Distribution Solutions Group - Earnings Call - Q4 2024

Executive Summary

• Q4 delivered 18.6% revenue growth to $480.5M on 3.5% organic growth; adjusted EBITDA was $44.9M (9.3% margin) and adjusted EPS was $0.42, while GAAP EPS was a loss of $0.55 driven by tax items.
• Sequentially, sales rose 2.7% while margins compressed 120 bps as expected on fewer selling days and the full-quarter inclusion of Source Atlantic (~50 bps margin headwind).
• Cash flow from operations strengthened to ~$45.7M in Q4; year-end liquidity was ~$334.7M with net leverage of 3.5x, positioning DSG to continue executing its M&A and integration agenda into 2025.
• Estimates: Wall Street consensus from S&P Global could not be retrieved (service limit). Beat/miss vs. estimates cannot be assessed this quarter (S&P Global data unavailable).
• Key near-term stock catalysts: synergy traction and margin re-expansion as Source Atlantic integration progresses, continued end‑market recovery at Gexpro Services and Test & Measurement, and visibility on deferred U.S. federal/military orders at Lawson.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Gexpro Services delivered strong organic growth (+26.8% YoY in Q4 to $118.8M) with adjusted EBITDA margin expanding to 13.3% (up 380 bps YoY), driven by rebounds in technology, aerospace & defense, and renewables and operating leverage.
• TestEquity’s margin improved YoY (7.8% in Q4 vs. 6.2% a year ago) with strength in Test & Measurement, chambers, rental utilization (up double-digits), and bookings momentum into 2025.
• Cash generation accelerated: Q4 cash from operations of ~$45.7M (vs. ~$28M a year ago) and full-year adjusted EBITDA of $175.3M (9.7% margin), supporting capital deployment and integration workstreams.

What Went Wrong

• Lawson organic sales were pressured by lower rep count and a significant decline in military sales (military down >50% for 2024; ~75% in Q4), weighing on Lawson’s organic performance despite rep rebuild efforts.
• Consolidated margins compressed sequentially (Q4 adjusted EBITDA margin 9.3% vs. 10.5% in Q3) due to fewer selling days and the lower‑margin Source Atlantic inclusion; management expects improvement as 2025 progresses.
• Canada Branch Division (Source Atlantic + Bolt) is early in integration and seasonally soft in Q4/Q1; EBITDA margin for the segment was 7.2% in Q4 with a plan to lift to double digits as synergies and branch consolidations complete.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Greetings. Welcome to the Distribution Solutions Group fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Steven Hooser. You may begin.

Steven Hooser (Head of Investor Relations)

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Distribution Solutions Group's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. Joining me on the call are DSG's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Bryan King, and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Ron Knutson. In conjunction with today's call, we have provided a financial results slide deck posted on the company's IR website at investor.distributionsolutionsgroup.com. Please note the statements made on this call and in today's press release contain forward-looking statements concerning goals, beliefs, expectations, strategies, plans, future operating results, and underlying assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described. In addition, statements made during this call are based on the company's views as of today.

The company anticipates that future developments may cause those views to change, and we may elect to update the forward-looking statements made today but disclaim any obligation to do so. Management will also refer to non-GAAP measures, and reconciliations to the nearest GAAP measures can be found at the end of the earnings release. The earnings release issued earlier today was posted on the investor relations section of our website. A copy of the release has also been included in a current report on Form 8-K filed with the SEC. Lastly, this call is being webcast on the internet via the Distribution Solutions Group investor page on the company website. A replay of the teleconference will be available through March 20th of 2025. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Bryan King. Bryan.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, Steven, and good morning, everyone. Thank you all for joining us. Let's start on slide four with a brief review of fiscal 2024. We ended the year with reported revenue of $1.8 billion, up almost 15%, primarily driven by highly strategic acquisitions completed over the past 24 months. DSG's trailing 12-month total revenues, including pre-acquisition revenues for all periods during 2024, were approximately $1.95 billion. Adjusted free cash flow, defined as adjusted reg G EBITDA less CapEx less working capital investments, including pre-acquisition trailing 12-month results, grew to $175 million. Ahead of the 2022 strategic merger, we disclosed comparative DSG results for the combined fiscal 2021 pre-merger results of adjusted revenue totaling $938 million and adjusted EBITDA of $75 million, which included 12 months of financial results for Lawson, GexPro Services, and TestEquity.

Comparing fiscal 2024 to the 2021 pre-merger results for consolidated DSG, we have doubled DSG's revenues and generated an incremental $100 million of adjusted EBITDA in three fiscal years, unlocking some additional earnings leverage while making key strategic acquisitions for continuing to drive the value of our offering to our customers and our equity value for our shareholders, all while keeping leverage ratios flat. Keep in mind that this expansion was made despite persistent macro headwinds throughout 2024 and much of 2023 across our business units, and still in early innings of our internal initiatives to unlock a structurally more profitable and valuable platform from which we can use our accelerating cash flows to drive even more valuable growth well into the future.

Last year was challenging for our entire industry, as evidenced by the manufacturing PMI remaining in contraction territory for all but one month during 2024, following market challenges that started across many of our end markets in 2023. Notwithstanding these macro challenges, we successfully expanded revenue during the year both organically and by closing on five highly strategic acquisitions to selectively broaden our scale, geographic footprint, and customer base. We added valuable offerings by targeting key capability areas where we strategically wanted more customer engagement and service capability and/or product depth to drive our market position and financial return opportunities longer term, but by doing it in an accretive way through leveraging our well-defined M&A resources and playbook, as well as our collective resources lens on how our strategic objectives should be prioritized relative to the expansive actionable opportunity set we are constantly evaluating.

This past year, we acted on priorities through opportunities that allowed us to triple our safety product offering at Lawson by acquiring ESS, expanded our test and measurement calibration services through the most recent ConRes acquisition, balanced out our geographic footprint, and expanded dramatically our customer engagements in Canada to leverage our large investment in Lawson and Kent VMI sellers there, expanded our product and service offerings for our Kent VMI automotive customers, and expanded the type of customers we were best geared to serve with the S&S acquisition. Lastly, we addressed a high priority to drive high growth opportunities in Southeast Asia being presented to GexPro Services by buying a small platform that we are now aggressively adding capabilities and geographic presence around in Southeast Asia to address specific customer organic growth opportunities.

As we deployed the resources to develop the relationship with these sellers and accomplish closing and managing these acquisitions, we were also prioritizing recruiting internal and external talent and consultative resources to thoughtfully integrate or not while tackling a litany of key value-accelerating internal initiatives, some of which are so intense and transformative that they require margin contracting investments on the income statement similar to the capital outlay of an acquisition, but where those land on the balance sheet. It will take multiple years to really have the desired impact, but at that point, we expect we'll have a compounding effect to profitability and long-term position in the marketplace, and importantly, to us as shareholders, will be engines to drive our return on invested capital to structurally much higher levels.

