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DATE

Thursday, April 30, 2026 at 8:30 a.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

  • Chief Executive Officer — Dale Foster
  • Chief Financial Officer — Matthew Sullivan
  • Senior Director of Alliances, EMEA — Cera Peters

TAKEAWAYS

  • Gross Billings -- $542.8 million, up 14%, reflecting “double-digit organic growth” and contribution from Interwork acquisition.
  • Distribution Segment Gross Billings -- $520.9 million, up 15%; Solutions Segment Gross Billings -- $21.9 million, up 4% (breakout ensures subtotal transparency).
  • Net Sales -- $182.4 million, an increase of 32%, due to both organic expansion and Interwork acquisition.
  • Gross Profit -- $26.5 million, up 13%, as a result of new and existing vendor growth in North America and Europe plus Interwork's contribution.
  • Selling, General & Administrative Expenses (SG&A) -- $20.3 million, increased from $16.8 million; driven by one-time investments for new vendors, IT upgrades, and legal/professional fees tied to the stock split.
  • SG&A as Percentage of Gross Billings -- 3.7%, up from 3.5%.
  • Net Income -- $3.3 million, or $0.18 per diluted share, down from $3.7 million or $0.20 per diluted share, impacted by a higher effective tax rate.
  • Adjusted Net Income -- $3.6 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, compared to $3.9 million or $0.22 per diluted share.
  • Adjusted EBITDA -- $7.9 million, up 4%; “primarily driven by organic growth,” partially offset by infrastructure investments.
  • Effective Margin -- 29.9%, down from 32.7%; “excluding the previously mentioned onetime investments and costs,” effective margin was higher than prior year.
  • Cash and Cash Equivalents -- $41.8 million as of March 31, 2026, up from $36.6 million on December 31, 2025.
  • Debt -- No outstanding debt or borrowings under the $50 million revolving credit facility.
  • Stock Split -- Board approved a 4-for-1 forward stock split in March “to enhance liquidity and broaden access to our shares.”
  • Vendor Portfolio Activity -- 39 new brands evaluated, with only 2 added, including Czech MK and Logic Monitor; highlights “highly selective approach.”
  • Interwork Acquisition -- Expected to deepen presence in Southeastern Europe and enable cross-sell opportunities via over 600 cloud reseller and MSP relationships.
  • AI and Automation Initiatives -- Over 41 IT projects underway; “using AI tools and agents” to improve process efficiency and scale workloads without commensurate headcount growth.
  • Fortinet Investment -- About $0.5 million in onetime Q1 costs for onboarding; management expects this to “turn the other direction as we move into the remainder of 2026.”
  • Recurring Revenue -- CEO Foster said, “80%-90% of ours are reoccurring revenue and renewal,” providing resilience against hardware market volatility.
  • Top 20 Vendors -- Account for over 90% of business; management aims to reduce vendor core from 70 to 50 for efficiency.

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RISKS

  • Net income and adjusted net income decreased due to a higher effective tax rate.
  • SG&A as a percentage of gross billings increased to 3.7% from 3.5%, reflecting elevated expenses from onetime investments, infrastructure spending, and legal fees.
  • Effective margin fell to 29.9% from 32.7%, attributed to “onetime investments and costs.”
  • Management described lumpy deal timing, notably with VAST Data, and acknowledged that hardware market supply-chain issues could continue to add unpredictability to deal flows.

SUMMARY

The company delivered substantial growth in gross billings, net sales, and gross profit, supported by new and existing vendor momentum as well as the Interwork acquisition. Management highlighted the ongoing shift to higher operational efficiency through broad AI and automation adoption, aiming for scalable growth without proportional headcount expansion. Strategic focus continues on selective vendor onboarding and cross-regional platform integration, with a specific goal to concentrate revenue among top-performing vendor relationships. The recent 4-for-1 stock split is intended to increase share liquidity and accessibility for a broader investor base.

