Thank you. Before I introduce Dale, I'd like to remind listeners that certain comments made on this conference call and webcast are considered forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

These forward-looking statements are subject to certain known and unknown risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those reflected in these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are also subject to other risks and uncertainties that are described from time to time in the company's filings with the SEC.

Do not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which are being made only as of the date of this call. Except as required by law, the company undertakes no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to any forward-looking statements.

Our presentation also includes certain key operational metrics and non-GAAP financial measures, including gross billings, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income and EPS, and effective margin, as supplemental measures of performance of our business. All non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules.

I'd now like to turn the call over to Climb's CEO, Dale Foster.

Thank you, Sean, and good morning, everyone. In the first quarter, we generated double-digit organic growth in our core business and also had some benefit from our acquisition of Interworks.cloud.

We have remained disciplined in our signing high-quality vendors to our line card while moving slower performing vendors to our Climb Elevate division. Our performance underscores the momentum across the business driven by the strength of our global platform and the depth of both vendors and partners.

During the quarter, we evaluated 39 net-new brands and selected only two consistent with our strategy of cultivating strong, high-impact vendor relationships across our platform. Notably, we signed Checkmk, an industry-recognized innovator in comprehensive enterprise-grade monitoring and observability.

As the strategic distributor, we provide channel partners with streamlined access to Checkmk's unified monitoring and observability platforms, delivering deep visibility across hybrid environments in key domains including infrastructure, networks, and applications from a single solution. Combined with enterprise-grade scalability, high automation, and open-core architecture, Checkmk enables partners to confidently position and sell and deploy unified monitoring platform that scales seamlessly across diverse customer environments and use cases.

We also launched a company called LogicMonitor during the quarter following the successful pilot with a large customer in the fourth quarter of 2025. LogicMonitor is an AI-powered hybrid observability platform that provides unified visibility across cloud, on-prem, and multi-cloud environments, enabling organizations to proactively identify and resolve issues.

Through this partnership, we are bringing LogicMonitor's capabilities to our partner ecosystem, equipping VARs and MSPs with a differentiated solution, enhanced visibility, improves operational resilience, and drives long-term customer value. We look forward to building our relationship with both Checkmk and LogicMonitor as we take their products to market.

Alongside expanding our vendor portfolio, in February, we acquired Interworks, a Greek distributor that brings over 600 cloud resellers and managed service provider relationships, as well as strong vendor to our existing strong line card. While early in the integration process, we are seeing meaningful opportunities to deepen our presence in southeastern Europe by leveraging Interworks' established network, as well as expanding cross-sell opportunities across our broader platform.

Overall, we are encouraged by this early progress we're seeing and look forward to generating additional synergies as we fully integrate the teams in the months ahead. As we continue to scale our global platform, we are focused on driving greater alignment and efficiency across our organization.

To support this effort, we promoted Sarah Peters to Senior Director of Alliances to our EMEA team. Sarah is working closely with regional leadership to replicate the process, discipline, and execution framework that have produced strong results in North America.

Importantly, our underlying alliance strategy remains unchanged. We continue to take highly selective approach to onboarding new vendors while prioritizing deep engagement with existing partners.

As our pipeline of opportunities expands, we are also seeing increased activity across both new evaluations and re-evaluations, which require a similar level of effort and reflect the deep growth and maturity of our vendor portfolio. Looking ahead, we remain focused on driving organic growth while maintaining a disciplined approach to capital allocation.

As we continue to scale the business, we're investing in infrastructure needed to support that growth, including advanced automation and AI-enabled tools that enhance visibility, streamline our workflows, and improve overall operating efficiencies. We currently have over 41 IT projects in the works that have streamlined and will continue to streamline our workflows.

We're using AI tools and agents to connect our partners that will help our team be more efficient as we grow. These initiatives are designed to increase throughput across the platform and enable us to support higher volumes of activity without the commensurate increase in headcount.

At the same time, we continue to view M&A as a strategic lever to complement our organic growth. We're actively evaluating opportunities that align with our high-performance culture, as well as our service offerings and in our geographic reach.