Making acquisitions on the balance sheet and on the income statement require me to process the noisiness it creates to near-term earnings, ROIC, and EBITDA margins, but as we pour analysis and emotions over and over on evaluating these projects and then commit to executing on them, we have tremendous confidence that each has an extremely large net present economic value for us as shareholders, as well as a real benefit to our customers and colleagues. A big thank you to all our teams that we are pushing hard on all these initiatives.

While juggling all that they are doing to build the DSG of the future, they still demonstrated strong forward progress across those discipline sets of critical initiatives in each of our verticals while collaborating with each other, debated and allocated capital to buy key engines to drive long-term free cash flow, all while driving very strong current financial outcomes in a less forgiving backdrop around many of their end markets. Like for many other ambitious and success-driven leaders in the recent industrial marketplace, it was quite the fatiguing year for much of our team. Thank you. We still have much to do, but we are pleased with the progress toward our strategic goals and financial targets for 2024. We enjoyed 2024 cash flows from operations of over $100 million before the Hisco retention payment and acquisition costs.

With market conditions improving sequentially across most of our end markets during the second half of 2024 and early in 2025, particularly within our OEM vertical, we remain confident that DSG is very well positioned for record performance in 2025 as some of the most recent headwinds subside. As Ron will discuss in a moment, we continued to show excellent operational traction on initiatives within each of our operating units for the year that should improve earnings leverage for this year. Turning to slide five, I will provide updates on some of our initiatives and the outlook across our three business platforms.

At Lawson Products, we continue to focus on building a world-class sales force, and it's required a large investment of dollars as well as some commitment to choppiness in our earnings engine as we compressed our sales force during the overhaul of our sales tools and disciplines and now are back focused on growing the team with like-minded additional sales resources. We are still in the early innings of this transformation, which is changing the 73-year history of that company. This includes cultivating a strong culture that embraces tools and technology and providing more attractive incentives mostly aligned around customer connectivity and sales growth for our employees. These initiatives, in time, will take Lawson to the next level of customer engagement, growth, and profitability. We fully implemented our Salesforce CRM last year and plan to go live with our completely rebuilt digital platform in the first quarter of this year.

As discussed in investor calls over the last 18 months, Lawson's Salesforce initiative required EBITDA compression for 2024 as we invested in additional capabilities and selling tools and compensation, as well as began the journey to fill well over 100 new territories as well as open territories by prioritizing hiring new sales reps with a refined and improving lens on what capability sets will offer them the greatest success with these new tools and capabilities and putting them in the right markets. This is vital to our long-term growth plans as we position the right people to drive the right book of business with the right technology to produce long-term strength and value in the marketplace.

From the 2022 announcement and through the compression needed to rework our tools and territories, we reduced our Salesforce team from about 1,020 to approximately 830 by mid-2024, which we've now grown back to approximately 920. We saw the increased rep retirement and turnover that took place as we announced the rolling out of a significant set of new tools, a CRM, and selling resources to support our field sales reps' efforts to improve customer connectivity and coverage that initially took place in 2023 and the first half of 2024 subside appreciably over the last five months. We are targeting to build up to 1,000 sales reps by the second half of 2025 and an informed lens of better and more territories than we had defined prior to tackling this very transformative set of initiatives.

We enjoy some exceptional Lawson field sales representatives, but we knew we needed to build a more consistent experience to recruit more to join them and, as critically, make sure that we enhanced all those Lawson sellers' ability to drive a better customer experience. For us to create better Salesforce opportunities for future generation of top-selling candidates, we hope to recruit and retain, all of which should drive a high return on the significant investment as sales productivity benefits and a larger Salesforce are in place as 2025 plays out. We made this investment that we believe has an exceptionally high net present value but required near-term pain that we are largely through where we all along were not expecting the real benefits to more likely be fully realized not until 2026 and beyond.

Other elements of the investments are we've enhanced our sales reps' onboarding by improving recruitment, training, and leveraging collaborative technologies between sellers and continue to build and drive our predictive analytics tools out to the Salesforce and our customers to enhance everyone in the value channel's efficiency. The omnichannel platform of tools includes and is centered around a large outside sales team, but now includes a nimble and resourceful inside team, an expanded set of technical sales specialists, an account service field sales support resources, and now a robust digital customer interface platform that, with expanded enhancements and is currently being rolled out, will further support our new and existing customers in whatever manner they prefer to engage. Additionally, we've invested in expanded customer acquisition and retention teams to enhance sales productivity and growth.

For Lawson's core acquisitions completed in 2024, we are well underway and, in most cases, complete with integrating products from Emergent Safety Supply into Lawson's offerings and combining S&S Automotive with the Kent Automotive division. Under our MRO focus for the Canada branch division, we are executing initiatives to integrate Source Atlantic with our Bolt Supply House business across eastern and western Canada. Notably, we recently hired Jarrod Jahnke as the Canada Division President. Jarrod has a proven track record of transformational leadership, implementing business strategies and building organizational capabilities through positive winning cultures. Jarrod joined DSG after 14 years of progressively larger leadership roles at Applied Industrial Technologies. Most recently, he was Vice President of Distribution, responsible for $280 million of revenue by leading the sales and operations teams of 26 distribution facilities throughout western Canada.

As our new Canada Division President, Jarrod's immediate priority is to align the leadership teams of Source Atlantic and Bolt to ensure collaboration and success of DSG's growth strategy in Canada. Our Canadian branch division positions us as the leading wholesale distributor of MRO supplies, safety products, fasteners, and services to the large and diverse Canadian markets. As we discussed last quarter, we signaled our expectation that this acquisition would compress our overall DSG margins. At the same time, we continue to work to realize defined synergy opportunities, so this segment's fourth quarter EBITDA margins are no surprise. We know that Source Atlantic had a 50 basis point impact on DSG's consolidated margin profile in the fourth quarter.

We are marching toward margin enhancements to return to double-digit margins for the Canada branch business, as we remember when we bought Bolt Supply House, and it was a below 10% margin business also. We are actively working on ERP integrations for the Canadian branch business, and the consolidation of four separate branches will be completed by this summer. We have excellent employees in Canada and are excited about some of the additional resources we have recruited to join their team. We are excited about each of Lawson's three acquisitions in 2024 and how they address real strategic objectives. Together with Lawson and DSG's existing and improved capabilities, together, we offer them a stronger ability to drive enhanced profitability and revenue growth as we go into 2025 and through 2026. One area of particular headwind for Lawson during 2024 was our military business.

