And here’s some numbers. Here’s all of our competitors and is our revenue per employee. And I think this is an underappreciated statistic when it comes to investing. We get mix. It makes a big difference when you’ve got fewer people, you get focused on fixing things, making things better, and its magic. All right. We have a simple compensation structure in the company. Many of you know from following us for many years, it’s revenue, gross margin, cash and EPS. And what that does is it makes the company financially literate. So when we’re talking about gross. We’re talking about gross margin in every part of the company. When I go into a plant, we have 15 plants. We do town halls with all three shifts. We’ll talk about gross margin. What is it?
How do you get it? It’s part of our compensation. And then as far as how do you get gross margin? It was good to great is the name of our productivity program. And it’s a book that everybody has heard about, probably no one’s read, but that’s the name we use to describe our productivity program. Supply chain optimization, that’s also how do we run our plants, what kind of capital we’re putting in our plants which plans should we make a product that. New products, if you introduce new products that have higher gross margins, it’s going to help you as well. And then finally, acquisition synergies. We like to buy businesses that have gross margins that are at or higher than our current gross margins. All right, leverage assets. Rick took you through this before.
We pride ourselves on being asset-light. And historically, we’ve been around 2% of sales. It spiked back in 2009 when we built our gigantic plant in New York, Pennsylvania. It’s spiking more recently because we’re investing in so many different categories. But that’s a good signal. You don’t put in new capacity if you don’t think you’re going to grow. So we’re going to be able to fill that up over the next couple of years. All right. And finally, leverage acquisitions. I mentioned that before. If you do that well, you can turn good returns into great returns. All right. And I just want to repeat the acquisition criteria in case you missed it previously. So we invest in brands that are number one or number two in their category. You’re not going to see us invest in a brand that’s number four or five and tell you the investor, we’re going to drive that to number one.
That’s not going to happen. The brands are number one and number two for reasons. That’s what we focus on. They need to be high growth, high margin and fast-moving consumables. Asset-light is our preference. We want to be able to leverage our substantial footprint around the world. And again, needs to have a long-term competitive advantage. So with respect to cash, we have 14 brands today, we are like 20 tomorrow. I just want to kind of end on the look ahead. So you saw in the release, we said, “Hey, we got strong fundamentals going into 2023.”We got top line strength, both reported and organic. We got gross margin expansion. We’ve got a terrific new product pipeline, you only heard about one today, but there are many others as well. We’re jacking the investment in advertiser.
That’s going to help us not only in ’23, but in future years. Rick took you through the capacity expansion. And finally, we generate lots of cash. And so we’re on the hunt for our next power brand. And with that, I’m going to bring up the rest of the management team, and we’ll do some Q&A play stump the band for a little while. All right. Come on up gang.
A – Matthew Farrell: All right, Kevin, I’m going to call on you first.
Unidentified Company Speaker : There’s a microphone coming right down.
Matthew Farrell: No, we want to get you a mic.