We believe these initiatives will enable us to execute on our 2026 plan and deliver yet another year of strong results. With that, I will turn the call over to our CFO, Matt Sullivan.

Matt?

Thank you, Dale, and good morning, everyone. A quick reminder, as we review the financial results for our first quarter, all comparisons and variance commentary refer to the prior-year quarter unless otherwise specified.

As reported in our earnings press release, gross billings in Q1 2026 increased 14% to $542.8 million compared to $474.6 million in the year-ago quarter. Distribution segment gross billings increased 15% to $520.9 million, and solutions segment gross billings increased 4% to $21.9 million.

Net sales in the first quarter of 2026 increased 32% to $182.4 million compared to $138 million in the year-ago period. This reflects double-digit organic growth from new and existing vendors, as well as contributions from our acquisition of Interworks on February 24th, 2026.

Gross profit in the first quarter of 2026 increased 13% to $26.5 million compared to $23.4 million for the same period in 2025. The increase was driven by organic growth from new and existing vendors in both North America and Europe, as well as the contribution from Interworks.

Selling, general, and administrative expenses in the first quarter of 2026 were $20.3 million compared to $16.8 million in the year-ago period. The increase in SG&A expenses was primarily driven by one-time investments to drive organic growth from new vendors and in our infrastructure to support long-term growth initiatives.

More specifically, we expanded our IT capabilities to enhance system efficiencies, further aligned our sales organization across teams and geographies, and continued to build out our Fortinet-focused sales resources. In addition, SG&A reflects higher legal and professional fees associated with strategic initiatives, including our stock split.

SG&A as a percentage of gross billings was 3.7% for the first quarter of 2026 compared to 3.5% for the prior-year period. Net income in the first quarter of 2026 was $3.3 million, or 18 cents per diluted share, compared to $3.7 million, or 20 cents per diluted share, for the prior-year period.

Adjusted net income was $3.6 million, or 19 cents per diluted share, compared to $3.9 million, or 22 cents per diluted share, for the year-ago period. Both net income and adjusted net income in the first quarter of 2026 were impacted by a higher effective tax rate compared to the prior-year period.

Adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter of 2026 increased 4% to $7.9 million compared to $7.6 million for the same period in 2025. The increase was primarily driven by organic growth from both new and existing vendors, partially offset by the aforementioned investments in our infrastructure to support long-term growth initiatives.

Effective margin, which is defined as adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of gross profit, was 29.9% compared to 32.7% for the same period in 2025. Excluding the previously mentioned one-time investments and costs, effective margin for the first quarter of 2026 was higher compared to the prior-year period.

Turning to our balance sheet, cash and cash equivalents were $41.8 million as of March 31st, 2026, compared to $36.6 million on December 31st, 2025. The increase in cash was primarily attributed to the timing of receivable collections and payables.

As of March 31st, 2026, we had no outstanding debt or borrowings outstanding under our $50 million revolving credit facility. As previously mentioned, our board approved a 4-for-1 forward stock split effective in March to enhance liquidity and broaden access to our shares while maintaining each stockholder's proportionate ownership.

We believe this action improves the accessibility of our stock and supports a more efficient trading environment for a broader base of investors. Looking ahead, our balance sheet remains a strategic asset.

With over $41 million of cash and no outstanding debt, we have ample liquidity and flexibility to execute on our growth initiatives in 2026. We remain active in evaluating accretive M&A opportunities that can deepen our vendor portfolio, broaden our geographic footprint, and enhance our operating platform.

We believe these initiatives, coupled with our demonstrated track record of success, will enable us to continue driving value creation for our shareholders. This concludes our prepared remarks.

We'll now open up the line for questions. Operator?

Good morning, guys, and thanks for the opportunity here. In terms of the extra spending here on the SG&A for the quarter, I noticed you guys had a number of one-time items including IT and legal costs and investments like a Fortinet.

Can you perhaps bifurcate that a little bit more so we understand? I'm assuming increased costs for Fortinet will continue going forward, some of your one-time IT costs probably one-time in nature.

Any way to bifurcate some of that growth in SG&A to understand a little bit more going forward?

