. But for now, we can get pretty outsized delivery on low sales because of the focused branch improvement and the other initiatives that we've got that kind of combined together to give us that pretty robust profit improvement.

Yes. Thanks, Doug. You almost answered my follow-up question, but let me just drill in a little bit more on that. So the factors that had depressed margin previously at the trough where weak market demand, negative pricing, we had this pioneer overhang, structural investments you made in the business and distribution centers and technology, and that was offset by the cost reduction efforts that you mentioned. And maybe as it relates to those specific efforts, clearly, some of those are in the rearview mirror and no longer apply. But as you look at 2026, which are the key levers as we go forward? And then is there anything else from a cost standpoint that we need to think about that will be an offset in '26? Just any sort of investments or anything else we should be watching for?

Yes. I mean you pretty much hit the list, and that's why we're excited as we look forward. Pioneers delivered significant improved profitability in '25. We expect that to continue in '26. Deflation, which has been hampering us for several years is largely behind us. And the investments that we've made during those periods, even when things were tougher are starting to pay off and we're getting to harvest those. So a good outlook, I guess, going forward. The 1 headwind, we do have a headwind. We mentioned we put in the fifth DC. We put that in the fourth quarter. We're also expanding another 1 of our DCs. When we do that initially, it tends to be dilutive a couple of million dollars in the fourth quarter. It will be another $8 million next year. As a headwind, that will offset some of the gross margin improvement, but we'll still see solid gross margin improvement on top of that.

Last year, we had a bonus headwind with very little bonus in '24, we paid higher bonuses in '25 on better performance. So kind of -- if you replace that headwind in '26. But that would be the 1 thing that's kind of -- that would still be going against us.

Our next question comes from Ryan Merkel with William Blair.

I wanted to start with the first quarter outlook, if I could. Are you expecting low-single-digit organic growth here in 1Q? And can you comment on how the start to the year has gone?

Yes. I mean we would expect our growth to be fairly balanced through the year. Pricing will be a bit stronger in the first half just because of the way the tariff pricing hit kind of in May-ish, April, May, of last year. And the way the deflation of the commodity products has come off, we'll probably have stronger pricing in the first half than the second half. But overall, let's call it, organic sales volume should be fairly spread out through the year. The start of the year has been very reasonable. We had a good January. February has been somewhat weather-affected. But we're not seeing anything that doesn't line up with our guidance or outlook for 2026.

Okay. That's great to hear. And then for my follow-up, guiding '26 organic to low-single digits, the flat market price of 2%. So what I noticed is it doesn't include a lot for share gains. So how are you thinking about share gains in '26 and then maybe speak generally to competition, if it's still rational or if you're seeing people get a little more competitive here?

Yes. No, great question. Yes, we're confident that we can continue to gain market share -- we're obviously very cautious on the market itself. We're calling it flat, but we do expect to gain market share. And so we probably put some cushion in there if the market ends up holding up, we should do well on a volume basis. We're very pleased with the 1% volume increase that we got last year when the market was down. So that looks optimistic. In terms of competition, it's the same, right? I mean, our very competitive market. We have different competitors, some are more competitive than others. They're all kind of behaving the same. We're very good at battling it out for the large customers. We're taking share kind of with the small mid customers where the competition is less or tends to be less. And so that's kind of our strategy. But the competitive environment is very similar, but it is a very -- it's a competitive market. .

Our next question comes from Jeffrey Stevenson with Loop Capital Markets.

How should we think about the expected operating leverage benefits in 2026 from your internal initiatives, focused on improving underperformer branches. And then could there be additional opportunities to close or consolidate branches in addition to the 20 you did in the fourth quarter?

Yes. Thanks, Jeff. I think focused branches will continue to contribute. We're expecting kind of a similar contribution to '26 as we delivered in '25. I think closures at this point, we're not expecting to do something that we have done in the last two 4th quarters, we'll continue to assess those opportunities. But it's part of our typical process to close branches and consolidate when leases come up. So we're not planning anything significant at this point. But in terms of other SG&A items, we do expect to drive productivity improvements on top of just the closures, cost management, our delivery programs, multiyear journey, we expect that to contribute again. So we are facing -- we do have inflation not only in wages, but overall across our SG&A. So we do believe that our initiatives will overcome that and we'll achieve leverage. That's our plans in '26.

Okay. Great. No, that's helpful. And private label growth has been a standout this year, increasing to 15% of sales. And it sounds like you have a long runway of opportunities in your core private label brands. Just is there a long-term target of what percentage private label sales could grow to over the coming years?

Yes. I mean we would think that 25%, 30% private label in the long term would be very doable. It will take us time to get there. We kind of have a goal of adding 100 basis points in our total sales mix a year, and we achieved that goal this year. We've got some terrific programs for private label products for '26. So we feel like it will be a steady very long-term march, but quite powerful over that period in terms of margin improvement.

Our next question comes from Collin Verron with Deutsche Bank.

I just want to start on maintenance. It's really shown steadiness in this uneven macro backdrop. So just curious, can you quantify the organic maintenance sales growth you saw in 2025 and sort of what your expectations are in terms of magnitude for 2026. And then I guess just the offset here on the new resi side, just any sense of order of magnitude for the declines that you're expecting there?

Yes. Our organic growth for the products we sell into maintenance. So agronomics growth for the year was 7%, and that was all volume. Pricing came in flat for the full year. And in the fourth quarter, it was 11% on 9% volume with 2% price. So we feel like we're performing very well, taking share, penetrating adjacent markets and driving a lot of improvements in our balanced mix of products.

We think the base market demand is probably 2% to 3% a year in maintenance. -- it's 36% of our business. So that's a kind of powerful force. New res is 20% of our business. So it does allow us to kind of counterbalance that weakness. But coming in at 7% volume, we have been gaining market share in maintenance. And we think we can continue -- we gain market share there, probably for the last 2 or 3 years and have great capabilities there.

Great. That's helpful color. And I guess just committing to gross margin. I mean, it was a really strong quarter in the fourth quarter, and I think it was slightly better than sort of the expectations coming out of the third quarter. So maybe can you compare sort of what transpired in the fourth quarter to what you were thinking in the third quarter and some of the puts and takes there? And maybe how those will continue into 2026.

Yes. So if you think about price, we had guided 1% to 2%. We ended up on the high end of that with the 2%. So a better contribution on price, price realization. Vendor support. We were conservative there and things came in a little better. That can move around at the end of a seasonal quarter, not necessarily tied to sales. It's more purchasing volumes related and then freight impacts, which there's been some partial offsets there that wasn't as bad as we anticipated. And acquisitions contribution came in a little higher on the gross margin side. So overall, it was better than we expected. We entered the year on the high end of the pricing guide here for '26, so we think that will be beneficial for price realization in the first quarter and first half of '26. .