  • Management expects the Fortinet investment to begin contributing positively by Q3, following an initial $0.5 million ramp-up cost incurred in Q1.
  • Interwork’s cloud transaction platform DNA is targeted for broader integration into the U.S. and European MSP teams.
  • Discussions with multiple large prospective vendors have accelerated after the Fortinet deal; management stated, “there are other meaningful potentially needle-moving vendors that you are in discussions with now.”
  • Efforts are underway to split the company’s effective margin target, aiming to allocate the equivalent of 2.5% to SG&A and 2.5% to operating profit as a long-term efficiency benchmark.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

  • Gross Billings: The total invoice value of all products and services transacted, before deductions for returns, allowances, or fees.
  • MSP (Managed Service Provider): A third-party company that remotely manages a customer's IT infrastructure and end-user systems.
  • Effective Margin: Defined by the company as adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of gross profit.
  • VAR (Value-Added Reseller): A company that adds features or services to an existing product and resells it as an integrated offering.
  • ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning): Business management software used to automate and integrate a company’s core processes.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Sean Mansouri: 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.

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 Interwork cloud. We remained disciplined in our signing high-quality vendors to our line card, while moving slower performing vendors to our Climb 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 2 consistent with our strategy of cultivating strong high-impact vendor relationships across our platform. Notably, we signed Czech MK, an industry recognized innovator in comprehensive enterprise-grade monitoring and observability.

As a strategic distributor, we provide channel partners with streamlined access to Czech MK's unified monitoring and servability platforms. Delivering deep visibility across hybrid environments and key domains, including infrastructure, networks and applications from a single solution. Combined with enterprise-grade scalability, high automation and open core architecture, Czech MK enables partners to confidently position and sell and deploy unified monitoring platform at scale seamlessly across diverse customer environments and use cases. We also launched a company called Logic Monitor during the quarter, following the successful pilot with a large customer in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Logic Monitor 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 Logic Monitors 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 Czech MK and Logic Monitor as we take their products to market. Alongside expanding our vendor portfolio in February, we acquired Interwork 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 Interwork's 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 the organization.

To support this effort, we promoted Cera Peters to Senior Director of Alliances to our EMEA team. there is working closely with regional leadership to replicate the process discipline and execution framework that we have produced -- that have produced strong results in North America. Importantly, our underlying alliance strategy remains unchanged. We continue to take a highly selective approach to onboarding new vendors while prioritizing deep engagement with existing partners. As our pipeline of opportunities expand, -- we are also seeing increased activity across both new valuations and reevaluations, 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 are investing in infrastructure need 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 stream line 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 head count.

At the same time, we continue to view M&A as a strategic lever to complement our organic growth. We are 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?

Matthew Sullivan: 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 Interwork on February 24, 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 onetime 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 and further aligned our sales organization across teams and geographies and continue 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 $0.18 per diluted share compared to $3.7 million or $0.20 per diluted share for the prior year period. Adjusted net income was $3.6 million or $0.19 per diluted share compared to $3.9 million or $0.22 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% in for the same period in 2025. Excluding the previously mentioned onetime 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 31, 2026, compared to $36.6 million on December 31, 2025. The increase in cash was primarily attributed to the timing of receivable collections and payables.

As of March 31, 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 stockholders' 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 will now open up the line for questions. Operator?

Operator: [Operator Instructions]. We'll move first to Keith Housum with North Coast Research.

Keith Housum: 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 onetime items, including IT and legal costs and investments like before in that. Can you perhaps bifurcate that a little bit more so we understand like I'm assuming increased costs before net will continue going forward, some of your onetime IT costs probably onetime in nature. Any way to bifurcate some that growth in SG&A to understand a little bit more going forward?

Matthew Sullivan: Keith, the buses go ahead, Matt. I'll fill in. I was going to say the largest driver there or a big piece of the driver there was the Ford net investment. And the investment in that relationship has been -- is slightly different than the investment in the typical onboarding of a new vendor where we had increased cost, building out teams and additional onetime costs as we start that relationship here in Q1 of 2026. So that really was about $0.5 million worth of costs that were in the first quarter that it was a driver -- negative reduction to adjusted EBITDA that we expect to turn the other direction as we move into the remainder of 2026.

Dale Foster: Keith, this is 1 of the -- Keith, real quick. This is 1 of the things. We typically -- when we sign vendors, we'll do some small investments and a lot of times, it's paid 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. And the relationship was just a little different. We agreed and didn't have it in all of our budget to put this investment out there because we see it such an opportunity. It's an anchor for us as we go forward. And it's 1 of the top 4 cybersecurity vendors in the world.