Keith, go ahead, Matt, and I'll fill in. I was going to say

the largest driver there, or a big piece of the driver there, was the Fortinet investment. The investment in that relationship is slightly different than the investment in a typical onboarding of a new vendor where we had increased costs building out teams and additional one-time costs as we start that relationship here in Q1 of 2026.

That really was about half a million dollars worth of costs that were in the first quarter that it was a negative reduction to adjusted EBITDA that we expect to turn the other direction as we move into the remainder of 2026.

Keith, real quick, this is one of the things, we typically, when we sign vendors, we'll do some small investments, and a lot of times it's paid for by the vendors. If you take a look at Fortinet, it's a market cap $60 billion company, I think $6 billion in annual sales.

In their relationship was just a little different. We agreed and didn't have it in all of our budgets to put this investment out there because we see it's such an opportunity.

It's an anchor for us as we go forward, and it's one of the top four cybersecurity vendors in the world. That's why we put this investment in there.

The sales are coming along, and we'll be able to report those better in Q2 as we have been ramping those up along with the team that we brought on board.

That was going to be my follow-up question is what's kind of the break-even point for that, and how fast does it take to ramp up somebody like a Fortinet? Will you see the return on investment here before the end of the year on that?

We will. Q2 is already ramping up pretty quickly, but it'll be Q3 when we'll see that return on investment.

There'll be some of those SG&A costs in Q2 of that team and then covered in Q3.

Okay. Gotcha.

Then it looks like the mix between gross and net revenue here spiked really on the gross side. I think the highest it's been several quarters, if not several years.

Is that attributable to some of the new vendors, or is there anything you can point to as we think about going forward with the split between gross and net revenue?

It- not- not- im- Go ahead.

Sorry, guys.

I was going to say it's not an impact of the new vendors. It's really just the product mix of our existing vendors.

That can fluctuate from a given quarter. You're right, it is the highest this quarter of any quarter in recent time.

That's really driven by our existing vendors and what specific products we are selling to them.

Okay. Gotcha.

Then the memory issue is wreaking havoc in the hardware world. In your realm in the software space, are you guys seeing a benefit as people prioritize some of their spending away from hardware with increased prices towards software?

Is it too early to tell, or what's your thoughts on that?

We did not see the impact, Keith. Some of the delays on potential people doing installs or if they're doing a hybrid cloud or going to a data center, we see some of that.

Remember, 80 to 90% of ours are recurring revenue and renewals, we just haven't seen that slow down. We haven't seen the seat licenses decrease like everybody got crazy in Q1 to talk about.

I think the adults are coming back and saying, "Hey, listen. This is sophisticated software that people are selling."

Where we've got two things going for us. Number one, we have a strong renewal stream.

Number two, we're 60-some percent in the cybersecurity world, which people are always going to protect their infrastructure first.

Gotcha. Maybe last question for you.

In terms of the targeted one-time investments like an IT in the first quarter, what's your expected ROI on that? I guess are you satisfied with some of the progress you've made with those initiatives?

Our new CIO that's come on board, he'll be coming up on a year in Q2. The first time I pointed out in how many projects we have going because the list continues to grow.

We went to our new ERP over a year and a half ago and we've been streamlining it. Now we're using so many of the AI tools to just make our systems faster and that is not only the ERP piece of it, but all of the associate applications that we can use agents to do a lot of the work that we've had to do before manually.

Here's our goal that Matt and I have set, and that is we're throwing technology at it so we don't have to increase headcount, as I mentioned in my remarks. That is we need to be able to scale this business, our goal is to double it in the next three years, but not double our headcount because we would just be running on a treadmill at that point.

That's our goal is using the technology, and it's out there to use. We just keep putting the projects on the list to make it more efficient.

Great. Thanks.

I'll turn it over.

Thanks.

Dale, was the organic growth broad-based in the quarter across your top 20, and were there any lumpy deals that impacted the period?

It's it's it is our top 20 that happened. We had some fallover to, typically happens, that from Q4 that come in that deals didn't get closed on that side.

No, it's it was just a a good quarter for us when you look at just the vendor performances. We had some vendors that finished their fiscal year at the end of March, there was going to be, and some of our new member or new vendors that did that, but other than that, it's just across all of our our vendors, decent performance.

