John Glynn
Everybody, John here. The team's been working hard to put something together for you today, and we hope you enjoy it.
First, a couple quick points. We're going to be making some forward-looking statements today, and while I wish we had a crystal ball, the reality is nobody can predict the future.
Things might work out a little differently than how we say. Second, we're going to be using some non-GAAP measures, including adjusted EBITDA and adjusted free cash flow.
Please take a look at our Investor Relations site, richardsgroup.com, and our filings on SEDAR+ for reconciliations to these non-GAAP measures. Now, with that aside, enjoy the show.
Hello, and welcome to this first episode of the Richards Management Review podcast. I'm John Wood, the CEO, and your host today, alongside Enzio Di Gennaro, our CFO.
We're doing this podcast in lieu of a traditional earnings call. We want to reach out to all of our investors, and we thought, why not use media that is the most ubiquitous and accessible to everyone?
Now, if you followed our story for a while, you'll know that we recently changed our name to The Richards Group. We did that very much on purpose, because our company is now divided into two important segments: healthcare and packaging.
In the coming minutes, you're going to see us go through a full review of fiscal 2025, including deep dives into each of those two segments. We'll go through our balance sheet and what was a very busy year for M&A activity, and then we'll cap off with a review of strategy.
Back in 2024, we outlined a three-year plan, we'll check in on our progress, and today, for the first time, we're going to be including an update that takes us all the way out with two new phases to 2030. Now, that's a lot to get through in a short period of time, let's get started.
Enzio, how did we do in 2025?
Enzio Di Gennaro
Thank you, John. From the full year perspective, 2025 was a transition year for The Richards Group.
Revenue was up 5.5% from acquisitions in the healthcare space, offset by declines in food and beverage in our organic healthcare business. Adjusted EBITDA was down 1% to 13% of revenue over the previous year, as investments in people costs rose to build out our bench strength as part of the transition.
Our performance reflected the execution of our acquisition strategy and enhancement of our people, process, and systems while maintaining strong cash flow generation. Q4 followed the same profile as the full year, which accelerated by 5.8% over prior year, and gross margins rose to 44.4% with the addition of the healthcare-related acquisitions.
Adjusted EBITDA dropped, however, 0.7% as significant operating expenses also came with those acquisitions. Adjusted free cash flow was down $4.6 million to $34.9 million on higher interest on acquisition borrowings and higher maintenance capital, with investment in warehouse, evaluation, and office equipment, along with leaseholds and computer software systems, and product development costs.
Our performance reflects deliberate actions taken earlier in the year, cost alignment, and a sharper focus on profitable growth.
John Glynn
As you can see, a lot happened this year, but that last bit's very important, it's worth saying twice: Richards is changing its focus from dividend distributions to growth, but we're not doing so at the expense of our profitability and building a high-quality asset. Our focus here will always be on margins and on profitable growth with high cash flow.
Now, on to healthcare. This is probably the least understood part of our business.
Richards divides its healthcare business into three important verticals: aesthetics, pharmacy, and vision care. We also play in the surgical and dental spaces and are hoping to build up the same sort of dominance in those over time as we have in our first three.
Even more recently, the company has made investments in its OEM strategy. We've developed the [Louvo?]
brand internally, and then, in the last year, we've made two important acquisitions: WorldPRP through a company called HL Production, and DermapenWorld. Hold on, that's to come in a moment.
First, let's talk about healthcare results in 2025. Enzio, how did we do?
Enzio Di Gennaro
From a financial perspective, Richards Healthcare delivered 14% revenue growth, driven off the acquisitions of DPW, National Dental, and WorldPRP. While revenue from pharmacy was down due to a difficult first-half comp and large one-off capital in Q4 of last year, this was partially offset by revenue growth in aesthetics and vision care.
Revenue in this segment is now over half of the total company revenue, a trend that will continue with incremental acquisition revenue in the first half of 2026. Gross margins rose 4% to 45% in 2025, primarily off of the addition of DPW, which comes with higher OEM margin.