So 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've born on board.

Keith Housum: Yes. That was my follow-up question. What's kind of the breakeven point for that? And how fast does it take to ramp up some like Fortinet. Will you see the return on investment here before the end of the year on that?

Dale Foster: We will. I mean Q2 is already ramping up pretty quickly, but it will be Q3 when we'll see that return on investment. So yes, there'll be some of those SG&A costs in Q2 of that team and then covered in Q3.

Keith Housum: Okay. Got you. And then the -- it looks like the mix between gross and net revenue here despite really on the gross side. I think the highest has 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, the split between gross and net revenue.

Matthew Sullivan: It's not an impact of the new vendors. It's really just the product mix of our existing vendors. And that can fluctuate from a given quarter, you're right, it is the highest this quarter of any quarter in recent time. But that's really driven by our existing vendors and what specific products we are selling to them.

Keith Housum: Okay. Got you. And 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? What's your thoughts on that?

Dale Foster: We did not see the impact, Keith. I mean some of the delays on potential people doing installs or if they're doing a hybrid cloud or going into a data center, we see some of that. But remember, 80% to 90% of ours are reoccurring revenue and renewal, so we just haven't seen that slow down. We haven't seen the seed licenses decrease like everybody got crazy in Q1 to talk about, I think, the adults are coming back and saying, "Hey, this is sophisticated software that people are selling where we've got 2 things going for us.

Number one, we have a strong renewal stream, and number two, we're 60-some percent in the cybersecurity world, which people are always going to protect their infrastructure first.

Keith Housum: Got you. And maybe the last question for you. In terms of the targeted onetime investments that IT in the first quarter, what's your expected ROI on that? And I guess, are you satisfied with some of the progress you've made with those initiatives?

Dale Foster: Yes. So our new CIO that's done on board to be coming up on a year in Q2. Just I wanted to point out, the first time I'd pointed out how many projects we have going because the list continues to grow. We went to our ERP over 1.5 years ago, and we've been streamlining it. But now we're using so many of the AI tools to just make our systems faster. And that is not only the ERP place of it, but all of the associated applications that we can use agents to do a lot of the work that we've had to do before manually.

So here's our goal that I have said, and that is we're throwing technology at it, so we don't have to increase headcount, as I mentioned in my remarks, and that is we need to be able to scale this business. our goal is to double it in the next 3 years but not double our head count because we would just be running on a treadmill at that point. So 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.

Operator: We'll move next to Vincent Colicchio with Barrington Research.

Vincent Colicchio: Yes, Dale, was the organic growth broad-based in the quarter across your -- and were there any lumpy deals that impacted the period.

Dale Foster: Yes. It is our top 20 that happened. We had some fallover typically happens that from Q4, they come in, the deals didn't get closed on that side. But no, it was just 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. So there's going to be and some of our new members -- or new vendors that did that. But other than that, it's just across all of our vendors and decent performance.

Vincent Colicchio: And as gross billings momentum carried through April?

Dale Foster: Yes. I mean we're closing in April. We don't want to talk too much about that. But Yes, we are not seeing a slowdown definitely in our workloads. So that's where our focus is right is how would it become more efficient with those workloads. But if you look at our adjusted gross billings, so the whole talk about AI, and it's going to take over this and it's going to take our receipts. 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 the 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 con. But 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.

Vincent Colicchio: And curious about VAST data. Does the pipeline remain substantial there?

Dale Foster: Yes, it's still going to be lumpy with VAS, but it's still I mean if you look at best as a company, how much money they've raised, they only -- they appeal to the high-speed data pull for AI engines, and that's where they're claim to fame is, they're still on a good job. So you'll see throughout this year, some more lumpy deals that are coming in. But it's just hard to predict because they're all based in back to Keith's comment about memory. They're going to be affected by that. Anybody that's going into data centers going to be affected by some of the chip stuff.

Vincent Colicchio: Is it -- are you able to give us some help in terms of when Interwork will provide meaningful cross-selling synergies -- or is that tough to talk about in terms of timing?

Dale Foster: It's the cross-sell that we have, and this is our strategic plan when we acquire companies in various regions and the opportunities that typically start with vendors in the U.S. and move there. They have a big Microsoft practice, which goes right in line with our Microsoft practice in the U.K. 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. We think that -- and here's the uniqueness about Interwork. They transact all of their business through a cloud platform, which we have a small portion of our business.