Has gross billings momentum carried through April?

We're closing out April. We don't want to talk too much about that.

We are not seeing a slowdown definitely in our workloads, so that's where our focus is, right, is how do we become more efficient with those workloads. If you look at just the gross billing, and the whole talk about AI and it's going to take over this and it's going to take over seats.

Here's my comment on that and I've commented before on it is that we're going to use AI more than we're going to sell it this year, including our vendors are going to use it more internally to develop their products faster. That's the thing that gets talked about the most when we have all of our QBRs with our vendors is how much faster they're being able to develop products.

AI does a great job with repetitive process, and that's how we're using it inside of Climb. When it comes to sophisticated somebody that's going to go and attack your network, we're seeing the tools that we're selling as important as ever and we haven't seen that slow down.

Curious about VAST Data. Does the pipeline remain substantial there?

It's still going to be lumpy with VAST, but if you look at VAST as a company, how much money they've raised, they appeal to the high-speed data pull for AI engines and that's where their claim to fame is. They're doing a good job.

You'll see throughout this year some more lumpy deals that are coming in. It's just hard to predict and back to Keith's comment about memory, they're going to be affected by that.

Anybody that's going into the data centers is going to be affected by some of the chip stuff.

Are you able to give us some help in terms of when Interworks will provide meaningful cross-selling synergies, or is that tough to talk about in terms of timing?

It's the cross-sell that we have, and this is our strategic plan when we acquire companies in various regions, and that is the opportunities that typically start with vendors in the US and move there. They have a big Microsoft practice, which goes right in line with our Microsoft practice in the UK, and I mentioned that before that we meet the threshold to stay as a distributor.

We're working on becoming a frontier distributor, which is a new designator by Microsoft. Here's the uniqueness about Interworks.

They transact all of their business through a cloud platform, which we have a small portion of our business. We want some of that DNA to come to our newly dedicated MSP team in the US and then to the greater company in Europe as well, though we can transact on a platform as we keep getting better and better with our system.

It's going to be going both ways, from the Greek team to us on how they actually transact and from vendors to the Greek team that they're looking to add more vendors. You'll see that the cross-selling and really the onboarding of new vendors in Southern Europe with, as I mentioned Sarah Peters taking that role and that was one of the reasons for it.

Thanks, Dale.

Thanks, Vince.

Good morning, and thanks for taking my call, guys. I want to follow up a little bit more on the SG&A line.

If you look sequentially, I think it went up about $2 million, and year over year, about a $3.5 million dollar increase. You kind of pointed out the Fortinet was about $500,000 of that, and then you called it primarily one-time investments.

The other $1.5 million sequentially, can you kind of give us a little bit more detail on what that was and quantify it? Then, when you say one-time, is that mean one quarter, or is that going to continue into Q2 and to the rest of the year?

[laughter] Yeah. When we refer to that as one-time, specifically with the Fortinet relationship, that was a net cost of about half a million dollars to Climb as a company.

We expect that to begin to turn to a positive contribution in the later part of 2026. We start to see that in Q2 here and really see that ramp up in Q3 and beyond.

Like I said earlier, that was a different type of investment than our usual investment cycle. Then we had other one-time professional and legal-type costs associated with the stock split and some other initiatives there.

Like I had mentioned in the prepared remarks, if you exclude those items, our effective margin from Q1 of 2026 compared to Q1 of 2025 increased. Typically, Q1 is our lowest effective margin quarter of the fiscal year.

Even if you look back at 2025, that 33 32.5% or so, that continued to climb as the year progressed, and we expect no changes to that trajectory as we move forward here in 2026.

Just looking forward on a

dol-

Go Go ahead, Dale. Sorry.

Real real quick, Howard. When Matt and I looked at it, as we were going through the quarter, we just had some messy like we say one-time things, but, we had some legal stuff that we typically didn't have in the past, for those quarters.

It was unfortunate, but a lot of those are one-time things as as as as the quarter, as we pointed out. If you look at the actual SG&A, I think it went from 3.5 to 3.7.

