WillScot Holdings Corporation

Welcome to the first quarter 2024 Will Scott Mobile Mini Earnings Conference Call. My name is Cherie, and I will be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct the question and answer session. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Nick Girardi, Senior Director of Treasury and Investor Relations. Nick, you may begin.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Will Scott Mobile Mini First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. Participants on today's call include Brad Saltz, Chief Executive Officer, and Tim Boswell, President and Chief Financial Officer. Today's presentation material may be found on the Investor Relations section of the Will Scott Mobile Mini website. Slides two and three contain our safe harbor statements. We will be making forward-looking statements during the presentation and our Q&A session. Our business and operations are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. As a result, our actual results may differ materially from today's comments. For a more complete description of the factors that could cause actual results to differ and other possible risks, please refer to the Safe Harbor Statements in our presentation and our filings with the SEC. With that, I'll turn the call over to Brad Saltz.

Thanks, Nick. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Brad Saltz, CEO of Will Scott Mobile Mini. Starting on slide six, Our Q1 results were solid and in line with our expectation and support our 2024 outlook. Tim will cover these in more detail in a few minutes. I'd first like to highlight several significant strategic milestones the team also accomplished in the quarter, as well as provide a brief status update regarding the McGrath-Tins action. First, in January, we combined our legacy Will Scott and Mobile Mini sales and operations teams under a single leadership structure, organized by geography. This allows us to go to market locally with a single team that can service our customers across our full offering of turnkey space solutions. Our team is now empowered to present our full suite of capabilities to every customer at every opportunity. And my colleagues are equally excited for their own career development and growth opportunities inherent in this structure. Next, and to support this field integration, in March, we consolidated and upgraded our field service and dispatch systems, which allow us to better utilize our logistic resources across all product lines while improving execution, safety, and customer communication. As a result, our team can now leverage all available trucks, drivers, and service crews across the market. As we progress through the remainder of 2024, we'll be deploying the latest available route optimization and logistics management tools. With these tools in place, we can in turn accelerate the insourcing of these crucial services, which further differentiates us from competitors and improves both customer service and profitability. Our drivers and service teams are consistently recognized by our NPS promoters, and we're putting in place the systems to build upon that advantage. This is just one example of how we're advancing our digital roadmap using customer feedback to enhance nearly every aspect of the customer experience. We're also focusing on improving our external technology interfaces. By Q3, we'll consolidate our six websites into one, supported by the latest technology to promote awareness and drive demand across our full offering of turnkey space solutions. This will include an enhanced customer portal, with expanded customer self-service capabilities, which will simplify key customer touchpoints and improve our back office efficiency. These enhancements are also in direct response to feedback we get from our customers. And finally, in support of Salesforce effectiveness, I'm particularly excited about our recently launched proprietary sales tool we call Project One. Project One leverages multiple third-party and internally generated data sources to identify developing project opportunities well ahead of initial bidding across our largest customer segments. These opportunities are profiled by algorithms informed by our vast transaction history. We then estimate the full turnkey space solution requirements for each project, which are then automatically assigned to the most appropriate local sales expert based upon size and geography. This gives us a platform to optimize selling time, improve cross-sell and conversion, and and to be more prescriptive in recommended bundled solutions that are tailored by project type. Taking a step back over the past three years, our team has diligently and painstakingly worked to harmonize our business processes and underlying systems while dramatically growing the business and expanding profitability. With this foundation in place, we've now harmonized our teams and are in a position to even more seamlessly integrate new businesses and deploy technology more offensively enhancing every aspect of the customer experience and further differentiating our unrivaled customer value proposition. I'd like to thank the team for their safe and flawless execution during these complex initiatives, which will further accelerate our growth as we continue to execute the $1 billion of idiosyncratic growth levers to the benefit of all stakeholders for years to come. Now, turning to slide 26, consistent with our history of execution and value creation, we announced a definitive agreement to acquire McGrath in January that we expect to close in the second half of 2024. We see tremendous opportunities to drive incremental value for our collective customers, communities, employees, and shareholders. Our assets, our geographical footprints, and customer segments are each unique but fit well together, resulting in broader turnkey space solutions, enhanced customer service capability, and additional career opportunities for our colleagues. I'd like to highlight several examples of value drivers associated with combining these two unique platforms. First, we'll cross-sell the comprehensive Will Scott VAPS portfolio, as we've successfully done in all past acquisitions. McGrath has already began this journey through their MM Plus offering, and we believe we can accelerate this growth while improving overall customer satisfaction. Second, McGrath customers will benefit from access to Will Scott's innovative Flex, ClearSpan, and Climate Control Solution. Will Scott customers will in turn benefit from a grass kitchen-to-go, EnviroPlex, and custom modular sales capability. We'll benefit from a grass expertise in serving the education sector, which is but one great example of how we can grow in new industry verticals. The grass inventory centers have clear efficiency benefits, which Will Scott can pass on to our customers. We'll leverage our in-house Will Scott transportation and service crews to better service the McGrath customers. We'll share fleet across the combined network, realizing capital synergies. We'll optimize the combined real estate footprint over time. We'll integrate the best-in-class safety, learning and development, community engagement programs, all building on our Great Place to Work certification. And finally, Will Scott's technology platform can support all of this with seamless integration, thanks to our prior investments. To the right on this slide, we've highlighted how these drivers check all the boxes with respect to value creation. The list of potential benefits goes on and on with advantages for all stakeholders, which makes us excited about the combined future. Most importantly, these are underpinned by two outstanding teams. While our interactions are appropriately limited until we close, everyone we've had the opportunity to collaborate with thus far has been fantastic. We've been particularly impressed by McGrath Team's customer focus pragmatic approach to problem solving, and strong work ethic. I believe that the McGrath culture is truly complementary to ours, with both built on a customer first, common drive to excellence, and focus on unlocking value for all stakeholders. Finally, I'll touch on the progress supporting the FTC's review of this transaction. I know there's been a lot of noise and speculation around this process, as there is with virtually all M&A transactions these days. We don't engage in speculation or hypotheticals. We put our heads down and go to work. We have excellent advisors who are experienced in the process and are intimately familiar with our facts and circumstances. We're engaged in a productive dialogue with the FTC, which has been both collaborative and professional. We expect that we'll have complied with all of the FTC's information requests in the second quarter, and based upon our progress working with the FTC, expect that we'll be in a position to close the transaction in the second half of 2024. Further, we anticipate that McGrath will be in a position to hold its shareholder vote in early Q3, and as we progress the year, will remain opportunistic as to how and when we replace the bridge financing. We clearly have a proven formula to drive sustainable growth and value creation. Our acquisition of McGrath has clear benefits for all stakeholders, and will both accelerate our growth and proportionally increase the $1 billion of idiosyncratic growth levers fully in our control. We continue to see $700 million of free cash flow, and $4 of free cash flow per share is important milestones that we'll surpass in due course. And I'm incredibly proud of the tireless and expert execution by our teams to deliver the transaction, transform how we do business, and execute every day in the field on behalf of our customers. With that, I'll hand it over to Tim to discuss our Q1 results and highlight how these strategic initiatives support our outlook for 2024 and well beyond.