This was coupled with a higher mix of aesthetics and vision care revenue. Selling and distribution costs rose 29%, and admin costs were up 36% over 2024, both reflecting that addition of DPW.
As a result, adjusted EBITDA in healthcare came in at 16%, similar to 2024, as the higher gross margins were offset by higher fixed costs incurred at DPW to establish operating capacity for future growth. The segment, though, produced 66% of total adjusted EBITDA.
That's up from 55% in 2024.
John Glynn
That brings us on to our packaging business, which is probably the best understood segment. Richards operates under two banners here: the namesake Richards Packaging, and McKernan Packaging.
The Richards banner serves primarily food and beverage customers from a network of distribution centers across North America. We have DCs in every major Canadian city, and mostly down the West Coast of the US.
McKernan operates out of the headquarters in Reno, Nevada, and has one major distribution center outside of Chicago, and serves primarily cosmetic customers. Now, the packaging industry has historically been known for being very stable and predictable, but the last five years have been anything but.
First, COVID put a bullwhip of demand and then oversupply through the system. Then, more recently, with the changing geopolitical environment and the tariffs, we've seen everyone's supply chains be shaken up, and a lot of shopping activity going on in the industry.
Now, that creates a lot of interesting back context, with that in mind, let's take a look at how we did with packaging in 2025.
Enzio Di Gennaro
John, packaging remained an important contributor to overall cash flow and financial stability. Despite a challenging macroeconomic environment which shook the supply chains, revenue only declined 2%, with those declines coming from food and beverage in the US, offset by growth in Canada and in our cosmetic packaging business.
Gross margins actually rose 30 to 38.4%, slightly up from 38.1%, demonstrating the continued focus on profitable business despite that top-line revenue pressure. Selling and distribution expenses were up 5% over 2024, and admin expenses increased 21% with the effort to bolster our people, process, and systems.
As a result, the segment produced adjusted EBITDA margin of 11%, down 3% on those higher administrative costs. Despite operating in a dynamic environment, the segment demonstrated resilience and continued to support our capital allocation flexibility.
John Glynn
All right, that's enough about the P&L. Let's talk a bit about our balance sheet.
We had a very busy year. There was some M&A activity, a lot of working capital moves.
Enzio, take us through it.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Just to frame it, John, capital discipline has always been central to our strategy, and in 2025, we prioritized the deployment of that capital in three distinct ways: growth-oriented M&A activity, with the acquisitions of NDI, WorldPRP, and DPW; organic investment in modern technologies and processes, like CRM, e-comm, and warehouse modernization; and the sustaining of our monthly dividend. This was a particularly busy year for M&A, and I'm sure that investors want to understand how each deal fits into our strategy.
John Glynn
Absolutely. We had a number of deals.
Where would you like to start?
Enzio Di Gennaro
Let's start with the National Dental acquisition, John. That was one where we really, really wanted to expand the verticals that we're into in healthcare.
Now we're into pharmacy, we're into aesthetics, we're into vision care. That became a real opportunity for our organization.
Can you talk a bit about it?
John Glynn
Absolutely. We know there are between 15 to 20,000 dental clinics in Canada, and when we start to do the math with the potential for the product sets and how big that market can be, we know it's significant.
We also know that the dental market is historically one of those markets that really does not have a lot of innovation in it. I don't know about you, but my experience with the dentist has felt the same as it's been for the last 20 years.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Absolutely, John. Let's talk a bit about the advancements in the technology and laser technology, and how that actually applies in the dental industry.
Yeah.
John Glynn
It seemed to make sense to us that this was an area ripe for some innovation. What we found with National Dental Innovations was a business that was selling laser-assisted dentistry products.
Now, we're the laser people in Canada through Clarion with aesthetics and in vision, it made a ton of sense for us to partner and acquire National Dental to try to build out the dental business. We had two particular use cases that we thought were really compelling and that hopefully investors find as compelling as well.
The first is a traditional filling. Most people have at some point had a cavity in their life, and you've gone to the dentist, you get shot up with lidocaine, they drill out your tooth, they fill it back in with something, cure it, and send you home.
