Mike McGaugh
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets
Thank you, Sonal, and great work. Well done. Let's turn to Slide 8. I'm now in my third year as CEO of Myers, and we've been running our 3-year Horizon strategy for about 2 full years. We are seeing meaningful and lasting results which continue to give me confidence in delivering our Horizon 1 goal of a run rate of $1 billion annual revenue and a 15% EBITDA margin by the end of 2023. Although we are technically in Horizon 1, we are starting our planning and our preparation for Horizon 2. The future is exciting and will be here soon. All that excitement aside, our key to meaningfully growing Myers in sales and profitability is executing against our core tenets of Horizon 1. Self-help, which provides the oxygen in the funding for the next 2 elements, which are organic growth and bolt-on M&A. In the area of self-help, our internal pricing excellence group has helped our commercial teams analyze and better understand data, better understand the value our products bring, and we are seeing the results in gaining traction in value-based pricing. In addition to pricing excellence, we focused on making S&OP a core competence as well. Over the past few quarters, we piloted a robust sales and operational planning process in one of our plastics businesses. The results were very good, [the planning] production and profitability records. We've since rolled out this pilot to a few of our other businesses and plan to continue to roll this out to all businesses in Myers, completing work over the next 12 to 24 months. The enhanced S&OP increases output and ensures that we can reliably supply our customers. This reliability of supply puts us in good stead with our customers, often putting us in a preferential position to grow with them. In the area of organic growth, I'm proud to say that this is our sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit sales growth, and customer demand has continued. Our sales training and market planning processes that I've spoken about before have been a breakthrough. The new sales and market planning processes have provided alignment across our commercial and operations team. We are rowing together. Going back to my Charles River analogy, we're 1 of those 8-person boats that are smooth and in balance, not flailing, not struggling. We have alignment. We're on plan, and we're moving faster with more harmony across the water. Just like watching those [gates] cut across the water when we hit stride at Myers and we're rowing in synchronicity, it's a beautiful thing. We're having more of those moments with each passing month in the quarter. Yes, we still have our moments of struggles when we fall out of sequence. Those moments are becoming less and less frequent. Regarding bolt-on M&A, Elkhart and Trilogy acquisitions continue to increase their contributions to our financial results. Elkhart and Trilogy are proof that we will have discipline in our acquisitions. We will buy companies with an easy-to-see and easy-to-understand competitive moat. We'll buy talented leadership teams, and we'll pay a fair price. In Q1, we received numerous inbounds and have passed on many. We're not going to get starry-eyed. We will have discipline in our acquisitions in which ones we pursue. This discipline is important. We treat the opportunity to shepherd our shareholders' capital as an honor, not a right, and we'll make decisions accordingly. From a pipeline standpoint, we are always evaluating potential M&A opportunities within both our Material Handling and Distribution Segments, and we continue to be pleased with our prospects. Slide 9 outlines the strategic pillars of Horizon 1 of our strategy. This one slide is a simple, clear playbook for our true north: our strategic objective. We will execute and deliver the strategic objective by driving the 4 pillars: organic growth, strategic M&A, operational excellence and by having a high-performing culture. We will have success and execution because we have clearly defined the areas of focus for each of these 4 pillars. These areas of focus have specific action items for the year 2022 and are paired with a single executive team member who is accountable for delivering results. This drives alignment and drives clarity. It's the coxswain that helps us keep tempo and rowing together. Now I'd like to walk through our progress against those pillars quickly on Slide 10. With the first pillar, we have seen encouraging and consistent organic growth in both top and bottom line, which has allowed us to hire new excellent people with world-class global multinational training and experience. With respect to our sales efforts, our teams are better trained. Our training continues. Our teams are focused and incentivized on profitable growth, on cross-selling and on pricing our products for the value they deliver. Now on to strategic M&A, which has been an integral part in helping the company get scale. Over the past 2 years, through the deals we've consummated and the opportunities we've evaluated, we've learned. These valuable lessons and approaches have been incorporated into a proven integration playbook which is helping us better identify, negotiate and integrate newly acquired businesses. Moving on to commercial excellence -- to operational excellence. This is an area where we are truly transforming Myers and an area where we have added the greatest concentration of world-class talent and capability. As I mentioned earlier, we continue to implement S&OP across our businesses. These improvements are helping us better schedule, plan and operate our plants. By doing this, we are identifying a hidden factor. We are identifying and unleashing additional capacity. Finally, we've seen meaningful improvements in our high-performing culture. We have and will continue to transform Myers' mindset into a culture of winning. We are now doing company-wide employee development planning and succession planning. We've instilled robust, world-class frameworks and processes to ensure that we are developing our associates and leaders with an eye to their aspirations and needs over the next 5 years and the company's aspirations and needs over the next 5 years. We want our employees to have the career they seek here at Myers. We run a low-ego, servant-leader model. Servant leadership inspires all of us to serve our people. Servant leadership requires a "roll up the sleeves and get the job done" mindset. All of us take the hill together. The servant leadership approach is resonating very well, especially with the post-COVID mindset, where our employees are interested in not only delivering great products reliability to our customers and making a great return for our shareholders, they're also interested in doing good for society and doing good for each other. We've now completed 4 waves in servant-leadership training covering over 100 leaders. I've participated in all the sessions. I often hear from seasoned veterans that this is the best training I've ever been through. It's remarkable. Something special is happening at Myers in terms of culture. I'll close today by thanking our current investors for their confidence. We delivered solid results last quarter, and I continue to believe that our performance will continue to build in the future. We can't forecast precisely how every quarter will shake out in the near term. However, with all the great things occurring at Myers, with our transformation underway, I'm confident that over the long term, we are moving the company up and to the right. The company is on a remarkable journey, and I encourage you to join us on that journey. With that, we'll turn the call over for questions. Operator?