So we want some of that DNA to come to our newly dedicated MSP team in the U.S. and then to the greater company in Europe as well that we can transact on a platform as we keep getting better and better with our systems. So it's going to be going both ways. Then on -- from the Greek team to us on how they actually transact and from vendors to the great team that they're looking to add more vendors. So you'll see the cross-selling and really the onboarding of new vendors in Southern Europe with -- and as I mentioned, there Peter has taken that role and that was 1 of the reasons for it.

Operator: Move next to Howard Root with Fairhome Capital.

Unknown Analyst: I want to follow up a little bit more on the SG&A line. So that -- if you look sequentially, I think it went up about $2 million and year-over-year, about a $3.5 million increase -- you kind of pointed out that Fortinet was about $500,000 of that. And then you called it primarily onetime investments. Can you -- the other like $1.5 million sequentially. Can you kind of give us a little bit more detail on what that was and quantified. And then when you say 1 time, does that mean 1 quarter? Or is that going to continue into Q2 and for the rest of the year?

Dale Foster: Yes. yes. So when we refer to that as onetime, I mean, specifically with the Fortinet relationship, that was a net cost of about $0.5 million to Climb as a company. We expect that to begin to turn to a positive contribution in the later part of 2026. And we start to see that in Q2 here and really see that ramp up in Q3 and beyond. And like I said earlier, that was a different type of investment than our usual investment cycle. And then we had other onetime professional and legal type costs associated with the stock split and some other initiatives there.

So like I mentioned in the prepared remarks, our -- if you exclude those items, our effective margin from Q1 of 2026 compared to Q1 of 2025, increased. And typically, Q1 is our lowest effective margin quarter of the fiscal year. So even if you look back at 2025 that 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.

Unknown Executive: So just looking forward on Go ahead, Dale. -- sorry.

Dale Foster: Yes, real quick, Howard. -- when Matt and I look at it as we're going through the quarter, we just have some mess, we say onetime things, but we had some legal stuff that we typically didn't have in the past for those quarters. So it was unfortunate, but a lot of those are onetime things 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%. But yes, we got to get that in the other direction.

And as you often point out, can we get to the and I talked about it now with some of our investors and of course, our Board how do we get our 5% to more of a 50-50 on our SG&A and our effective margin. So that is the goal that we have. And we do not see -- and our vision has not changed on that.

Unknown Analyst: Okay. So the -- I wish you guys would start giving a little bit of guidance. But just looking at this line, generally, it's around a little $20 million, $20.5 million for the quarter. Do you see Q2 on a dollar basis being I've decreased from that, an increase from that are relatively the same?

Dale Foster: Well, it all depends -- we'd have to go by percentages, Howard, because it all depends on our Q2 is going to be 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. So -- and that's how our gross profit is affected by the commissions that we put out there. So I can't give you a hard number that way. But percentage-wise, we're going to see that drop.

Unknown Analyst: Okay. So then you mentioned the 532, which we talked about before, I 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 via depreciation as well. And you said that's still kind of your target, but is that a goal? Is that an expectation? Or is that just kind of -- what is that an.

Dale Foster: Yes, our gold, Howard, and we -- and our executive meetings, we kicked off this year, including presenting to the Board is to get that to a 50-50. And this -- we had our sales kickoff both in the U.S. and overseas, and it's to get the 5 to 2.5%, 2.5%. I mean, we know where our competitors are. We know we can get there, but it's an efficiency play for us to get to split that 5% in half and drop that through. So that is our hard target to get to. that we have set for ourselves as a management team.

Matthew Sullivan: And our expectation is that 532 doesn't change?

Unknown Analyst: Okay. 532, but 2.5% would be what your real goal is here, not just to better than that.

Dale Foster: That's where we have our site set is to take the $5 and just put it in half and half of it is going to our SG&A, the other Hasco dropping through.

Unknown Analyst: Okay. All right. Then just bigger picture, and I don't want to get too nitty I mean, congrats on the revenue growth, you guys are still doing a great job. On the M&A environment, though, the Interwork, it was kind of 1 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?