For the full year 2024 results, military sales were down over 50%, placing significant pressure on Lawson's total sales, and not explained at all by our deliberate compression initiatives or the weaker CPI we all fought through. As we've mentioned in previous calls, a change in the military ordering and approval process drove the vast majority of this decline, and it was a decline that our customers are telling us did not largely get redirected elsewhere. We do have open orders that have been carried over from 2024 and are beginning to be released. Until the last six weeks, we were confident there would be an additional tailwind for the first half of 2025 for Lawson, but over the last six weeks, we are more subdued in our expectations about the pace of the military releasing these orders.

Government has been half of the drag on Lawson's revenue contraction for 2024. At Gexpro Services, we drove sequentially higher quarterly sales for aerospace and defense, technology, and renewables in markets in the fourth quarter as these end markets continue to rebound. These end markets also continued to grow sequentially from Q3 to Q4, and our activity in book to bill continues to be strong in the first quarter. As I look across our end markets at both sales and book to bill, the CNI at about 11% of current average daily sales volume is the only area where we are seeing more consistent cautionary book to bills and revenue trends. The aerospace and defense, technology, and renewables verticals that collectively represent over half of our current daily sales volume continue to lead the momentum that Gexpro Services continues to enjoy.

During the fourth quarter, we announced the acquisition of Tech-Component Resources, providing us a platform to grow in the expanding Southeast Asia market. Since that acquisition, our Gexpro Services team has only become more encouraged by the growth available to us in those Southeast Asian markets and are rapidly hiring talent and locking down relationships with customers who are inquiring about our ability to serve them as we concurrently add supporting locations. We are very pleased with the full year EBITDA margin expansion for Gexpro Services of 160 basis points and the fourth quarter expansion of 380 basis points, which was primarily driven by leveraging our fixed cost structure across growing end markets. Our initiatives from 2023 and our acquisition from 2022 contribute significantly to the momentum and margin increase Gexpro Services is enjoying.

Strategic initiatives, not the least of which are our Southeast Asia investment and a focus on investing in our commercial sales pipeline, were implemented in 2024 to make investments and to recruit additional leadership talent to grow and scale as the leading global supply chain services and sea parts provider to OEMs. We also currently enjoy a strong lens around several additional accretive acquisition objectives we hope to successfully address during 2025. At TestEquity Group, our test and measurement business continues to show strong sequential momentum. Across all nine of the vertical slices on the business, after two years of challenging in-market backdrops, we are seeing indications through sales and bookings that all but our small European business appears to have stabilized or are improving. Core test and measurement sales, chambers, and rentals and refurb are experiencing positive growth.

Rental utilization rates also grew by double digits in the fourth quarter of 2024. In-market expansion aligns with improving aerospace and defense, technology, and R&D results, which we believe tracks with our customers' 2025 budgets. Hisco continues to face weaker sales in key supplier categories. While our order volumes remain steady, the average order size has declined over the last two years during this contraction. We have seen some competition in the marketplace around customers as distributors and salespeople have predictably competed and shuffled less committed customers to keep volumes up during weaker backdrops. As we discussed late in 2024, bookings have continued to grow, and this momentum continues into 2025. We expect increased bookings to translate to sales in the production supplies business, which includes Hisco.

Having reworked our go-to-market strategy in Salesforce, bringing both sets of resources together on our production supply effort, the TestEquity and Hisco teams, and separating our technical resources around test and measurement sales and services has led to better accountability in customer coverage models. We are hearing confirmation from our key vendors that support this approach as being well received by customers and vendors alike, leading to confirmed market share gains and better channel partnerships. These efforts were disruptive over the last 18 months but are now allowing us to better our spending leverage, better sales, and technical coverage, and have allowed for us to unlock key growth opportunities and renewed sales growth pipeline.

Customers appreciate TestEquity's total value proposition, which provides a unique set of capabilities created by combining the products and services from each of the platforms we've brought together in this vertical: TestEquity, TEquip, and Hisco, as well as the key tuck-in acquisitions we've completed, and several we are chasing where we can bring in structurally higher margin capabilities to leverage the total network this vertical allows them. Finally, although we have taken out more costs than we identified when underwriting our acquisitions, we continue to look for additional optimization opportunities for the platform and have hired a Vice President of Integration to add additional leadership to TestEquity Group's full integration efforts.

This business intelligence is essential as we make strategic decisions about making significant improvements in our business moving forward and underwrite the next several tuck-ins around how they will inform the total profitability acceleration and stabilization of the revenue in this vertical. At TestEquity, our strategic direction will continue to revolve around expanding wallet share with customers, driving repeatable business on the consumables and services side, and optimizing digital selling capabilities to supplement and leverage our technical and field sales talent investment. We believe supply chains have mostly normalized for our key vendors and are encouraged by many of them wanting to expand collaboration with us to expand and grow our relationships. Although business remains choppy in some areas still, we believe we are benefiting from our disciplined approach and improved platform across several strategic imperatives we tackled over the last two years.

We are optimistic that we will see sales and margins build quickly as end markets return. With that, I'll turn it over to Ron to give a broader review of our financials. Ron?

Ron Knutson (EVP and CFO)

Thank you, Bryan, and good morning, everyone. Turning to slide six, DSG's consolidated revenue for the fourth quarter was $480.5 million. This represents an increase of $75.2 million or 18.6%, primarily driven by $61 million from five acquisitions in 2024, along with organic sales growth of 3.5% over the same quarter a year ago. I will provide average daily sales by operating segment in a few moments. Fourth quarter sales grew sequentially compared to third quarter by 2.7%, despite three fewer selling days, fueled by a full quarter of Source Atlantic and two small acquisitions completed in the fourth quarter.

For the quarter, we generated adjusted EBITDA of $44.9 million or 9.3% of sales, up 90 bps compared to last year's quarter. The sequential compression from Q3 and consolidated margins of 120 bps was expected, primarily due to margin pressure related to the Salesforce transition, fewer selling days, and the impact of Source Atlantic on the Canadian branch for the quarter. Excluding the impact of Source Atlantic in the fourth quarter, net margins were 9.9%. We reported operating income of $20.1 million for the quarter, including $12.6 million in acquisition-related intangible amortization expenses and $4.7 million from acquisition-related costs, non-cash stock compensation, non-recurring charges, and other one-time items. Adjusted operating income improved to $37.3 million or 7.8% of sales compared to $28 million or 6.9% of sales in the prior year ago quarter.