We we we got to get that in the other direction. As you often point out, can we get to the, and and I talked about it now with some of our investors and, of course, our board, how do we get to our 5% to more of a 50/50 on our SG&A and our effective margin?

That's that is the goal that we have, and we do not see and our vision is not changed on that.

Okay. I wish you guys would start giving a little bit of guidance.

Just looking at this line, generally it's around $20 million, 20 $20.5 million for the quarter. Do you see Q2 on a dollar basis being a decrease from that, an increase from that, or relatively the same?

We'd have to go by percentages, Howard, because our Q2 is going to typically higher than Q1. We're going in with our education, that's where all the buying starts happening and all the quoting starts happening.

That's how our gross profit is affected by the commissions that we put out there, I can't give you a hard number that way. Percentage-wise, we're going to see that drop.

Okay. Then, yeah, you mentioned the 5-3-2, which we talked about before.

You mean 5% gross profit off of your gross billings, which is kind of the way to look at your business, I think, then 3% for SG&A, leaving 2% roughly for income from operations. You got depreciation as well.

You said that's still kind of your target, but is that a goal? Is that a expectation, or what is that?

I'm sorry. Go ahead.

No, our goal, Howard, in our executive meetings we kicked off this year, including presentations to the board, is to get that to a 50/50. We had our sales kickoff both in the US and overseas, and it's to get the 5 to 2.5, 2.5.

We know where our competitors are, we know we can get there, but it's an efficiency play for us to split that 5% in half and drop that through. That is our hard target to get to that we have set for ourselves as a management team.

Our expectation is that 5-3-2 doesn't change.

Okay. 5-3-2, but 2.5 would be what your real goal is here, not just 2.

Better than that. Right.

That's where we have our sight set is to take the 5 and just split it in half, and half of it is going through SG&A, the other half is going and dropping through.

Okay. All right.

Then just bigger picture. Congrats on the revenue growth.

You guys are still doing a great job. On M&A environment though, the Interworks, it was kind of one of these new things where it was kind of acquire or go out because of the Microsoft vendor that you talked about before, and they had to get bigger or they just weren't going to have that card.

Do you see that continuing in the environment, or how do you see more generally the M&A environment in terms of the opportunities and the valuations today?

The valuations have still stayed, and this is targeting mostly in Europe, a little bit in the Middle East that we're looking at because we'll prospect two years out into some territories. It was opportunistic that we did it with this company because we already had relationship with them from the cloud platform piece of it.

We're doing it that way, but right now, yeah, there's still a lot of opportunities on my list, a lot that I've met with when Matt and I were over in Greece with the team and did a stop by to talk to some other potential targets as out there. It's good.

It all depends, and everything is depends on what that company internally does, right? Are they reliant on one vendor, one territory?

There's all different factors that go into the valuation piece of it, from where we acquired Douglas Stewart at a 4.5 up to paying close to 8.5 for other companies, and it just depends on what their makeup is and where we see that we can effectively grow them and how quickly we can grow them as is what we pay.

Great. All right.

Thanks. Congrats on the progress, and thanks for taking my questions.

Thanks, Howard. We'll

[cough] Thank you. After signing the Fortinet agreement, given the size of that organization, has that led to any follow-on effects with other large vendors that basically raised their eyes to what Climb may be able to accomplish?

Hey, thanks for the question, Bill. It actually has.

Our talk track is, we're going after emerging vendors. If you look at our line card, and even our top vendors that we talk about, SolarWinds and Sophos, have been great partners for us and continue to be that.

As far as looking at like a tier-one vendor like a Juniper, Fortinet throughout there, we typically don't market toward that environment. When this one came up, it was not an immediate, "Oh, my gosh, this is going to be great.

It's going to change Climb for the better." My first reaction to was, "I don't want it to change our culture where we become like a broadline distributor, right?"

Because I think there's so much value in what we do and what we take to market. To your point, after that happened, we've had some pretty large companies reach out to us and say, "Hey, I didn't realize you guys did this.

I didn't realize you went as wide in some of the markets that you do." If you look at the North American market, you have the three large distributors now all public, with Ingram going public last year, and then it's all the way down to where we see Climb.