Dale Foster: Yes. So the valuations are still stayed and this is targeting mostly in Europe, a little bit in the Middle East that we're looking at we'll prospect 2 years out into some territories. But yes, it was opportunistic that we did it with this company because we already had a relationship with them from the cloud platform piece of it. So yes, we're doing it that way. But -- right now, there's still a lot of opportunities on my list, a lot that I've met with when I was -- Matt and I were over in Greece with the team. and did a stop by to talk to some other potential targets out there.

So it's good -- it all depends, and everything is depends on what that company internally does -- are they reliant on 1 vendor, 1 territory. There's some different factors that go into the valuation piece of it. From a where we acquired Douglas Stewart at 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 is what we pay.

Unknown Analyst: Great. All right. Congrats on the progress.

Operator: We move next to Bill Dezellem with Titan Capital.

William Dezellem: 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 raise their eyes to what climb may be able to accomplish?

Dale Foster: Thanks for the question, Bill. It actually has -- we've had this -- our talk track is we're going after emerging vendors. And if you look at our line card, and even our top vendors that we talk about solar wins and so forth have been great partners for us and continue to be that. But as far as looking at like a Tier 1 vendor like a Juniper, Fortinet, that are out there, we typically don't market toward that environment. So when this 1 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.

I -- my first reaction to was, I don't want to change our culture where we become like a broad line distributor, right? Because I think there's so much value in what we do and what we take to market. But to your point, after that happened, Charles Bass, which runs our alliances team, we've had some pretty large companies reach out to us say, "Hey, I didn't realize you guys did this. I didn't realize you win is wide in some of the markets that you do. And if you look at the North American market, you have the 3 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 billion, $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. So -- the answer is yes. I won't give you names, of course, until we announce them. But yes, it's nice to have them coming to us instead of us going and trying to knock on every door.

William Dezellem: So 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?

Dale Foster: I'll leave it at that, yes.

William Dezellem: And I'll try to not let you leave it at that. Would you anticipate that if these -- if any 1 of these come to fruition that it would happen this calendar year? Or are these discussions much more drawn out than that?

Dale Foster: No, that would happen in this calendar year on the ones we're looking at. But I mean, it's just like -- 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. But as I told my field sales team that I'm putting tons of pressure on, right, to launch this and getting into net new customers, and that's where we're really going after. -- is that 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.

So that's why we're putting the energy in right now. I mean 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 along 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 the list. One number one, there are 7 or 8 that we already work with. So there's cross-selling and we do marketing programs together with them.

But if you look at that list, it is big on the solar security side and associated platform side, even on the monitoring piece of it. So yes, more new targets for us, but Yes, it's -- I see more and more of that coming our way.

William Dezellem: And if you were to sign 1 more of them, the onetime 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 the same scaling that you would do for vendor B. Would you help us understand behind the scenes how that would work?

Dale Foster: Yes. I'll give you an example that's real time. So when we acquired Douglas Stewart, Adobe was a big part of that relationship, and they had a separate team and that team being maintained separate until we put them to our ERP. Now the Adobe platform, the Adobe marketing, all that stuff is part of climb, right? We want a 1 climb approach to how we go to market. Same thing for net, it will eventually morph into our overall team and become part of the climb ecosystem. But right now, we kept it separate so we can track it so we can show our progress. But every everybody -- we have 80 some sellers in North America.

They're all selling for net products just like they're all selling Adobe. It wasn't that way to start with. So it depends on the -- you're not going to like the sense, 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. And 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.

And 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-some percent of our business, we want to keep doing that focus, and 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 sales -- I mean how many vendors can a sales rep really represent, so we want to limit that. So we're really extension of the vendor sales force.

William Dezellem: Great. Thank you for the additional perspective.

Dale Foster: Thanks, Bill.

Operator: And there are no further questions at this time. I would now like to hand back to Dale Foster for any additional or closing remarks.

Dale Foster: Thank you, operator. Again, thanks to the entire client 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 Semanie and Afton. 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 produce 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.

So they fit with not only our go-to-market, but they have the same type 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 7 in New York City. And for our shareholders, we'll be sending out invoice for that I'd love to see you in New York. Thank you,operator.

Operator: Thank you. This brings us to the end of today's meeting. We appreciate your time and participation. You may now disconnect.