We've all kind of had that experience. Doing that with a laser instead of a dental drill has a couple of benefits.
First, you can see the work surface because you're not actually touching it with the laser, you can really see what you're doing the entire time. There's no judgment really required about how deep to go.
The second that is really interesting is because of laser physics here, there's something called a cold-cutting laser, which is what we now distribute with National Dental. The simple explanation of what happens is the laser pulse delivers energy at such a high speed that there is no transfer of the heat elsewhere into the tooth.
That's important because there are only two main sources of pain, really, when you're getting a filling done, and that is vibration and heat. There's no vibration with a laser, and if I can set the pulse so that there's no heat transfer, I have the potential to do fillings without anesthetic, and that would save a tremendous amount of time.
We're really excited about where that's headed. The second use case is in endodontics, mostly root canals.
Most people will either have had one themselves or know what this is like. The dentist has to open up your tooth to expose the root.
They then use a mix of solvents and physical, mechanical files to file out the tooth and get all that nasty gunk down there. The problem with most root canals today is, one, they're notoriously painful; two, they take a long time; and three, there's a high complication rate.
That's because about 20 to 30% of the material that's supposed to be coming out of the tooth actually stays in. Using a laser, you can set up a protocol that acts like a rip tide.
If you were going surfing at the beach, it looks like all the waves are always coming in towards you, but we all know there's parts of the beach somewhere where the water's actually flowing out and a swimmer can be swept out to sea. You create that same function by creating a sort of standing wave of pulses of the laser shock waves in the tooth.
You open up the tooth, you fill it with a fluid, you put the laser tip inside, run this protocol, and it's a really compelling video if you can see it, the material actually comes sucked up out of the tooth. You get much, much faster process.
It's way cleaner, you get a lot more of the material out to reduce the complication rates. Endodontists who've been using the lasers for these procedures have told us they're able to see an entire extra patient every day.
Almost no matter how expensive these lasers are, they pay for themselves pretty quickly.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Do we want to talk about Dermapen?
John Glynn
Absolutely. We actually have the product right here in front of us.
This is the flagship product from DermapenWorld, the Dermapen 4. Now, DermapenWorld is known as the number one microneedling brand worldwide.
Most people listening to this have probably just said, what is microneedling? The idea of microneedling is to take very small needles, in this case, a cartridge that's inserted into the pen, and create a stamp.
What you do is you stamp the skin many, many times over and over, and you're creating all of these micro-channels. Almost everything you do in aesthetics, fundamentally, is doing targeted, specific damage to the skin in order to get it to react in the way that you want and regenerate itself.
That's the basics of how microneedling works. The Dermapen 4 device is one of the leading devices on the market from an engineering standpoint, and it's complemented by an entire suite of dermaceutical products, some of which are on the wall behind us, over behind me here.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Let's talk about two other things. We're excited about the geographic reach that this acquisition has generated for us.
Maybe we can get a little bit into that. We've traditionally been a North American company.
John Glynn
Absolutely. DermapenWorld is based in Sydney, Australia, all the way across the world, about as far as you can get.
Enzio Di Gennaro
You had to go that far.
John Glynn
[laughter] We did. We did.
The fact that it's an Aussie business actually helps the brand quite a bit. It's extraordinarily well respected for that reason.
DermapenWorld's mix of revenue is obviously quite different than what we would have here entirely in North America. In fact, the number one market for DermapenWorld is really Europe, followed closely by Asia and Oceania.
That's fantastic for us, because as we mentioned earlier in the pod, we have a few other OEM brands that we're starting to work with together. Our plan over time is to combine these brands and use what is today DermapenWorld's distribution network of about 80 distributors worldwide to extend our reach and start to target international clients with our OEM portfolio.
Enzio Di Gennaro
That's a real benefit. That's one that was part of our investment thesis when we bought Dermapen.
John Glynn
Absolutely.
Enzio Di Gennaro
We really wanted to be able to extend our reach for our OEM product as well, and the prospects of being able to get our products out into the rest of the world is really exciting for us at the end of the day.