Our next question comes from Mike Dahl with RBC Capital Markets.

First one on just the organic daily sales outlook. I know that with these branch closures, you typically expect to retain most of the sales, but given you've had to at least 2 larger iterations of this now. I don't know if that may or may not be different than normal. But do you have any kind of stats that are showing you so far maybe percentage-wise of what percentage of sales you're retaining and how that's influencing your , if at all, your daily sales guide? And similarly, if we should think about that extra week in December as negatively impacting your daily sales guidance?

Yes. In terms of the closures, we typically retain 75%, 80% of the sale. I mean, that has been our history. And so we would expect something similar. It is baked into our guide. So that's a bit of a headwind that obviously we can overcome come with share gains. And then I'll pass it to Eric for the effect of the 53rd week. .

Yes. The 53rd week, obviously, it's an extra week of sales, but it's a very slow week. I think after Christmas, and wrap around New Year. So those 4 extra selling days is seasonally very slow. On the organic daily basis, it's about 100 basis negative drag on organic growth.

For the -- and Eric, that's for the year or for the quarter, it equates to 100 basis points.

Yes, that's the full year, that number.

Okay. Yes. That's what -- that makes sense. That's what I kind of figured. Okay. And then just pivoting to the margin side. you're not giving exact guide for SG&A and gross margin per usual, but you expect improvement in both. Can you give us a sense of whether it's more heavily geared towards 1 versus the other?

It's pretty balanced across the 2 as it was in 2025. So we feel like we're driving initiatives on both sides and it would be pretty balanced in the contribution of each.

Our next question comes from Matthew Bouley with Barclays. .

You have [indiscernible] on for Matthew. I wanted to follow up on private label. So within that, like what categories are you seeing the most opportunity to expand within? And can you walk us through maybe some of the margin differentials there for your business?

I mean the categories are we have private -- strong private label and agronomics being with the LESCO brand, with the Pro Trade, that would be lighting and other landscape supplies like synthetic turf, erosion control and fittings, et cetera. The -- and then we have a strong private label brand, Solstastone in hardscapes. And so that's high-ends and flooring, decking, et cetera. And then finally, portfolio is our nursery private label, which is growing quite rapidly. So that gives you the full breadth of our private label brands. the differential, I would just say, is significant. It makes a difference. And when we move the percentage of private label as a percent of total sales, it makes a material impact on our gross margin. .

Got it. And can you also touch on what you're seeing in terms of price increase announcements so far into like early 1Q. How has price realization tracked so far? And is there any difference between like finished goods and commodity pricing?

Yes. So price realization, I would say it's early, but it's tracking how we exited Price increases so far in the quarter, it's early larger suppliers I guess we had 1 signal low-single digit. So nothing significant so far in the quarter. .

And commodities.

Yes, commodities, sorry, commodities, so we exited the year, the 2 that had been deflationary or have been deflationary, grass seed was down 12% and PVC down 10%. As we enter the this first half of the year, grass seed will stay in that range, kind of 10% to 15%, reprices in June. We'll see -- we believe we're at a bottom there. We're down to 2013 pricing levels. So we don't believe that we're going to go down any further after the first half of the year. And then PVC is kind of flattish right now in the environment. We're kind of monitoring. We haven't seen any price increases or any significant decreases at this point. So commodities right now, we believe we're exiting that deflationary impacts on the business. And then across the rest of the cost basket more 90% positive price territory and tariff-affected products, where price increases went in the second quarter in '25. Those have remained in the positive pricing territory. .

Our next question comes from Andrew Carter with Stifel.

Regarding the digital growth that you cited, where is digital penetration today across the platform? And is it significantly different by markets where there's a test case to show where this can be? Or is it pretty even at this point?

It's a pretty broad spread across products now and across geographics. We're very pleased. We're up 120% or over 120% versus last year. We expect that to be double-digit penetration for total sales this year. We've got our regular users of siteone.com are up 60%. There were about 10,000 regular users in 2025. So we're very pleased at how digital is ramping up and becoming a very meaningful part of SiteOne.

And regarding kind of the end market guidance that you gave, new construction to be down, how much in your guidance has factored in how deep the declines could go that you could manage and still stay within your guidance? And remind us, I think you have your 6 months out from new construction, census is delayed, but -- so that still gives you until April. So any help and clarity on that key market?

Yes. I mean it's hard to say, right? There's a lot of uncertainty with new res, but I would kind of -- we're looking at maintenance as a balance and maintenance is 36% of our business. New res is 20%. Maintenance demand will be up 2% to 3%. So new res could be down more than that. And obviously, it balances, right? So that gives you the math of how we're thinking about how things will play out. And we stand ready for -- if the market is worse than that, then we feel like our share gains can also help balance that. We're gaining strength there. But we'll see what we get. 2025 was we feel a down market where new res and repair and remodel go down, and we were able to kind of drive out a 1% volume growth. So we're still optimistic, even though we feel that the new res market is likely to be soft and down materially.

Our next question comes from Charles Perron-Piche with Goldman Sachs.

I'd like to touch on the M&A pipeline. What gives you the confidence in the normalization in activity this year? And should activity remain soft, how would you consider other capitalization priorities given the strength of the balance sheet?

Yes. Thanks, Charles. I would say, obviously, the M&A activity in the year very significantly. But our long-term average is that the average size is $15 million to $20 million in revenue. And just to show the variability in '23 and '24, our average revenue was over $25 million per company. And this year, as you saw, it was well under 10%. What gives us confidence is that our active discussions this year would lead us to believe that we'd be in a more typical range. So it's just our experience and our ongoing discussions. And then in terms if it is a light year, Eric?

Yes. We would be -- we redeploy capital to return cash to the shareholders. So yes. we would fill in any space there.

Got it. Okay. That's helpful. And then just touching on the fifth distribution center that opened up in understanding the costs that will come through it in the near term. But can you talk about the expected benefit that you're going to be able to generate from this and the improvement of service associated with that?

Right. So yes, the fifth DC is in Wisconsin. So it fills in the midwest part of our business. It will partly support 100 to 150 branches. And obviously, longer term, that will drive down our total delivered cost of goods sold and improve our margins. It is dilutive when we do it initially, but it improves the margin. But it also improves our stocking and our ability to service our customers with tremendous service at lower overall inventory levels because we get the inventory efficiency there. So adding the fifth DC will help us continue to lower our overall network cost over time. It will allow us to streamline our inventory turns and increase our inventory turns. But in the short term, it's dilutive in the year where you put it in and ramp yourself up.

And I'd also add that it helps us continue to accelerate our private label so it gives us just another driver there to achieve our objective.