During the quarter, we generated cash flows from operations of approximately $46 million as compared to $28 million in the year ago quarter. We reported a GAAP loss per diluted share of $0.55 for the quarter versus a GAAP loss per share of $0.35 a year ago. Adjusted earnings per share of $0.42 for the quarter compares favorably to EPS of $0.37 in the third quarter and $0.22 in the year ago quarter. Turning to slide seven, I plan to discuss Q4 results and will not call out the full year highlights, but they are available on the slides for your reference. Starting with Lawson, Q4 sales were $111.8 million, and average daily sales were up 1.8% on acquired revenue. Organic sales were down 10.9% on a soft December, lower rep count, and a decline in military sales.

Rep count rebuilding efforts are well underway and progressing nicely as Bryan highlighted. Net rep counts increased between Q3 and Q4, and we ended the quarter and year with approximately 900 field sales reps compared to a low point of approximately 830 at the end of the second quarter and 860 at the end of Q3. As we've communicated on past calls, new outside sales reps require a couple of years to ramp up, but we continue to optimize the onboarding and the use of technology to advance the efforts in the short term. For the quarter, Lawson reported adjusted EBITDA of $11 million or 9.8% of sales, down from 11.3% a year ago and 13.1% in Q3. As expected, fewer selling days, slower military business, and rep investments compress our fourth quarter margins.

2025 has started strong as we've realized sequential sales growth over Q4 levels, and we're back to double-digit EBITDA margins for the month of January. Turning to slide eight, as mentioned last quarter, we added a new reporting segment, the Canada Branch Division, which combines the Bolt Supply House that was previously included in our other segment with Source Atlantic as a separate segment. Fourth quarter sales for this new Canada segment in US dollars were $59 million, including $45.6 million from the Source Atlantic acquisition that was closed during the third quarter. Excluding the acquired revenue, organic sales increased 1.4% from the year ago quarter at Bolt Supply. Key operational initiatives are focused on acquisition integration, including pricing disciplines, Salesforce optimization, branch consolidation, and cost management. Q4 adjusted EBITDA for the Canada Branch segment in USD was $4.2 million or 7.2% of sales.

Excluding Source Atlantic, Q4 adjusted EBITDA for this segment would have been 14.8%, being Bolt Supply as compared to 12.9% a year ago. Although we are in the early stages of integrating Bolt Supply and Source Atlantic, we continue to target double-digit EBITDA margins for Source Atlantic, driven by expected growth and the realization of planned synergies. Turning to Gexpro Services on slide nine, fourth quarter revenue grew by 27.4% from $93.2 million a year ago to $118.8 million, primarily from organic expansion with a nominal amount of acquired revenue. Total organic sales for the quarter were up $24.9 million or 26.8% from the year ago quarter and up 1.7% sequentially over Q3. This growth came primarily from expanding our existing customer relationships and the strengthening of many of their end markets, including technology, aerospace and defense, and renewables.

Gexpro Services adjusted EBITDA was $15.8 million or 13.3% of sales, up from $9.5 million a year ago and compared to $14.1 million in the third quarter. Operating leverage continues to be strong, and Gexpro Services continues to cross-sell, realize acquisition synergies with a growing book to bill as end markets strengthen compared to a year ago period. Lastly, I will turn to TestEquity Group on slide 10. Third quarter sales were $191.3 million, with daily organic sales essentially flat compared to a year ago due to headwinds in the electronics assembly market or our consumables causing softness in the electronic production supplies end market, offset by improvements in our test and measurement chambers and rental businesses.

TestEquity's adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $14.8 million or 7.8% of sales, up from 6.2% as a percent of sales in the prior year quarter and also up 40 basis points compared to the third quarter. Moving to slide 11, our balance sheet remains strong. We ended the quarter with approximately $473 million in net working capital and $335 million of liquidity, which includes $82 million of cash and cash equivalents and approximately $253 million under our existing credit facility. Debt leverage at the end of Q4 was 3.5 times compared to 3.7 times at the end of Q3. Our targeted debt leverage remains in the range of three to four times. Net capital expenditures, including rental equipment, were $3.4 million for the fourth quarter and $14.4 million for the full year.

We expect our 2025 net CapEx to be in the range of $20 million-$25 million or approximately 1% of our revenues. We also realized a trailing 12-month cash flow conversion of approximately 100%, defined as adjusted EBITDA, less working capital investments, less CapEx, resulting in a ROIC of roughly 11% inclusive of our acquisitions. We expect that more mature distribution assets can generate ROIC levels in a range of 20% plus, and we remain focused on driving incrementally in that direction as we scale the assets that we currently own. Finally, as part of our capital allocation strategy, we opportunistically repurchased $2.6 million of stock at an average price of $30.13 during fiscal 2024. I'll now turn the call back over to Bryan.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Thank you, Ron. Moving to slide 12, we've summarized progress on our 2024 initiatives, which Ron and I discussed in greater detail today.

Our management teams, with strong collaboration from the LKCM Headwater team, continuously work to improve our customer intimacy and value proposition, our strategic direction objectives, but also strive to make our specialty distribution platform less complex for our investors to understand. We manage the business embracing the tension around near-term performance without sacrificing the more powerful opportunities that drive the longer-term compounding objectives we are committed to. It all comes back to driving profitability and return metrics higher and to drive sustained accountability across a diverse set of complementary capabilities in each vertical and the collaboration and commitment of each leadership team around continuously working to help improve operational performance with a daily focus on driving profitability and capability enhancements that ultimately will compound our cash flow engine. Our M&A playbook is vital to our long-term growth strategy, profitability enhancement objectives, and the real compounding engine we are building.

This framework sets high goals for management's allocation of capital and the performance expected from that capital and capability allocation to enhance the compounding engine. We and they are measured against our ability to convert that capital and defined opportunity into reality. Our verticals compete for capital, but also collaborate on how to best maximize shareholder value, and we deploy capital by ranking the best and highest return on initiatives and acquisitions to accomplish those long-term goals. All working on this business are enthusiastic about the reality of the opportunity as they are highly aligned with the shareholders and confident we have a clear path to generating a significant long-term shareholder value-creating engine. We are lapping 2024 organic sales softness and are comparing against easier sales comparisons over the next several quarters.

Relative momentum feels good, but on an absolute basis, we need to get back to our mid-2023 growth and earnings trajectory, which we are confident with a recovery in our end markets, we will be better positioned to earn more during. The last months have not been without some uncertainty as to how our end markets and our own model should adjust to the new mandates from Washington. We are well positioned to enjoy a renaissance in domestic manufacturing. Concerning tariffs and the new administration's directives, including DOGE, we are controlling the areas of our business that we can control and will stay alert to necessary changes as things progress in 2025.