John Glynn
Yeah. The other thing it does for us too is it solves one of the core problems of being a distributor, which is that when you are really successful as a distributor, you often build up someone else's product to the point where it starts to make sense for them to go direct.
Right? Do you want to talk about our experience with that a little bit?
Enzio Di Gennaro
Absolutely. If we think about that in the packaging space, there are many, many countless situations where we develop a relationship with a customer, we've got purchasing power with manufacturers, and that customer just gets wildly successful.
The customer goes from a $50,000 a year business to a million dollar a year business, and the economics there just don't work throughout the whole supply chain. They end up going direct to that manufacturer.
It's very, very similar. It's a very similar economics.
The other part of that is as a distributor, your margins are a lot lower,
John Glynn
and
Enzio Di Gennaro
you have a lot lower operating expenses. As an OEM, your margins are really lucrative, but you've got a lot higher operating expenses.
Maybe we can talk a little bit about that dynamic.
John Glynn
That's right. As a distributor, your R&D is really limited to going to trade shows and scouring the world for cool new products, and perhaps spending the money on regulatory.
It is a differentiator for us here in Canada, how good our regulatory team is. We can get products to market that others can't.
In the relative world of medical products R&D, it's a pittance versus truly developing brand-new products. That is definitely a significant change in spend.
There's also the change in marketing. What we said right at the beginning, DermapenWorld is the number one microneedling brand in the world.
That didn't happen by accident. This is a business that spends a lot of time and energy on its marketing calendar.
In fact, this morning, I was looking at the marketing calendar, and it is jam-packed for the year. There's events all over the world you need to be at, you spend a lot of time training and developing and getting your message out there.
You're totally right. This is going to be a different kind of operating model than our distribution business.
Enzio Di Gennaro
We're starting to put pieces of the puzzle together here. We've got a business that was primarily a distribution business, and we've started to play in the OEM side of the business.
We find this OEM business across the other side of the world, and all of a sudden, they've got some distribution business embedded in there, and, sort of, in their business as well. One of the things that excites us as well is we both bring expertise to the table, just in different factions.
We can pull all the distribution together. We're really good at that.
They're very good at OEM. It sounds like a match made in heaven.
John Glynn
Yeah. Now, it'll take us a little while to figure this out.
We are working across the world, and these things aren't easy. Hopefully, that gives investors here a sense of what's potentially coming in our future.
We think it's huge.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Absolutely. Now,
John Glynn
that leaves us with one deal we haven't talked about yet, which is WorldPRP.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Yes, our Swiss acquisition.
John Glynn
That's right.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Halfway to Australia. WorldPRP was a product that, not dissimilar to Dermapen, was actually distributed by our private clinic business, the Clarion company that we've got out in Cambridge, that we purchased five years ago.
The interesting part about WorldPRP is there's a link between our Dermapen product and WorldPRP, and we can talk a little bit about that, John, in terms of how they complement each other.
John Glynn
Absolutely. First, perhaps, let's start with explaining exactly what PRP is.
PRP stands for platelet-rich plasma, and this is the product: WorldPRP's plasma tube. It's a very specifically engineered plastic tube, and what you do is a medical practitioner will draw your blood, put it in one side of this tube, and spin it in a centrifuge.
When you spin it, you separate the components of the blood, which then allows you to pull out the concentrated platelet-rich plasma, or any other component of the blood you really were getting after. PRP is most commonly known by people in orthopedics, where it's used as a regenerative factor, but it's also used in aesthetics.
People use it both for skin rejuvenation and for hair regrowth. One of the biggest benefits of microneedling is that you open up channels in your face, which dramatically increases the ability for serums to find their way in.
Turns out the skin's job is typically to keep things outside your body. The biggest problem with most cosmeceutical stuff out there is you put it on in the morning and you go to wash your face at night, and it all comes right back off your face.
When you microneedle, you dramatically increase the uptake, which means you really increase the efficacy. We have now cross-branded the product.