Our next question comes from Shaun Calnan with Bank of America. .

Just a follow-up on the M&A activity question. Do you have a target for the amount of capital you want to deploy this year or a target for the leverage ratio outside of the long-term number just so we could kind of think about total M&A and share repurchases together since you're below the low end of your target at this point?

Yes. I think the target is on leverage. And so we would maintain that target. And so we'll see how the year develops in terms of M&A. M&A tends to average toward a mean. And so with last year being a lighter year. And given the discussions that Scott mentioned, we feel like this is going to be a stronger year. And that's our first priority, right? Invest in the business, value-added acquisitions that help us build our company. And then we do have strong cash flows. We expect them to continue to be strong. If we have capital that we feel is in excess staying within our target, we'll get share repurchases opportunistically through the year as well. .

Okay. Great. And then the macro backdrop for large discretionary spend seems to remain challenged right now, but you guys are guiding for repair and upgrade to be relatively flat this year. What gives you the confidence that it will remain stable? And then what are you hearing in terms of backlogs on the repair and upgrade side?

Yes, it's a great question. I mean, we would say that flat is our best estimate. There certainly is some uncertainty around there in terms of the market. What we're seeing in the market is that the very high end of our model continues to be strong, big backyard projects where folks aren't borrowing the money they can pay with cash and et cetera. So that continues to be strong. What became very weak was that middle income, some smaller projects that had -- would have to be funded through either an equity loan or some type of interest rate device. And so we that has been weak. As we mentioned, the remodel market was down, we believe, in 2025. We've seen some stabilization in our own numbers. or scapes products, lighting products that tend to be remodel-driven would have been less down as the year progressed through. And so we take that as a sign that the market is kind of bottoming out.

Certainly, that could be a wrong progression, but that's what we're seeing. The backlog, our customers, they have piece and backlogs they're way smaller than they were in the post COVID and some of the heyday. But it seems like they've got reasonable backlogs to be able to deliver on a flat year. So what we're seeing now, obviously, there's some uncertainty there. But we -- it gives us greater confidence that maybe we're hitting the bottom and that this year could be flat.

We have reached the end of our question-and-answer session now as there are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the floor back over to Doug Black for closing comments.

Okay. Well, thank you all for joining us today. We appreciate your interest in SiteOne, and we look forward to speaking to you again at the end of next quarter. Again, a big thank you to all our terrific associates for all they do our suppliers and our customers, and we will talk to you next quarter. Thank you. .

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

Greetings, and welcome to the SiteOne Landscape Supply, Inc. Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, John Guthrie, you may begin.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We issued our third quarter 2025 earnings press release this morning posted a slide presentation to the Investor Relations portion of our website at investors.siteone.com.

I'm joined today by Doug Black, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Scott Salmon, Executive Vice President, Strategy and Development; and Eric Elema, Vice President, Finance and Corporate Controller.

Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today's press release slide presentation and the statements made during this call include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. Such risks and uncertainties include the factors set forth in the earnings release and in our filings with Securities and Exchange Commission.

Additionally, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. A reconciliation of these measures can be found in our earnings release and in the slide presentation.

I would now like to turn the call over to Doug Black.

Thanks, John. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. We were pleased to achieve solid results during the third quarter with 4% net sales growth, including 3% organic daily sales growth and 11% growth in adjusted EBITDA compared to the prior year period despite the continued softness in our end markets. Our teams are executing our initiatives well yielding excellent SG&A leverage, good gross margin improvement and meaningful market share gains.

We also benefited from a more favorable price cost environment, yielding a 1% improvement in pricing for the quarter. Finally, we added 3 excellent companies to SiteOne during the quarter and 1 more in October, expanding our full product line capability in those local markets. Overall, with strong teams, a winning strategy and excellent execution of our commercial and operational initiatives. We are delivering solid performance and growth in 2025, despite softer end markets.

Heading into 2026, we are confident in our ability to drive continued performance and growth in the coming years. I will start today's call with a brief review of our unique market position and our strategy. followed by some highlights from the quarter. John Guthrie will then walk you through our third quarter financial results in more detail and provide an update on our balance sheet and liquidity position. Scott Salmon will discuss our acquisition strategy, and then I will come back to address our latest outlook before taking your questions.

As shown on Slide 4 of the earnings presentation, we have a strong footprint of more than 680 branches and 4 distribution centers across 45 U.S. states and 6 Canadian provinces. We are the clear industry leader over 3x the size of our nearest competitor and larger than 2 through 10 combined. We estimate that we only have about an 18% share of a very fragmented 25 billion wholesale landscape products distribution market.

Accordingly, our long-term opportunity to grow and gain market share remains significant. We have a balanced mix of business with 65% focused on maintenance, repair and upgrading, 21% focused on new residential construction and 14% on new commercial and recreational construction. As the only national full product line wholesale distributor in the market, we also have an excellent balance across our product lines as well as geographically. Our strategy to fill in our product lines across the U.S. and Canada, both organically and through acquisition further strengthens this balance over time.

Overall, we believe our end market mix, broad product portfolio and geographic coverage offer us multiple avenues to grow and create value for our customers and suppliers, while providing important resilience in softer markets like the markets we are experiencing today.

Turning to Slide 5. Our strategy is to leverage the scale, resources, functional talent and capabilities that we have as the largest company in our industry, all in support of our talented, experienced and entrepreneurial local teams to consistently deliver superior value to our customers and suppliers.

We've come a long way in building SiteOne and putting the teams and systems in place to fully execute our strategy at a high level across each of our product lines. In the current challenging market environment, we are making good progress in leveraging our capabilities to drive tangible results with consistent market share gains, improved SG&A leverage and steady gross margin improvement.

For our commercial and operational initiatives, we believe that we are delivering industry-leading value for our customers and suppliers, and solid performance improvement and growth for our shareholders this year. Importantly, we are gaining momentum for continued success in the years to come. These initiatives are complemented by our acquisition strategy, which fills in our product portfolio, moves us into new geographic markets and adds terrific new talent to SiteOne.

Taken all together, we believe our strategy creates superior value for our shareholders through organic growth, acquisition growth and adjusted EBITDA margin expansion.

On Slide 6, you can see our strong track record of performance and growth over the last 8 years. From an adjusted EBITDA margin perspective, we benefited from extraordinary price realization due to rapid inflation in commodity products during 2021 and 2022. In 2023 and 2024, we experienced significant headwinds as those commodity prices came down.

In 2024, we also experienced further adjusted EBITDA dilution from the acquisition of Pioneer, a large turnaround opportunity with great strategic fit and from our other focused branches, which resulted from the post-COVID market headwinds.

