Elyse Greenspan : My first question, does your guide — your organic guidance for ‘24, are you assuming double-digit organic growth in all of your segments? And then within IAS I know you discussed earlier, about some of what caused the slowdown in the second half of the year. Can you give us a sense of how that business is trending? In the first quarter, two months into the first quarter from an organic basis?
Trevor Baldwin : Yes. Hey, Elyse. One, we are expecting double digital organic growth across all three of our segments in 2024. Relative to kind of early trends in the first quarter for the IAS business, through January we have seen a, what I would call normalization of the impact of rate and exposure and continued strength in new business momentum, as I shared on the momentum we saw in sales velocity in the fourth quarter.
Elyse Greenspan : And then how, can you just provide, I guess, some thoughts, I guess for ‘24 and ‘25 as you guys think about a return to M&A obviously interest rates have come down, just give us an update on the pipeline and how you’re thinking about return to M&A activity.
Trevor Baldwin : Yes, so we continue to have active dialogues and traffic in the opportunities that exist across the industry. We believe that M&A will continue to be an important value-creation lever for us. As evidenced, if you’ve seen our financial supplement that’s posted to the IR portion of our website, you’ll see that we added some new disclosure this quarter, that details the success of our first large cohort of partnerships, the transactions we completed in 2020. And you’ll see the significant multiple buydown that occurred as a result of both top and bottom line growth across that cohort. And so, M&A, we do believe will be an ongoing and important part of our story. Consistent with our view last quarter, we don’t expect any material m and a in 2024 as we focus primarily on de-levering into our stated target leverage range of 3 times to 4 times.
And after we pay the last of the large earnouts in the first quarter of 2025, I think we would expect that M&A becomes, a more prevalent part of our story again, but importantly, we’ll be more episodic in nature than it was in the first few years of our life as a public company. We’re incredibly fortunate as a business to have a platform that knows how to grow organically, double digits, year-end, year out throughout market and economic cycles. And that enables us to be very thoughtful about when and how to deploy capital for M&A. We don’t need M&A to create value or to grow our business. As I articulated early, we grew organically our business by $190 million of revenue this past year. And so, when there’s opportunities to align with high-quality businesses that have terrific talent and bring this unique incline industry sector capabilities, expertise, and risk competency, centers of excellence, then those are opportunities we will pursue and execute on.
But what you will not see us do is M&A just for the sake of driving growth or trying to create merger arbitrage. It’s purely about creating value-enhancing capabilities and driving long-term sustainability into our operating model.
Operator: Thank you. They are no further questions. At this time, I would like to turn the floor back over to Trevor Baldwin for closing comments.
Trevor Baldwin: I want to thank you all for joining us on the call this evening. In closing, I want to thank our colleagues for their hard work and dedication to our clients and each other. I also want to thank our clients for their continued trust and confidence. Thank you all very much, and we look forward to speaking with you again next quarter.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.