As the narrative and negotiations around tariffs with a handful of countries threatens to impact a very modest amount of our total direct and indirect procurement, we reflect on history where it indicates that we've been able to work closely with our customers to offset these potential costs. The U.S. PMI numbers this year in 2025 are trending over 50 for the first couple of months, which signals better expansion than we have seen in many quarters. Given this and potentially lower regulatory and DSG deal interference, we believe companies will be spending more as they settle in with the new administration. The 2024 pent-up demand will continue to create sales momentum for our platform in 2025. Positive comparisons are demonstrated in Gexpro Services and our test and measurement chambers and other equipment categories TestEquity group. We are seeing some end market improvement in Lawson as well.

This is a good start. DSG enjoys a tremendous portfolio of end market diversification as well as diversification wherein that end market we engage with our customers with value-added services and products. We are always preparing for choppiness in the demand environment for certain end markets. We are encouraged and know that other end markets will recover further if global tensions ease as expected this year. In closing, thank you for your interest in DSG. We are fortunate to operate within a large combined addressable market across diverse end markets in the MRO, OEM, and industrial technologies areas that focus on specialty distribution categories that include products and services and generate significant cash flow through our collective efforts. We also have a trusted proven track record of resiliency through business cycles that benefit from our asset-like model and tight working capital management.

Our teams leading these businesses and working with me on this business are exceptionally aligned with the shareholders. This business is built to generate significant free cash flow that provides us the flexibility to focus on the very best ways to efficiently reinvest at high expected returns to drive the compounding engine across this platform for all of us, or to more directly explore ways to unlock our return capital to shareholders. I want to thank our over 4,400 dedicated employees for working hard to serve our over 200,000 customers worldwide with excellence, dedication, and energy. Thank you. I also want to thank our executive team and board for their ongoing support and encouragement.

My dozen or so LKCM Headwater team members that are daily challenged by our executive team and me to dive into value unlocking initiatives and the confidence and patience of DSG shareholders and my partners for investing alongside of us to grow and scale our DSG business in 2024 and 2025 and for many years to come. With that, operator, let's open the line for questions.

Operator (participant)

Certainly. At this time, we will be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions.

Your first question for today is from Zach Marriott with Stephens.

Zach Marriott (Research Associate)

Good morning and thank you for taking my questions.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Hey, Zach. Good morning.

Zach Marriott (Research Associate)

Is there any color you can share on quarter-to-date sales levels across DSG as compared to the end of Q4?

Ron Knutson (EVP and CFO)

Yeah, Zach, you're asking about the first quarter, correct?

Zach Marriott (Research Associate)

Yes, sir.

Ron Knutson (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. I think I mentioned this in some of my prepared remarks that Lawson has gotten off to a stronger start here in the first quarter. If you exclude the acquisition, certainly that came through in 2024, if you back that out of the conversation here for a minute, up versus, I would say, a year ago, January, February up also versus a year ago, all in on a consolidated basis, I'd say kind of flattish relative to Q4 trends into the first couple of months of 2025, though.

Zach Marriott (Research Associate)

Great.

Thank you for that. Also, on a sequential basis, how have consolidated margins trended in Q1 versus Q4 and any noteworthy factors in March that may change that?

Ron Knutson (EVP and CFO)

I would say nothing really noteworthy in March. In February, we are still working through getting everything finalized and so forth. January, again, I would say pretty consistent with where we were in the fourth quarter from an overall margin perspective. What I would say is that, and Bryan alluded to this a little bit in his comments as well, as 2025 develops, especially as we continue to work on a lot of the synergies and opportunities within the acquisitions that we made in 2024, our expectation is that the margin profile will lift as 2025 develops.

Especially on the Source Atlantic acquisition that we made and then also certainly with S&S that we made in 2024 as well. We're still, I would say, pretty early innings, especially around the Source Atlantic acquisition, given that that took place in Q3 of last year. Now that we have Jarrod in place, starting to see some realization there, but that'll happen more in the second half of the year than the first half of the year.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. Let me just add a couple of things, Zach. Thank you, Ron. Ron talked about at the beginning on sales momentum, he alluded to Lawson to kind of add color to TestEquity's vertical or to Gexpro Services.

I tried to, and both of us tried in our prepared remarks to indicate that book to bills and revenue, certainly on the Gexpro Services side and also in most of the categories, certainly the capital asset categories of TestEquity have continued to show good strength, like we enjoyed in the fourth quarter. March is an important month in the first quarter always. Even though January and February are feeling relatively better, both from a year ago and the trend off of the fourth quarter feels good, that does not mean that we have seen in March yet. We are always respectful that we are not through the quarter yet. Margins are key to us, and March will influence the final margins for the quarter, regardless of how well January and February might have felt.

There's not a lot of areas that we are feeling are directionally softer, which I think we called out military. There's kind of a big question mark there in terms of when that revenue really starts flowing for us again. The rest of the key market areas, other than CNI, which we called out, feel like they're directionally heading the right direction. Mexico, it's got some choppiness still to it. We saw that in the first half of last year, and it persisted during last year for Hisco. It's not going directionally, it's stable to improving since the middle of last year.

Zach Marriott (Research Associate)

Great. Thanks for the color. I'll turn it back.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah.

Operator (participant)

Your next question is from Kevin Steinke with Barrington Research.

Ron Knutson (EVP and CFO)

Good morning. Morning, Kevin.

Kevin Steinke (Managing Director)

I wanted to ask about the fourth quarter organic revenue growth of 3.5%.

In your earnings release, you noted that was in line with expectations, although on your previous conference call, you had been talking about kind of a flattish outlook. I was wondering if you felt like the organic sales trend was a bit of a positive surprise for you in the fourth quarter and just relative to the improvement in the end markets that you referenced.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. I mean, and Ron probably has some specifics on this, but just to Kevin, I would say that we were respectful going into the fourth quarter, certainly how the fourth quarter can taper off. We've had some tough December's in years past around purchasing behavior. What we ended up with was a bit more firm fourth quarter that reflects kind of the way we feel about the first quarter.

That flowed through two of the verticals at levels that were kind of above maybe where we had confidence to forecast or to kind of message at the end of the third quarter. That was obviously the Gexpro Services vertical sustained the momentum that it's sustaining, the momentum it's been enjoying. More of its end markets are cooperating than are not cooperating right now. Those end markets are touching up a lot more of the revenue there than the ones that are softer. Hungary, Power, and CNI are the two areas that we've got our eyes on. I do think that we've got a meaningful power exposure there or set of relationships and a bull on electricity or power needs. I think many of us are. That super cycle, we think, will ultimately help us. We've got some renewed customer opportunities there.