In 2025, our pricing has transitioned from negative 1% in the first quarter to flat in the second quarter, to up 1% in the third quarter, as commodity deflation continues to dissipate. We expect to exit 2025 with pricing up 1% to 2%, setting us up for a more normal inflation and price realization in 2026.

We Furthermore, we are achieving excellent progress with Pioneer and our other focus branches in 2025 and expect to continue achieving improvements over the next several years as we bring their performance up to the SiteOne average. In summary, we believe we are positioned to drive strong adjusted EBITDA margin improvement in 2025 and in the coming years, as we execute our initiatives and as the market headwinds turn to tailwinds.

Since the beginning of 2014, we have completed over 100 acquisitions adding more than $2 billion in acquired revenue to SiteOne, which demonstrates the strength and durability of our acquisition strategy. These companies expand our product line capabilities and strengthen SiteOne with excellent talent and new ideas for performance and growth.

Given the fragmented nature of our industry and our current market share, we believe that we have a significant opportunity to continue growing through acquisitions for many years to come.

Slide 7 shows the long runway that we have ahead in filling in our product portfolio, which we aim to do primarily through acquisition, especially in the nursery hardscapes and landscape supplies categories. We are well connected with the best companies in our industry and expect to continue filling in these markets systematically over the next decade.

I will now discuss some of our third quarter highlights as shown on Slide 8. We achieved 4% net sales growth in the third quarter with 3% organic daily sales growth and 1% growth due to acquisitions compared to the prior year. Organic sales volume grew 2% during the third quarter, reflecting continued share gains partially offset by end market softness in new residential construction and repair and upgrade.

Pricing was up 1% in the third quarter, marking a meaningful improvement versus the prior year period. As expected, the growth in maintenance-related demand remained steady in Q3, and we achieved 3% organic daily sales growth with our agronomic products. The residential new construction end market was down during the quarter, especially in Texas, Florida, Arizona and California.

The repair and upgrade market continued to be soft but we believe this market is beginning to stabilize versus prior year, while commercial demand also remained stable. Accordingly, with the benefit of market share gains and more favorable weather, we achieved 3% organic daily sales growth with our landscaping products.

Overall, we believe that we are consistently outperforming the market through our commercial initiatives, which, in combination with the recovery in pricing, should allow us to achieve positive organic daily sales growth for the remainder of this year, even in a down market.

Gross profit increased 6% and gross margin improved by 70 basis points to 34.7% due to higher price realization and gains from our initiatives. This outcome was higher than expected as our teams executed well and as the deflation in Grasse and PVC pipe was more than offset by stronger pricing and other products, which had a positive impact on gross margin.

Our SG&A as a percentage of net sales decreased 50 basis points to 28.4% and compared to the prior year period. For the base business, on an adjusted basis, SG&A as a percent of net sales decreased approximately 60 basis points versus last year, demonstrating our strong cost control and execution of our key initiatives, including continued improvement with our focus branches. We remain highly focused on achieving SG&A leverage through our initiatives. while benefiting from the impact of positive pricing on organic daily sales growth.

Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter increased 11% to $127.5 million, and adjusted EBITDA margin improved 60 basis points to 10.1% due to higher net sales, improved gross margin and increased SG&A leverage. With pricing continuing to normalize and with our commercial and operational initiatives yielding stronger results, we are pleased to resume adjusted EBITDA margin expansion this year and expect to drive continued improvement in the coming years.

In terms of initiatives, we are executing specific actions to improve our customer excellence, accelerate organic growth, expand gross margin and increased SG&A leverage. For gross margin improvement, we continue to increase sales with our small customers faster than our company average, drive growth in our private label brands and improve inbound freight costs through our transportation management system. These initiatives not only improve our gross margin, but also add to our organic growth, as we gain market share in the small customer segment, as well as across product lines with our competitive private label brands like Pro Trade, Solstas Stone and portfolio. Collectively, these 3 brands grew by 50% in the quarter and nearly 40% year-to-date.

To further drive organic growth, we are leveraging our increased percentage of by label branches and executing Hispanic marketing programs to create awareness among this important customer segment. We are also making great progress with our sales force productivity as we leverage our CRM and establish more disciplined revenue-generating habits and processes among our inside sales associates and over 600 outside sales associates.

This year, our outside sales force is covering approximately 10% more revenue than in 2024 with no additional head count, which has allowed us to achieve higher organic sales growth at a lower cost. Our digital initiative with siteone.com is also helping us to drive organic daily sales growth as our results have shown that customers who are engaged with us digitally grow significantly faster than those who are not.

Year-to-date, we have grown digital sales by over 125%, while adding thousands of new regular users of siteone.com, helping customers to be more efficient and helping us to increase market share while making our associates more productive, a true win-win-win. Through siteone.com and our other digital tools, we are accelerating organic growth, and we believe we are outperforming the market.

With the benefit of this batch track, which allows us to more closely manage our customer delivery, we are now able to improve both associate and equipment efficiency for delivery while more consistently pricing this service. We believe that we can significantly lower our net delivery expenses while improving the experience for our customers. So far this year, we have reduced our net delivery expense by approximately 30 basis points on delivered sales, which represent approximately 1/3 of our total sales. This is a major initiative, and we expect to make significant progress this year and in the next 2 to 3 years.

Last year, we mentioned that we are intensely managing our underperforming branches or focused branches, to ensure that they have the right teams, the right support and are executing our best practices to bring their performance up to or above the SiteOne average. As a part of these aggressive efforts, we consolidated or closed 22 locations in 2024 to strengthen our operations and better serve our customers at a reduced cost. Through the third quarter, we improved the adjusted EBITDA margin of our focused branches by over 200 basis points, and we expect to gain a meaningful adjusted EBITDA margin lift for SiteOne in the coming years, as we improve the performance of these branches.

To support further progress in 2026 in the face of potentially soft markets. We are planning to consolidate or close an additional 15 to 20 branches and serve existing customers from nearby branches at a lower cost. We will provide further detail on this later in the call. Taken all together, we are gaining momentum with our commercial and operational initiatives, which are improving our capability to drive organic growth, increase gross margin and achieve operating leverage.

On the acquisition front, as I mentioned, we added 4 excellent companies to our family during the quarter and in October, and we have added 6 companies and approximately $40 million in trailing 12-month sales to SiteOne so far in 2025. As we have mentioned earlier in the year, most of our more advanced discussions are with smaller companies this year, and so we expect 2025 will be a lighter than normal year in terms of acquired revenue, even as we aggressively cultivate key targets for future years.

In our fragmented industry, we still have plenty of high-quality targets, and we remain well positioned to grow consistently through acquisition for many years with an experienced acquisition team, broad and deep relationships with the best companies, a strong balance sheet and an exceptional reputation for being a great long-term home for companies in our industry.