We actually just launched it with DermapenWorld as PowerPlasma, and we are going to see how that performs in conjunction with microneedling this year.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Exciting stuff. One of the other things I think we should probably clarify is we do not actually manufacture these products.
They're OEM products, but we are not the manufacturers. We have strong business partners, strong manufacturing partners located in Australia, located in Asia, and they supply the product for us.
John Glynn
An asset-light model has been important to us from the beginning. It's one of the most important parts of being a distributor.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Absolutely.
John Glynn
When we pursue this new sort of OEM world, we are trying to kind of retain that, where we have control over the designs, control over the IP, but we don't necessarily want to start sinking tens or more millions into production and manufacturing facilities. That's not our forte.
Enzio Di Gennaro
A compelling strategy, John. Across all these deals, we deployed $63 million in acquisition capital, ending the year with a leverage ratio of 1 times and a healthy fixed-charge coverage of 3.7 times.
Now let's turn to our three-year strategy: transform, perform, present. Can you give us an update on that, John?
John Glynn
Absolutely. I think we should break it down into its component parts.
We started with transform, which itself had a three-part structure: people, process, and systems. We've made reference to that already a couple times on the pod.
On the people front, we began with a wave of retirements that we knew was coming, not a lot of the next generation coming in, we knew we needed a general succession plan. We also had some holes in the organization that had kind of developed over time and not really been plugged.
We were missing a couple of folks in the sales department, we were missing a few things in operations. Over the course of 2024, and it actually bled into '25, we went out and recruited, and today we've really revamped the leadership team, adding support for ops leadership, sales leadership, HR, IT.
Then those groups have then gone and looked at their own organizations and done small reorganizations and additions there. On the people front, I'd say check, check, check.
We are in a much better state than we were before. On the process front, that was actually driven by the people.
You bring in all these new people, they come in with their own set of ideas. We've been doing things like centralizing our operations so that we're starting to do more central purchasing.
If you can believe it, we had the regions and some of the branches doing some of their buying independently and not leveraging the size of our company to get the better MOQs and better cost profile. We're now bringing that together and getting some better pricing on that front.
We've also then brought in central HR and IT, which has allowed us, across all of our businesses, to have specialists in roles that each one couldn't afford on its own. For example, we now have a talent acquisition specialist that makes sense for the entire company, but couldn't have been afforded by each one of the individual businesses.
Similarly, we have a full IT department now, where we used to have sort of single managers in each place that were wearing all of the collective IT hats. We can now separate infrastructure and enterprise applications, for example, and that lets us specialize.
Those specializations give us a bit of a better view into how we should be running those parts of our business.
Enzio Di Gennaro
To add, John, that's a good point. I love that you referred to each of the individual businesses.
There's now the ability for each of those businesses to go out and sell. Go out and focus on selling and don't focus on the rest of the infrastructure business, because we've got centralized infrastructure available for you to use as resources.
That has always been something that the business was really, really calling for, and that's needed it. I'm glad you called that out.
John Glynn
It's a good point. Further supporting that is the system side of things.
That really started with an ERP changeout, and anyone who's been through an ERP knows how difficult those processes are. The ERP we were running on was getting pretty old, and so we were starting to really notice as we tried to implement some new processes that it was becoming clunky and we couldn't layer things on the way we wanted to.
We were not in a position to even come close to maybe using AI tools as they were developing. We implemented the Business Central ERP across a number of our businesses.
That rollout is actually still happening, because we've phased it in the different business units. Then we followed that up with CRM.
We got HubSpot, and we were able to implement that at our pharma business first. We're going live right now with the packaging business, and it'll keep rolling as we go.
As a distributor, when you sell to thousands of customers, to not have the best-functioning CRM is a real anchor around the ankles of the sales team.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Who are competing against those that have it. Exactly.
John Glynn
They are all very excited, actually, about being able to use this new tool. Those tools, while they used to be seen as sort of all Big Brother, because the only thing that you did with the tool is put in everything that you did, now with the developments in software and the improvements in AI, they're starting to be able to use that data to actually support the sales rep, right?