The test and measurement side of the business, we saw indications. We spoke towards book to bill or order flow being positive, I think, in the third quarter conference call there. It started to translate into the dollars more during the fourth quarter. We still have a few areas where we're working through filling orders, but the revenue side of the equation there is starting to feel better. We've got a lot of operating leverage in both of those two business models. The acquisitions that we've done at Gexpro Services are really helping the total margin profile of the business. That's part of our deliberate objective to add some specific capabilities that are higher value-add that blend the margin profile of these businesses higher over time.

We have to get the footprint right, which is why you have seen us do some things that may require us to have areas like Source Atlantic where we start off with a lower margin before we can kind of try and work it higher. I do not know if that is helpful or not.

Kevin Steinke (Managing Director)

No, it definitely is. Yeah. Thanks for all the additional color. I wanted to also ask about Lawson and the margin trajectory there. You noted that the first quarter has started off pretty well with getting back to a double-digit margin and a bit of more sales momentum there. Just as we think of the progression of margins for Lawson as we move throughout 2025, you said you are kind of past the near-term pain and the Salesforce initiatives.

At the same time, you also, I guess, will have some compression from ramping up that Salesforce and also the continued softer military sales. I'm just trying to think about how all those factors play into the margin outlook for Lawson.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Really super fair in an area that all of us are acutely focused on. The Lawson, we got the benefit of some margin lift in 2023, I guess it was, as our compression started, but our sales momentum was still being, we were still enjoying good relative momentum there. The markets turned tougher. Our government business turned a lot tougher last year. We also had a lot less feet on the street selling for us as we went through the compression cycle.

What I tried to highlight in my prepared remarks is the significant amount of dollars that we committed to this Salesforce resource and significant investment in Salesforce resources that we put into the Lawson team over the last 18 months. We knew that we were putting over $10 million of investment back into the business on the income statement. If you think about also the hiring of capabilities, or I mean, hiring with more feet on the street, the 100 sellers for us typically costs about $5 million in the first year that we've got them. That was a real investment that we started staging through last year. We were planning on our staging more of that through this year. That number kind of straddles the year some.

The benefit of it is that we are starting to see some better productivity and get some lift out of the first wave of sellers that we've hired. The other challenge that Lawson's always had has been turnover. We've been talking about this as long as long before I went on the board of Lawson, the real cost of having over 20% of your Salesforce turnover every year, which is the historic numbers, metrics are in excess of that for Lawson over the last decade. Seeing that trend down over the last five months is something that should help the margin because it's been a, in our estimation, it's been an over $20 million EBITDA drag a year of kind of trying to manage through that Salesforce turnover.

Many of the tools that we're adding and the capabilities that we've added have been to try and buffer that drag that you have when you do have turnover or to try and figure out how to shorten the lead time before your Salesforce hits profitability or is productive for you so that that J curve gets cut. Also try to make sure that our territories are more profitable on day one or at least scoped at a more attractive territory size. All those should add to, we think, not only getting us back to the levels of profitability that we enjoyed when we were starting the compression and still having in-market momentum, but to higher levels than that even, which I've alluded to as our primary long-term objective on Lawson, which is to get it up into the high teens and higher.

We don't think that that's going to happen overnight. It's not a dramatic move. We do think we'll see good progression there this year, but it's going to take a couple of years to really get that back to the levels that we enjoyed probably in 2022. It also is going to take just in markets being more firm. Ron, are there elements that I missed there?

Ron Knutson (EVP and CFO)

No, I think you hit it, Bryan, especially around the rep turnover. When we look at what we call impacted revenues from the rep turnover, more of that, we've seen some positive movement here, as Bryan mentioned, over the last three to four months in terms of those dollars being back in the where we were back in, call it 2022.

2023, when we started the compression, we did see a spike in, again, those impacted revenues that are connected to a sales rep, continue to get progressively better throughout 2024. The last few months has seen a marked improvement versus where we were in the last couple of years. That plus being at, call it 920 sales reps today, our low point in 2024 was about 830 at the end of the second quarter. Having 90 more individuals on the street now certainly helps us in that ADS number, which is we can drop $0.30-$0.40 cents of every incremental sales dollar into Lawson's EBITDA line. Certainly building that out to 1,000 sales reps here by the second half of 2025.

Still some investments to be made relative to the sales reps, but we're excited about a lot of the areas and a lot of the data that we're now receiving through our CRM tool and then also the rollout of our new website, which will take place here later yet here in the first quarter. We think that those are two areas that really can help the productivity of our reps.

Kevin Steinke (Managing Director)

Okay. Great. That's helpful. I also wanted to ask about with regard to Lawson, you said there were some positive signs initially around the military orders, but now your outlook is a little more subdued. How do you think about that as the year progresses? Is it probably difficult to point, but it's hard.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Any government spend, anything tied to government spending, federal government spending or the military specifically right now has been an enigma.

It was an enigma for me as they changed their ordering program, if you will, or the way that you had to be on their federal supply schedule last year. And some of the bunch of the kits that we, MRO kits that we put together for them for keeping equipment up and running, those orders got held. I just hope that all of our equipment's running out there. I'm more worried about the military than I am worried about our revenue associated with it, although I guess I'm worried about both of them. We're hearing that those orders have been held. They went through a process, if you will. We started to see and hear that those orders are going to be released. There has been a more austere element of force in Washington. They're trying to drive holding down spending.

I do not know whether or not it is holding down or delaying at this point, but we are just being subdued in our expectation on when those dollars are going to get released to us. That could create some noisiness. It is a big number when you look at our total revenue that was down in the fourth quarter or what the drag that we had for all last year, that federal government spending line. We won some contracts last year on local and state. We had some benefits that we expect to flow through this year on organically growing our government business, but it is all at the local and state level. We had these federal relationships that were well over, we are down well over 50%. I mean, I think our military was down 75% or something crazy in the fourth quarter.

It's anybody's guess as to the timing of when that comes back. Our Salesforce that covers it has been our key people to our organization that have stayed steady even though they've seen their book of business contract. We appreciate their commitment to their customers during this tough period for their and for themselves on their own income from a commission perspective. We're not hearing that we're losing that business. We're just hearing that it's stuck on somebody's desk and it's not being released. I wish I had a better answer for you. We just kind of modeled and forecasted our year without making bold assumptions around that at all. We just felt like it was out of our control. Is that fair, Ron?

Ron Knutson (EVP and CFO)

Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It is, Bryan.

It feels like we've been kind of whipsawed on this throughout the second half or maybe even the last three quarters of 2024 where we thought we were going to see some of this come through. It seems like we get some positive news and then some news that things are going to continue to get held. To Bryan's point, we're just being just really it's hard to make a prediction as to when it's ultimately going to come through. Again, we feel good that the orders are still sitting in the queue. It's a matter of when they'll be released. The mixed messaging that we've received over the latter half of 2024 just makes us a little more conservative on trying to commit as to when they may come through in 2025.