In summary, our teams are doing a good job of managing through the near-term market environment, leveraging our many opportunities for improvement, prudently adding new companies to SiteOne through acquisition and building our company for the long-term.

Now John will walk you through the quarter in more detail. John?

Thanks, Doug. I'll begin on Slide 9 with some highlights from our third quarter results. There were 63 selling days in the third quarter as same as the prior year period. Organic daily sales increased 3% in the third quarter compared to the prior year period, driven by our sales initiatives and improved pricing. Overall, we saw 2% growth in volume and 1% growth from pricing.

Pricing has improved from 3% deflation in Q3 2024 to 1% deflation in Q1 2025 to 1% growth this quarter. Price increases due in part to tariffs have now more than offset the price decreases we were experiencing with certain commodity products. We have positive pricing in almost all categories, while commodity products like Grasse and PVC pipe which were down approximately 13% and 10%, respectively, this quarter are becoming less of a headwind.

Our outlook for price contribution for the fourth quarter is between 1% and 2% and for the full year, pricing should end up flat to up approximately 1%. Organic daily sales for agronomic products, which includes fertilizer, control products, ice melt and equipment, increased 3% for the third quarter due to solid demand in the maintenance end market and market share gains.

Organic daily sales for landscaping products, which include irrigation, nursery, hardscapes, outdoor lining and landscape accessories increased 3% for the third quarter due to our sales initiatives, improved pricing and more favorable weather. Geographically, 7 out of our 9 regions achieved positive organic daily sales growth in the third quarter.

Consistent with last quarter, we continued to see weaker sales in the Sun Belt states like Texas due to softness in the new residential construction end market. Acquisition sales, which reflect sales attributable to acquisitions completed in 2024 and 2025, contributed approximately $13 million or 1% to net sales growth.

Gross profit increased 6% to approximately $437 million for the third quarter compared to approximately $411 million for the prior year period. Gross margin for the third quarter expanded 70 basis points to 34.7% due to improved price realization and benefits from our commercial initiatives, like private label and small customer growth.

Selling, general and administrative expenses, or SG&A, increased 2% to approximately $357 million for the third quarter. SG&A as a percentage of net sales decreased 50 basis points for the quarter to 28.4%. The SG&A leverage improvement reflects our actions to increase productivity and better align operating costs with the current market demand.

For the third quarter, we recorded income tax expense of approximately $60 million, which is consistent with the prior year period. The effective tax rate was 20.4% for the third quarter compared to 26.2% for the prior year period. The decrease in the effective tax rate was primarily due to an increase in the amount of excess tax benefits from stock-based compensation. We continue to expect the 2025 fiscal year effective tax rate will be between 25% and 26%, excluding discrete items such as excess tax benefits.

Net income attributable to Cyclone for the third quarter increased 33% to $59 million due to net sales growth, improved gross margin and SG&A leverage. Our weighted average diluted share count was approximately 45 million at the end of the third quarter compared to 45.6 million for the prior year period. We did not make any share repurchases during the quarter, but post quarter, we repurchased approximately 161,000 shares for $20 million under a 10b5-1 plan.

Year-to-date, we have repurchased approximately 656,000 shares for a total of approximately $78 million at an average price of approximately $118 per share. These repurchases reflect our continued commitment to disciplined capital allocation and returning value to our shareholders.

Adjusted EBITDA increased 11% to $127.5 million for the third quarter compared to $114.8 million for the prior year period. Adjusted EBITDA margin improved approximately 60 basis points to 10.1%. Adjusted EBITDA includes -- adjusted EBITDA attributable to noncontrolling interest of $1 million for the third quarter of 2025 compared to $0.8 million for the third quarter of 2024.

Now I'd like to provide a brief update on our balance sheet and cash flow statement as shown on Slide 10. Working capital at the end of the third quarter was approximately $1.06 billion compared to approximately $992 million at the end of the same period prior year. The increase in working capital is primarily due to higher inventory purchases ahead of tariffs and growth in accounts receivable due to increased sales.

Net cash provided by operating activities was approximately $129 million for the third quarter compared to approximately $116 million for the prior year period. The increase in operating cash flow is primarily due to the improvement in the net income. We made cash investments of approximately $16 million for the third quarter compared to approximately $21 million for the same period prior year. The decrease reflects lower acquisition investment compared to the same period prior year.

Capital expenditures of approximately $10 million were flat compared to the same period last year. Net debt at the end of the quarter was approximately $423 million compared to approximately $449 million at the end of the third quarter of last year. Leverage declined to 1x trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA from 1.2x a year ago.

As a reminder, our target year-end net debt to adjusted EBITDA leverage range is 1 to 2x. At the end of the quarter, we had available liquidity of approximately $685 million, which consisted of approximately $107 million cash on hand and approximately $578 million in available capacity under our ABL facility. Our priority from a balance sheet and funding perspective is to maintain our financial strength and flexibility, so we can execute our growth strategy in all market environments.

Before I turn the call over to Scott, I'd like to take a moment to share that this will be my final earnings call as CFO. As previously announced, I will be retiring at the end of the year. It's been a true privilege to serve SiteOne over the past 20-plus years, and I'm incredibly proud of the company we built and the progress we've made together. I'm also pleased to welcome Eric Elema, our incoming CFO, who will be stepping into the role beginning in January. Eric has been a key leader and partner in building our finance organization and has played an integral role in shaping the strategy and driving execution at SiteOne.

I'll now turn it over to Eric to briefly introduce [indiscernible].

Thanks, John. I want to start by thanking you for your leadership and mentorship. You've built a best-in-class finance organization and have set a strong foundation for continued success. I'm honored to step into the CFO role and excited to continue supporting our teams and executing our strategy.

From a financial and operational standpoint, nothing is changing. We remain focused on disciplined execution driving performance and growth and delivering value for our stakeholders. I look forward to working closely with Doug and the leadership team as well as all our associates in the next chapter.

I will now turn the call over to Scott for an update on our acquisition strategy.

Thanks, Eric, and thank you, John, for your leadership and contributions to SiteOne. It's been a pleasure working alongside you.

I'll now provide an update on our acquisition strategy. As shown on Slide 11, we acquired 3 companies in the third quarter and 1 more post-quarter, bringing the total to 6 acquisitions year-to-date, with a combined trailing 12-month net sales of approximately $40 million. Since 2014, we have acquired 104 companies with approximately $2 billion in trailing 12-month net sales added to SiteOne.

Turning to Slides 12 through 15, you will find information on our most recent acquisitions. On July 24, we acquired Grove Nursery, a single location wholesale distributor of nursery products in Northwest Minneapolis, Minnesota. The addition of Grove Nursery now enables us to provide a full range of products to our customers in the Twin Cities.