We're starting to create automations in terms of outreach and follow-up that a person had to remember to do before, and now you can automate them, runs on its own, and to your point, they can spend time selling, doing what they're really supposed to do instead of chasing payables.
Enzio Di Gennaro
HubSpot was something that we had implemented at one of our other businesses. We knew it very well, we knew it worked, and so it was the logical choice.
John Glynn
Yeah. I think the last piece in systems would be e-commerce as well.
This is opening up a whole new channel for us, right? Historically, we'd really just been a wholesale, kind of knock-on-doors organization.
You had people who made calls or would show up places, and that was really the only channel. Because we know with our packaging business we focus on the smaller and mid-sized customers, a lot of whom are now trying to find us online.
Our website at the time hadn't been updated in a long time. We didn't have any of the product catalogue on it.
We went through this whole process to build up our e-commerce, and it's live today. We keep opening fulfillment from new centers.
We mentioned before that we have a network of DCs across North America,
Enzio Di Gennaro
we
John Glynn
have been rolling that out. Every couple of months, we're opening up a new fulfillment center.
We're working on the marketing plans and everything that goes with building a really high-functioning e-commerce site. That's pretty exciting, because we see when we look at the market that there are some players who are strictly e-commerce and build an entire business on that.
The fact that we don't have one with our size is an obvious opportunity, so that's very exciting in the forward growth plan. We're doing the same thing in healthcare as well, in order to make ordering easier, but we are going to be continuing to build our digital presence and being able to sell online.
Enzio Di Gennaro
The one other thing that I think we mentioned was warehouse optimization. As a distributor, that's an important aspect.
Can we talk a little bit about that?
John Glynn
Absolutely. Our rent costs is one of the biggest line items on our P&L.
We had a series of long-term leases that came up kind of all at once in a sort of 12-month span, right, six or seven of them. The lease rate from the time when we'd made the deal a decade ago to now would basically doubled.
We had to take a serious look at our real estate portfolio. The other thing that's changed is that it used to be that you had to have local distribution anywhere, because shipping and fulfillment logistics was relatively limited to the local area.
Would take a very long time to get things across the country and fulfillment elsewhere. That's obviously improved dramatically over the last decades, what with the development of Amazon.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Right.
John Glynn
We're now looking at that footprint and the capabilities out there in the logistics side of things, and realizing that we can start to combine some footprints and resize them for the business that we now have plus what we're expecting. We've got a fair amount of movement in real estate that's happened the last couple years and will probably continue for a year or two.
Enzio Di Gennaro
That's a lot. A lot going on in the transform, perform, and present aspect of the three-year strategy.
John Glynn
Yeah. I think, to be fair about the review, not all things go perfectly.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Yep.
John Glynn
I think last year we were hoping for a further lift in performance. What we really didn't anticipate was the change in the global macro environment
Enzio Di Gennaro
and
John Glynn
the tariff rates. If you remember back in May in particular, there was the escalation of the US-China tariff fight.
It locked up the entire market. No one was buying anything for a month.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Yep.
John Glynn
That really threw a bit of a wrench into things. Now, as we said before, we are speeding up as we do this transformation in our ability to react, but with the way the market was the last year, I think it made the actual financial performance a little more difficult, and it's harder to see all the impacts that we know that we see every day.
Enzio Di Gennaro
This is the year to present. We're now The Richards Group.
John Glynn
Yes.
Enzio Di Gennaro
We went through our conversion back in December. That was a milestone for us.
We are introducing this podcast, which is a major milestone as well for us, really communicating our story out to the street. We're also going to participate in investor conferences, and do one-on-one investor days as well, which will allow us to get the story out to the investment community.
A story that we think is really exciting, and one that's going to introduce the next phase of our growth strategy.
John Glynn
That's a beautiful segue into our long-term strategy. We promised at the beginning of the pod that today we would be unveiling a plan that goes all the way out to 2030.
It's time to bring it out. There are two new phases that we're adding to the strategy here.