Kevin Steinke (Managing Director)

Okay. It totally makes sense.

Just lastly, I wanted to ask, could you remind us about if you have a certain time frame in mind for ramping Source Atlantic's margins up to that double-digit level?

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Not fast enough. Yeah. We've got a great team in place. We're adding a couple more resources that we're really excited about there. We appreciate that we had Source Atlantic has a great organizational structure, some great employees, a wonderful commercial leader. We have great people over at the Bolt Supply House. We're very, we wanted to be mindful about how we brought those organizations together and not be too abrupt, just given that they both had proud cultures and they were bringing two different Canadian organizations together on either side of the country. We wanted to make sure that we had strong cultural buy-in and strong cultural leadership there to try and bridge that process.

We have four facilities that are in the process of being four locations where we're consolidating facilities. That is going to release some dollars. When we looked at Source Atlantic and worked through buying them, they had a fledgling Western Canadian operation that had a lot of expenses associated with it and was losing quite a bit of money on the western half just as they were building it up. When we looked at our purchase price on Source Atlantic, it was largely working capital and real estate and then a very modest airball over real estate and working capital values. That modest airball, collectively, the total purchase price was sub 10% or right at 10 times multiple.

When we looked at the specific dollar loss that we could reverse by consolidating facilities in Western Canada, it significantly lifted their margins and it significantly did not get them all the way to 10%, but it made a big dent to getting them there. We are in the process of doing that. It will happen, I think, between now and the end of the second quarter. It is going to take us two quarters to get through the consolidation piece. We have some work to do on how we manage our margin structure there. All that, and it is easier to do that. A number of our customers operate up there in pretty harsh weather environments this time of the year. It is easier to try and work through the volumes that we get.

There's a lot more seasonality in that book of business than maybe we communicated well to the street just because when you get to mining mines and large infrastructure investments that are going on or large companies with significant infrastructure that's pretty far north, especially on that eastern seaboard swath of Canada, there's not a lot of activity during these winter months. Fourth quarter and first quarter are seasonally soft months for Source Atlantic. That dragged our margins in the fourth quarter down more than they would have been dragged down had they been one of the second or third quarter revenue months. We obviously had some of that in January and February just in terms of total volume and throughput. We're also now going to work on trying to get that margin to where it needs to be longer term.

When you can take out expenses on a part of the business that was losing $6 million or so of EBITDA and you can flip that to a positive contributor, my team likes to call that a pick six at the goal line. You're kind of swinging the points to your favor. It can happen in a pretty good hurry, but it's not going to happen here in the first three or four or five months of the year.

Kevin Steinke (Managing Director)

Okay. Thanks for all the insight. I'll turn it over.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one. Your next question for today is from Ken Newman with Key Bank Capital Markets.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Morning, Ken.

Ken Newman (VP and Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, morning, guys. Thanks for squeezing me in. Hey.

Ron Knutson (EVP and CFO)

Morning, Ken.

Ken Newman (VP and Equity Research Analyst)

Sure.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Appreciate you staying hanging in here.

Ken Newman (VP and Equity Research Analyst)

Yeah. No, of course.

First one, Ron, I just wanted to go back to the Lawson comments you made about January and February. I'm just trying to understand whether holiday timing was a material impact there relative to those rebounds. I think some of your larger peers cited some extended customer shutdowns due to the timing of New Year's and Christmas. Was that something that kind of materially impacted the sequential move of ADS from December to January? I'm also wondering if, just given the moving target on tariffs, if you're seeing customers pre-buying inventory at all within that business.

Ron Knutson (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. Typically, just by way of history, we would normally see a lift going from December to January, specifically to your point, just around some of the holiday timing and so forth. I would say we saw almost 2x that normalized lift this year going from December into January.

When we look at our kind of the core piece of the business, in terms of what's coming through on the field sales rep side, we are seeing much better results. Even if I go back over many months, January was higher than December. It was higher than November, and it was higher than October all three months. February sequentially was up over where January was at as well. Yeah, I mean, certainly, the soft December played into that a little bit, although, as Bryan mentioned, December is always a little bit of a wild card, especially on the Lawson business. It feels like we've seen some nice movement upward beyond what we would normally expect, both in January and in February. I think that points to some positive signs. Yeah. Go ahead, Bryan.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Ron, and one of the things that, Ken, that I'm a lot more respectful of, I always have been respectful of this as a public shareholder in Lawson for years. I was very curious about the math associated with about hiring and spooling up the Salesforce. I mean, for years in the 2015 to 2018 period or 2013 to 2017 period before I was over the wall, we talked about adding 50 sellers or 100 sellers on a net basis. At the end of the day, feet on the street matters. Our Salesforce, our outside Salesforce is the lifeblood in many ways of this, certainly this business.

Compressing 200 sellers or 190, going from 1,020 down to 830, and then now building back up is a no matter what's going on in your end markets with your customers, the most important thing on a comp store basis or comp sales basis is how many feet you've got out there and how many people making sales calls you've got working for you. We have a massive amount of customers that we have bins and cabinets with where we are not covering them the way that we should be because we just we didn't have enough salespeople as we were reorganizing territories. We were going through all these sales tools that we were adding to our capabilities for our sellers, trying to make them better.

At the end of the day, the cost of that, if we had had a tailwind with our customers, it would have been less noisy than it was. If we hadn't had the military spending or the federal government spending challenges last year, it would have been more opaque to the public shareholder investors. The reality of it is with a headwind in PPI and with the government spending, what really is exposed here is the fact that we had 190 less sellers at one point than we'd had 12 or 18 months before. That's a massive drag to try to drive revenue.

I'm really proud of the team for having tackled what was an initiative that we were talking about from the first day I went on the board about at what point in time were we going to really roll out all these tools, how disruptive would it be to some of our sellers that were later in their careers and were closer to retirement and trying to protect them and not have them have to worry about the tools, but making sure that we had the tools for those that we were hiring and that we were bringing on board so that they were better equipped to drive revenue faster and to have a better level of accountability of this 90,000 inactive Lawson bins and cabinets that we have out there in the field.

That is a lot of customers that we have had very active relationships with that have our infrastructure that we floor plan for them. That was another thing that was a massive surprise for me when I went on the board, how much money was buried in our cost of sales of us giving bins and cabinets away or floor planning them for customers to put our product in those bins and cabinets. When you step back and you looked at whether or not you were covering them adequately with your outside Salesforce, we worked. We are going to, and we are going to continue to invest.