Also on July 24, we acquired Nashville Nursery, a single-location wholesale nursery in Northwest Nashville, Tennessee. Joining forces with Nashville Nursery further strengthens our position as the leading wholesale distributor of nursery products in Central Tennessee.

On September 19, we acquired Autumn Ridge Stone a single location hardscape distributor in Holland, Michigan, expanding the range of products we provide to our customers in Western Michigan. And lastly, on October 1, we acquired Red's Home & Garden a single location hardscape and nursery distributor in Wilkesboro North Carolina. The addition of Red's allows us to better service our many customers in Western Carolina.

Summarizing on Slide 16. Our acquisition strategy continues to provide a significant growth opportunity for SiteOne by adding excellent talent and moving us forward toward our goal of providing a full line of landscape products and services to our customers in all major U.S. and Canadian markets.

As we've noted throughout the year, acquired revenue is expected to be lower in 2025, reflecting a more modest contribution from recent acquisitions. We have a large pipeline of potential acquisitions, and we are actively building relationships with many other companies. We have significant runway to grow and create value through our acquisitions in the years to come. As always, I want to thank the entire SiteOne team for their passion and commitment to making SiteOne a great place to work and for welcoming the newly acquired teams when they joined the SiteOne family.

I will now turn the call back to Doug.

Thanks, Scott. Before we wrap up, I'd like to take a moment to thank John for his outstanding leadership and many contributions to SiteOne over the years. John has been a terrific partner and trusted colleague from the day I joined the company back in 2014. Over the years, he has been instrumental in building our strong company executing our strategy and achieving excellent performance and growth. We wish him all the best in his well-earned retirement.

I'd like to also congratulate Eric Elema on his appointment as CFO. Eric is a proven leader with deep knowledge of our business, and I look forward to working with him in his new role as we continue to execute our strategy and drive long-term value.

Now turning to our current outlook for the rest of the year on Slide 17. With continued market uncertainty, elevated interest rates and weak consumer confidence -- we believe that the softness in new residential construction and repair and upgrade demand will continue, more than offsetting growth in maintenance demand. With the benefit of positive price growth and our commercial initiatives driving market share gains, we expect to achieve positive organic daily sales growth during the remainder of the year.

In terms of our individual end markets, we have seen a decline in new residential demand this year, especially in the high-growth markets across the Sunbelt. Accordingly, we expect the demand for landscaping products for new residential construction, which comprised 21% of our sales to be down during the remainder of 2025. Continued elevated interest rates, housing affordability challenges and lower consumer confidence are constraining demand. And we expect this end market to remain weak until some of these factors improve.

The new commercial construction end market, which represents 14% of our sales, has remained resilient in 2025 so far, and we believe it will be flat for the remainder of the year. [indiscernible] activity from our project services teams continues to be slightly positive. But with the ABI index remaining below 50 there is uncertainty in new commercial construction future demand.

The repair and upgrade end market, which represents 30% of our sales has been down this year, but in talking with our customers and monitoring our volume in specific products, we believe demand has begun to stabilize in the last few months. We expect this market to remain soft during the remainder of the year, but we'd be optimistic that we may have reached a foundation for future growth in repair and upgrade demand.

Lastly, in the maintenance end market, which represents 35% of our sales, we have continued to achieve solid sales volume growth. We expect the maintenance end market to continue growing steadily in 2025. Taken all together, we expect our end markets to be slightly down for the remainder of the year.

Despite this backdrop, we expect sales volume to be slightly positive in the fourth quarter with the benefit of our commercial initiatives. Coupled with modest price inflation, we expect low single-digit organic daily sales growth during the remainder of the year. With strong actions taken to reduce SG&A and continued focus on branch improvement, sales productivity and delivery efficiency, we expect to continue achieving improved operating leverage during the remainder of the year. We expect solid adjusted EBITDA margin expansion for the full year 2025.

In terms of acquisitions, as mentioned earlier, we expect to add more excellent companies to the SiteOne family during the remainder of the year, though we expect to add less revenue for the full year 2025 compared to 2024, due to the smaller average acquisition size.

As mentioned earlier, to proactively address the potential for continued soft market conditions and to further optimize our footprint and cost structure, we plan to consolidate or close 15 to 20 branches in the fourth quarter and incur a charge to adjusted EBITDA of approximately $4 million to $6 million. We expect to retain most of the sales from these branches.

With all of these factors in mind and including the fourth quarter charge, we expect our full year adjusted EBITDA for fiscal 2025 to be in the range of $405 million to $415 million. This range does not factor in any contribution from unannounced acquisitions.

In closing, I would like to sincerely thank all our SiteOne associates who continue to amaze me with their passion, commitment, teamwork and selfless service. We have a tremendous team, and it is an honor to be joined with them as we deliver increasing value for all our stakeholders. I would like to also thank our suppliers for supporting us so strongly and our customers for allowing us to be their partner.

Operator, please open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of David Manthey with Baird.

First question, a simple one. Just on the charge that you mentioned, why are you not excluding that from adjusted EBITDA guidance? It seems like a nonrecurring item, just optically wondering why that's not being factored out.

We've always had relatively strict guidelines with regards to our adjusted EBITDA. And this is consistent with them. All of our adjustments primarily reflect acquisitions and the adjustments within the first year. So that's been our policy. We provide the information. So you and the investors can make those adjustments themselves.

Yes. I appreciate it. That's great. And then the next line of questioning on pricing. If you could talk to us about the price you realized in agronomics versus landscape products. And then thinking about the fourth quarter and seasonality, the mix of the business, for example, grass seed, obviously lower in the fourth quarter than the third. How should we think about price realization as it relates to mix as we go into the season -- the off season? And then any thoughts about 2026 as that's going to evolve?

Sure. Price for the quarter, landscape products was up 1%, and agronomic products was flat. I mean it was actually down slightly, but rounded -- or you would round it flat. Going into the fourth quarter, on [indiscernible], which is the largest component still negative price will be a smaller component of the business. And so we expect price in the fourth quarter to be between 1% and 2%.

And then going into next year as kind of the deflationary items continue to diminish, we would think it would be kind of more of a normal pricing year, with historically, we're around 2%, 1% to 3% where we would probably be a good range right now, but I think we would probably say we're at the midpoint of that range would be our outlook of today.

Perfect. All right. John, congrats all the best. And Eric, we look forward to working with you.

Our next question comes from the line of Ryan Merkel with William Blair.

And my congrats to John and Eric as well. I wanted to start off on the fourth quarter, the outlook for low single-digit organic. Are you seeing this in October is the first part of the question. And the second part is, you mentioned repair and upgrade stabilizing a bit. I'm wondering if you could provide a little more color there because that's a bigger ticket item usually. And I'm just surprised that you'd be seeing the stabilization now.