The first is globalize, the second is optimize, each one lasting two years. Now, the reason we're doing them over two years is these are much larger, much meatier phases that are going to take a little bit longer to execute, especially as we get into this.
One of the things that at least I learned from the three-year plan of transform, perform, present is that things do bleed and take a little longer than you think, and there's always more as you dig into things. To recognize that, we're making these each two-year phases.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Let's talk about the globalize phase for a minute. By reaching out to the other side of the world, that was our indicator.
What else is there that we believe will come out of our globalize phase?
John Glynn
To your point, the first big thing that I think will happen is we now have a complete aesthetic OEM portfolio, really only missing some injectables, and we have the ability to sell that worldwide. We've done a great job with all these products so far in Canada.
We believe in them. They're strong brands.
We're going to continue the expansion of that as we add products to the DermapenWorld brand over time, and we expect to see our sales rise in Europe, in Asia, and Oceania associated with the OEM strategy. Also, on top of that, there's expansion plans around our distribution business.
For example, we have a very small footprint in Mexico, and we've been looking at opportunities for packaging distribution in South America. It's a significant market.
It plays in the same verticals that we play in as far as rigid packaging, and we think we have a way to slowly grow into that business organically or inorganically as opportunities arise. The same is probably true in our healthcare business.
We've talked about the verticals that we're in today: aesthetics, pharmacy, vision, and smaller, but surgical and dental. We want to continue to build in those verticals, but we have so much expertise in them that we are great, logical, strategic owners of other assets in those verticals in other markets.
As we get connected to other distributors around the world, we're going to start looking at opportunities to partner with them and eventually take stakes in those businesses so that we can have operations that diversify across the world.
Enzio Di Gennaro
It sounds like to me there's a much more organic effort happening in that strategy, maybe complemented with acquisitions.
John Glynn
That's right.
Enzio Di Gennaro
That sounds like the pace here.
John Glynn
I think historically the Richards that investors would have followed for the last 20 years grew mostly by acquisition,
Enzio Di Gennaro
because
John Glynn
most of the businesses we invested in had very sort of slow top-line growth. That made sense when it was on a distribution strategy in a pure cash flow model.
As we change things here, we are looking for that organic investment and the opportunity to significantly grow. We think we've put together a big enough business now, with all the work we did to centralize some functions you were talking about earlier, where we can really support some acquisitions in growing tremendously, organically from there, and if needs be, build it ourselves.
Enzio Di Gennaro
That's exciting. We're now going to also optimize over the next five years.
John Glynn
Yes, that's right. Once you go through a couple years of globalize, when you're doing it both organically and inorganically, we're probably going to end up with an operation that doesn't quite look perfectly how you would draw it if you kind of knew what it was going to be.
These things happen, right? The things grow up organically, and you kind of look back and realize, oh gee, I should have a different real estate footprint, maybe.
We're talking about doing that right now. We should make changes in our org structure because we're doing a lot more of this work and a lot less of that work over time.
When you are growth-oriented, because I've been in some other growth-oriented businesses before, you focus so much on driving the sales and driving the new products that you kind of leave some of that to the wayside. We're suspecting that by the time we hit '29 and '30, that that amount will have built up again, and it'll be time to take a look back at the business and realize that we can be a lot more efficient and do some sort of optimization of our real estate, of our org structure, create great opportunities for people to grow with us, and create, like we said, a high-quality asset.
Enzio Di Gennaro
John, and I feel like the work we've done to build up our bench strength, those senior leaders, all those people, allows us to pivot where we have to pivot.
John Glynn
Absolutely. Yeah.
Enzio Di Gennaro
As we're executing this strategy, we've got the resources available to us to be able to execute, move, pivot, get better at this, don't need that. That's an important part of the optimization effort, for sure.
Yeah.
John Glynn
Absolutely. As we wrap up here, we hope you've seen today that we are not a company standing still.
We're a company evolving with intentionality and discipline, guided by a long-term vision. Thank you for listening to this first episode of the podcast, and thank you for your ongoing support of our business.
Enzio Di Gennaro
Thanks, everyone.
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