We wanted to get it organized in a way that allowed our sellers that we're hiring to be more effective and efficient with their time and for us collectively with them to be able to have the tools to help them see where they needed to be and how they could make sure they did the best job possible for their customers. There are a lot of customers out there that are asking us to, with the infrastructure that we have on site for them, do a better job. The customers that we're covering, we're covering well. It's not having enough feet on the street. We're back building into that. That's the primary driver to average daily sales, without a doubt.

Ken Newman (VP and Equity Research Analyst)

Just to be clear, Bryan, you're not seeing any indication of customer pre-buy.

The reason I ask, obviously, is PMI is back above 50. The new orders is back in contraction, right? I am just making sure that that is not exactly what we are seeing here.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

You know what? Ron's got a great schedule. We have spent a lot of time looking at our indirect and direct sourcing. For us, I do not think that we are seeing any indication based on the amount of revenue per invoice and in those categories that we, that is not jumping off the page for us, if that makes sense. For Lawson, we do not have a ton of product that we are sourcing in a way where you have some tested measurement equipment that is coming out of tariff-focused areas.

In total, it's $8 million or $9 million of indirect and direct impact that we would see across all of our categories and all of our verticals that we could have tariff impact on. That's going all the way deep. Most of that's indirect, or much of it's indirect, or it's large electronic goods that are coming out of China on the test and measurement side. Ron, help me there.

Ron Knutson (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. That's right, Bryan. That's a fair question. Relatively to the chair. On the tariff side, if we look kind of across DSG on the direct import, and not that all of that would be impacted by the potential tariffs, it's about 12% of our overall purchases on the straight direct imports.

On the indirect, it's a little tougher to get to an all-in number just because of the raw materials that are built into some of the products that we're purchasing and so forth. I think when Bryan mentioned this in his prepared remarks as well, if you look back over the last couple of years relative to us being able to work closely with our customers so that we don't see margin deterioration, I think we've proven that we've been able to do that in the past. Again, it's not a huge number for us across DSG on the impacted countries where the tariffs have been put in place. I would say, I mean, we're starting to receive some letters from our vendors, and we're starting to have some communication with some of our end customers as well already in terms of what that means.

We're not sitting idle around this. We'll be in front of it for sure to make sure that we don't have any margin impacted on us.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Ken, the question you asked is a great one. What I would say is that on the MRO side, the order quantities that we get and how distributed our customer base is really feels more like adding an extra now almost 100 additional sellers is more impacting our ability to cover existing or kind of historic Lawson customers again well with just having more feet on the street. I don't see that as it's harder to see at that granular level given how many customers they are and how small they are.

If you go over to TestEquity and the test and measurement side and some of the products there that might be could have some risk around them with tariffs, that's our book to bill or our order volumes that preceded our revenue volumes there where we were saying in the third quarter and early fourth quarter, we were starting to see more and more RFPs, and we were getting more interest in order. That all predated the election in November. We felt like that that market was coming back. The channel was cleaned up and that that market was coming back just out of the normal long cycle that we'd been through since the kind of summer August of 2023, I think it was, maybe was when it started really deteriorating. It was certainly not growing after late 2022.

That cycle started working back in our favor long before there was an election conversation around tariffs. What we are seeing on order flow there is really coming out of the RFPs and the indications that we had customers that were going to be buying from us. Now, on Gexpro Services, let's flip to it. There are the end markets there. The book to bill started building throughout last year on each of those end markets that have been strong. The book to bill is continuing to stay consistent across most all of their end markets, consistent meaning if it is a 105 all the way up to a 140 or 160 relative to orders or revenue that is flowing through.

It's the CNI and it's Hungary, and it's a little bit in PowerGen and where we've seen some softness or some choppiness there between where book to bill is currently and where revenues have been trending. Things there seem really consistent with activity at the plant level where they're having product pulled through. I don't know. They don't have a lot of, if I remember, Ron, on looking at our schedule, I think they're the least impacted by tariffs on their country of origin products of the three verticals.

Ken Newman (VP and Equity Research Analyst)

Yeah. Okay. That's helpful. I mean, one really quick question.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

The question you asked, Ken, the question you asked is going to be one that I'll be torturing myself with because what I'm not hearing, but the fact that I'm not hearing it or we're not talking about it, we're talking about tariffs, and we're talking about how it can impact us. Our customers, it's not getting back to our level that customers are pre-buying. I'm going to go back and try and ask at the field level and the regional level to see if I can get more insights on whether or not there's something at the street level that I'm not hearing.

Ken Newman (VP and Equity Research Analyst)

Yeah. One quick one to close this out, just the Canadian double-digit margin target run rate by the end of this year.

What's the risk that tariffs kind of limit your ability to get the revenue synergies there that you need to get to that target?

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Most of that target to get to that target is going to be this fixing their cost structure on the West and Western Canada and these consolidating facilities and kind of designing or kind of executing on a design that we put in place during underwriting to make it one really strong Canadian company. That's largely driven around the Canadian business, the cost structure of that Canadian business and trying to line it up. There were some revenue objectives there, but a lot of their customers are it's not as much tied to that Ontario and Quebec revenue that goes back and forth across the border.

It's really the business that we have at this point is an Atlantic Seaboard business that has a lot of product flowing north to mines or along that coastline and has trade that's going maybe more Pan-Atlantic. It is the Calgary and West Western footprint, a little bit in kind of the northern provinces and kind of the middle part of the country. I don't know how much of it is flowing back this direction where it's going to be impacted. I don't know what of our, we don't have a lot of product that's flowing back and forth across the border at this point that I know of. I know that there's our VMI business that we've had with Kent Automotive and the Lawson business.

Part of the reason why we wanted to make sure we had a stronger Canadian presence was that we wanted to make sure that we built a Canadian business that also gave us more productivity benefits out of our sales channel that we had sitting on Lawson's PNL, which is the Kent and Lawson VMI sellers. They would be the ones that maybe could be more impacted by product that we are traditionally thinking about. Ron can tell me how much of that product is moving out of McCook from McCook to a salesperson that's a VMI seller for Kent or Lawson, Phil and Benz in Ontario. It is not the Source Atlantic and Bolt operations that I would feel like are most at risk there.

Ron Knutson (EVP and CFO)

Yes, that's right.

Ken Newman (VP and Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Very helpful. Thanks.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Thank you for the good questions. Everybody's good questions. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

We have reached the end of the question and answer session, and I will now turn the call over to Bryan for closing remarks.

Bryan King (Chairman and CEO)

Thank you, operator. Thank you, everyone, for engaging with us today. We appreciate your interest in DSG. We are excited about being aligned with you as shareholders, and we look forward to speaking with you again when we report our first quarter results in a couple of months. Thank you for your time. Have a great day, and God bless. Take care.