Yes. So the comment on the growth first. We are seeing positive organic sales growth in October. Keep in mind that the fourth quarter is a tougher comp. Last year, we had 4% volume growth in the fourth quarter, which was quite strong. And the fourth quarter is highly impacted by weather. So -- but we are seeing that positive growth so far in October.

In terms of the repair and upgrade market and talking with our customers and monitoring our product lines that are tied to that like hardscape lighting. We've seen that kind of stabilize. The performance there has been stronger. I think our customers clearly remodel is down this year.

But I think it seems to have settled. We hope it's a bottom, if you will. I don't know that for sure. But certainly, the numbers there and discussions with customers they don't have long backlogs, but they seem to be settled into a rhythm of work. So more to come later, but the numbers that we see and the conversations that we're having, we would -- we're more optimistic now than we would have been 3 months ago.

Okay. It's good to hear. And then on fourth quarter, on in-line sales with the Street, the EBITDA has come in a few million dollars below and that's if I back out the branch closures. So how should we think about gross margin and SG&A in 4Q? Just trying to square why EBITDA is a little below? And I realized fourth quarter with the weather can be right, a small quarter. So I appreciate being conservative.

Yes. I think in the fourth quarter, our guidance does not quite have as strong an outperformance year-over-year on gross margin, as we achieved in Q3. We still expect to achieve good SG&A leverage and that to be the primary driver of performance is what's built into our guide.

Our next question comes from the line of Damian Karas with UBS.

Obviously, Yes, I was going to say that, obviously, the market environment for housing and homeowner spend isn't great right now. I'm just curious if you've been seeing any change in competitor behavior just given some of the demand softness out there?

We operate in competitive markets and I wouldn't say we're seeing anything unusual. Obviously, when things are softer, things naturally get more competitive. Those are typically around the larger customers and around the commercial side of the business. But -- and so we've seen that, but we've been seeing that for the last couple of years.

So nothing more than usual. And we have strong teams and with our initiatives and capabilities like siteone.com and our delivery capabilities and the way we're private label and going after small customers, we're able to combat that competitive activity and still, we believe, gain market share.

That makes sense. Then I wanted to kind of throw a little bit of a hypothetical your way, thinking about some of the additional store closures and footprint optimization that you're doing, if you were to see a comeback in housing and the demand environment sooner rather than later, would you still be in a position to fully serve the market I recognize that's not an expected turn of events at the current moment, but just any thoughts on how you might need to respond to such a scenario?

Right. That's actually a great question. Yes -- yes, we would be able to fully serve, let's say, a strong market with our current network. We have ample capacity. And of course, as things ramp up, we can add associates the front line and our branches, et cetera. We have our DCs, and we have the capability to feed the system, if you will.

And so the network optimization that we're doing with the store closures wouldn't prevent us from servicing a stronger market. We don't expect that to be the case, it would be a pleasant surprise. But we would be more than capable of serving that and obviously, that would accelerate our SG&A leverage and our EBITDA expansion that we're planning for next year, but we're planning within a soft market.

Okay. Good to hear. Good luck, everyone.

Our next question comes from the line of Keith Hughes with Truth Securities.

This is Julian on the line. Can you talk a little bit about how licensing to look like for the rest of the year. Any outlook on what input inflation look like in commodities?

I mean -- I think that's carried through in our guide for inflation for the year. We're not seeing fertilizers and stuff like that, we're not seeing necessarily kind of major swings. So all that really is embedded in the guide that we give it.

And then going back to the initiatives. I know you talked about you want to close 15 to 20 [indiscernible] '26. Do you have an idea of what the cadence of that would look like and kind of how that would contribute to margins going through the year?

Well, if you take our focused branches in total, which represents about 20% of our revenue. As we mentioned, the EBITDA margin, adjusted EBITDA margin for those sets of branches are up over 200 basis points this year. And we would expect to continue that improvement trend. They're not up to the average and there's a ways to go before they get up to the average. And so we would expect that improvement trend to continue into next year. and the new sets of closures and consolidations are really just part of making sure that we can make those improvements next year without a lot of help from the market, if you will.

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Carter with Stifel.

Question I have is around the margin targets you've said before. I know you put out there a double-digit near-term kind of margin. If we're in a soft volume environment for '26 and '27, do you have the internal levers to get there, whether it be focus branches, whatever independent of volume meaningfully accelerating?

Yes, of course, the short answer is, yes, we have a lot of self-help capacity with our focused branches with the productivity with our sales force, with the delivery productivity that we've mentioned. And then on the gross margin side with our private label growth, which we're driving quite successfully with small customer growth, et cetera.

And so given that we do need a base, if there was a big fall off next year or whatever, obviously, that would interrupt that. But as long as we have a solid market -- stable market, call it soft stable. Then we have the opportunity to continue to expand our EBIT -- adjusted EBITDA. Obviously, the stronger the market, the quicker we can make gains. But we do have the capacity to continue the gains that you're seeing this year on into the next year, next couple of years in a continued soft market conditions.

Second question on the M&A landscape. You said that this is going to be a softer year, which you've done 6% to date. Do you see that meaningfully picking up in '26 given your pipeline, are you going to be more focused going forward on the smaller guys? And I know you said Pioneer was kind of uncharacteristic. Would you be willing to do something like that again, given kind of the challenges that had, I'll stop there.

Yes. So we are having a lighter year revenue-wise this year with acquisitions. But if you look at the course of acquisitions, the size moves around every once in a while, we'll do a larger one like a Pioneer or Double Mountain and then you had the midsized acquisitions and then you have more small ones, right?

And so we sell or sell when they're ready to sell, now when we're ready to buy. And so we're out there talking to all the companies that we would like to join. And any 1 year, you could have it be up, you could have it be in down, et cetera. Given how it's falling this year, we would expect next year to be higher than this year just because of the law of averages. If you look at the 10-year period, $2 billion, that's a pretty good gauge of where we'll be going forward.

In terms of what we do, a pioneer, I call it a fixer upper. We don't look to do those. And I wouldn't know of anything in our pipeline, Scott, you can correct me, that we have any more pioneer. We had tracked Pioneer for a long time, so we kind of knew it was coming. But we much prefer to buy well-run companies. And I believe our target set going forward would be -- I mean, would be all well-run companies. Scott, could you confirm that?

Yes. To the extent we can know the performance of the companies, I would agree, we're not searching or racking a larger turnaround or anything like that.

Our next question comes from the line of Matthew Bouley with Barclays.