We're very small compared to these $50, $60 billion companies. We don't want to be them, but we're having vendors that are coming to us and saying, "Hey, either we want to keep them honest, or we want to do a targeted approach to a group of resellers that we think you touch much better than the broadliners do."

The answer is yes. I won't give you names, of course, until we announce them, but, yeah, it's nice to have them coming to us instead of us going and trying to knock on every door.

Dale, the implication then of what you just said is that there are other meaningful, potentially needle-moving vendors that you are in discussions with now?

I'll leave it at that. Yes.

I'll try to not let you leave it at that. [laughter] Would you anticipate that if any one of these come to fruition that it would happen this calendar year, or are these discussions much more drawn out than that?

No, that would happen this calendar year on the ones we're looking at. We expected Fortinet to have a little faster start than we have.

It always is, you're putting energy and, as we showed in Q1, we're putting resources and expenses into getting it going. As I told my field sales team that I'm putting tons of pressure on, right, to launch this and getting them into net-new customers, and that's where we're really going after, is, "Hey, we're going to take advantage of this vendor line for the next 5, 10, 15 years, right?"

Because I think we're just a better go-to-market play than our competitors. That's why we're putting the energy in right now.

Everybody has their day jobs to do, but we're pushing to our field teams to say, "Hey, this is important to us. It's going to drag a lot of cross-sell opportunities."

If you take a look at Fortinet's technology partner page on their website, you'll see all the vendors that they work with. There's quite a few on that list.

Number one, there is seven or eight that we already work with, there's cross-selling and we do marketing programs together with them. If you look at that list, it is big on the cybersecurity side and associated platform side, even on the monitoring piece of it.

More new targets for us, but, yeah, I see more and more of that coming our way.

Thank you for that. If you were to sign one more of them, the one-time investments that you've discussed here relative to Fortinet, would those scale to let's just call them Vendor B, or are these resources really dedicated to Fortinet and you would then have this same scaling that you would do for Vendor B?

Would you help us understand behind the scenes how that would work?

I'll give you a example that's real time. When we acquired Douglas Stewart, Adobe was a big part of that relationship, and they had a separate team, and that team we maintained separate until we put them into our ERP.

Now the Adobe platform, the Adobe marketing, all that stuff is part of Climb, right? We want a one-Climb approach to how we go to market.

Same thing with Fortinet. It'll eventually morph into our overall team and become part of the Climb ecosystem.

Right now, we kept it separate so we can track it, we can show our progress. We have 80-some sellers in North America.

They're all selling Fortinet products just like they're all selling Adobe. It wasn't that way to start with.

You're not going to like this answer, but it depends on the opportunity, right? If the vendor, if it already is in our same work stream like most of the vendors we sign are, it just goes right in.

As I mentioned in my remarks, we are pushing vendors that are not in our top 70 or that are drifting or don't have the investment to our Climb Elevate team, which is really a transactional team. It doesn't get marketing.

It doesn't get sales support, but just transactional. I'm trying to continue to move vendors off so we can focus on our core.

I would like, we started 100 vendors, we're down to 70 in our core. I would like that number to go down to 50 because if you look at our top 20, they represent 90 90-some percent of our business.

We want to keep doing that focus. That's what our vendors want on the top side, and that's what our customers expect to be able to deliver the message.

How many vendors can a sales rep really represent? We want to limit that so we're really an extension of that vendor sales force.

Great. Thank you for the additional perspective.

Thanks, Bill.

Thank you, operator. Again, thanks to the entire Climb team.

Hard work this year. A lot of things going on, a lot of moving parts.

Also, I want to welcome the team members from our new acquired Greek team in both Thessaloniki and Athens. Matt and I had a chance to go over and spend time with them, and it was just a doubling down on the culture that we have at Climb.

It's the same thing. That same strand goes right through our team in Greece, and just a great time.

They fit with not only our go-to-market, but they have the same kind of values that we have as far as taking care of our customers and our vendors. Last thing I want to mention is we will be doing an Investor Day on July 7th in New York City, and for our shareholders, we'll be sending out invites for that.

Love to see you in New York. Thank you, operator.