You have Elizabeth Langan on for Matt today. I just wanted to start off asking on SG&A. Obviously, you've made some improvement into this quarter. I was wondering if you could dig into that a little bit and maybe speak on how you're tracking with your SG&A initiatives and if you expect a similar magnitude of improvement through the end of this year and into 2026?

We expect, we're still tracking. We would expect to continue the trend we've seen for the rest of the year. So obviously, we're in Q where we are taking the charge, but we had a similar magnitude charge last year. So we would expect to continue to achieve the SG&A leverage in Q4. It's our plan to be without -- we're not giving guidance today on SG&A. But up for '26, but certainly, that SG&A leverage is foundational to what we're doing going forward.

Okay. And then I had another question on the commercial end markets. Could you speak to what you're seeing in those like in those end markets? And then also if you're seeing any regions that are having relatively lighter or more outsized demand on the bidding side?

In terms of commercial, we're seeing that continue to be stable. It has been all year. We look at -- we have a project services group that together take off for customers or commercial work. And so they're looking at all the commercial jobs coming down the pipeline. Their activity in terms of bidding is slightly up.

And so that -- we take that as a positive when we talk to our customers, the backlogs are less than they would have been a year ago, but they're seeing continued work coming down the pipe. So we would -- it's been stable. We think it will continue to be stable, flattish. And no, we don't see any outsized growth in any particular regions just seems to be kind of flat, stable going forward.

Good luck, both John and Eric.

Our next question comes from the line of Mike Dahl with RBC Capital Markets.

This is Chris on for Mike. Just shifting back over to pricing and your initial expectation of a more normal plus 2% price environment. I was hoping you maybe give some initial puts and takes in terms of the drivers there? What -- based on what you're seeing in commodity pricing how do you expect commodity pricing to play out relative to noncommodity. And should we think about -- given the easy first half comps should we think about kind of trending towards the higher end of that 1% to 3% range and then settling out to something more normal, just the evolution of that as where you see things today?

I think it will accelerate as you go just primarily because the [indiscernible] probably won't -- that will be an overhang in the first half on the commodity side. The rest of the products are in pretty good shape from a commodity standpoint, most of the PVC pipe prices decreases were, frankly, in 2024. And so that's been relatively stable in 2025.

So -- and then we'll have -- really the uncertainty is we'll have to see what the price increases are coming from our suppliers in the first quarter of next year. Right now, kind of we're hearing low single-digit type numbers coming from those suppliers, but that's a little bit uncertain at this point, and we'll get greater visibility of that over the next 3 months.

Got it. I appreciate that. And just drilling deeper into the SG&A outlook. I realize you guys aren't providing guidance, but just trying to get any better sense of magnitude of potential leverage next year, given actions to date. Should we think about taking volume out of the equation and just the pricing expectation and the actions you're doing around branch closures that we could see kind of a similar magnitude of SG&A leverage as we've seen in the last couple of quarters looking to next?

We're really in our planning process right now. That's our goal is to achieve it next year. I think it's a little premature to give too much guidance in Q4 since we're really having those discussions as right now.

Our next question comes from the line of Charles Perron-Piché with Goldman Sachs.

First congrats on retirement to John and Eric. Congrats on a new role. Maybe I could start with capital allocation. Maybe for John or Eric, anything you have to add. Your leverage is now at the low end to 1 to 2x range as of September. It's good to see that you guys were active on share repurchases in the total quarter. Against that, I guess, should the M&A market remains softer for longer, would you consider a higher focus on shareholder return going forward?

Yes, I think that's fair. Our guidance is to invest in the business first with acquisitions. Obviously, we will have some acquisitions in the fourth quarter. but insomuch as we are at the bottom of our leverage range, and that certainly lends itself to doing increased share repurchases.

Okay. And then second, just following up on pricing. I think in your prepared remarks, you talked about the benefits of commercial initiatives on pricing this quarter. Can you expand on that notion? And if you expect to see further mix benefit to results going forward on top of like-for-like pricing?

The benefit of commercial is really not -- I think separate things. We benefited from stronger pricing. And then also, we also benefit from our commercial initiatives with regards to gross margin. So we're also -- some of the outperformance and what we've seen with regards to gross margin has been as a result of our private label and small customer initiatives. They're both contributing to our overall performance in addition to the price benefit. So those were the 2 drivers that we talked about that kind of helped us from a gross margin perspective this quarter.

Our next question comes from the line of Jeffrey Stevenson with Loop Capital Markets.

And John, congrats on your retirement. So slight successful and parental initiatives continue to drive 2% to 3% above market growth and offset choppy end market demand this year. I just wondered how sustainable is the growth you're seeing in areas such as private label and small customers over the coming years? And do you expect share gains to continue to track above pre-pandemic levels?

Yes. We've got quite a bit of runway with those 2 in particular. We're still significantly lower market share with the smaller customers than we are with our larger customers. And so we've got quite a bit of catch up there that will take the next probably 3 to 5 years.

And so that's a long-term play in terms of private label, same thing. We're at about 15% private label. We'd like to be 25%, 30% long-term. And so we're continuing to drive initiatives. We mentioned the growth in the quarter. we intend -- we're already teeing up our forecast for next year, but we intend to keep pace and keep that percentage of our total sales growing as we move forward. And then the other initiatives is just our customer excellence initiatives, they work with our sales force and our CRM. We're -- we aim to be an above-market grower for many years to come. And so we are looking to keep pace, including adding adjacent product lines like pest control and erosion control and -- there's high growth in synthetic turf. So plenty of opportunities to outperform the market, not just this year, but in many years to come.

Got it. And then pricing came in better than expected in the third quarter versus kind of original flattish expectation. And I wondered what the primary variance with your results compared with prior expectations? Was it tariff-related price increases, grass seed declines maybe not as severe as expected. Any more color there would be helpful.

I think we went into the quarter thinking probably that it was going to be a more competitive pricing than especially with grass seed and some of the other products relative to what it actually was from that standpoint. So it held up just a little bit better from that perspective. And so that was -- it was a pleasant surprise from that perspective. But that was the primary driver.

And we are talking small -- we thought it would be flat and it was up 1%.

Yes, it should be relative. We didn't really put in a lot of price increases. It's more of the bids and boats where things ended up. And it was -- so it was -- we're probably within routing, but it was slightly stronger than we thought.

This now concludes our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the floor back over to management for closing comments.

Okay. Well, thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We very much appreciate your interest in SiteOne, and we look forward to speaking to you again at the end of next quarter.

A big thank you to our amazing associates for the great job that they do for us, also to our customers for allowing us to be their partner and our suppliers for supporting us. And then a final thank you to John who's been such a terrific partner for these years. And congratulations to Eric. We're excited about our future, and we look forward to talking to you at the beginning of next year. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines, and have a wonderful day.