And often, you don’t make the best decisions. But that’s the element you’re never going to read about in the sell-side analyst report. You might get it privately, but you’re not going to read it in a note. But that’s one of the things that you’re investing in, and that’s one of the things that makes the company go. And if you think about 2022, we pancaked in 2022, right, minus EPS. Hadn’t happened in 20 years. But the company is just so creative, clever and resilient that we said, hey, that’s — we’re going to turn that around in 2023 and we have. There are a few more things about how we run the place. First, I’ll just — I won’t read them all to you, but I’ll kind of bomb through. Leverage brands. We’ve talked about the brands already. Now, a friend of the environment, that’s important to us as people and just as human beings, but it’s also important to the consumers.
So if you talk to younger consumers, they’re really interested in the brands that want to be sustainable. So we’ve embraced that. And if you look at the laundry sheets, that is the most sustainable form of unit dose, comes in a cardboard box, there’s no plastic. And it’s just a little bit corny, but if you go back to the 19th century, hovering on the left part of this slide, we were putting pictures of birds in baking soda boxes, not baseball players but birds. And the card said, save the birds, save the planet. So this company wasn’t environment before anybody could spell sustainability. Then more recently in 2021, we’ve made a commitment to science-based targets. And in 2023, we started investing in those. So we’re putting our money where our mouth is in capital programs.
And those capital programs, they’re focused on removing, putting less CO2 into the atmosphere. Because up until recently, what we’ve been investing in is trees to take the CO2 out of the atmosphere, but now we’re going to reduce the amount that we actually pump out of our plants. And we get recognized for that. This is lots of rating agencies around the league that rate companies. But you can see we’ve been recognized BBB and now we’re AA for the last couple of years. Number three is the people. So I gave you a little bit of thumbnail with respect to the culture of the company. But we’re like super productive, and I think this is a really underappreciated metric. So we generate over $1 million per employee in the company. And generally, you’re going to see that with start-ups.
And we were very proud of this. And like I said, we’re — if you talk to anybody that’s coming up on this stage today, they’ll all say we don’t have enough people. And we do that deliberately because when you have fewer people, fewer really good people, you prioritize to only work on the stuff that matters. And again, that’s part of the culture. We have a really simple compensation structure, familiar net revenue, gross margin, and EPS, cash flow, but also strategic initiatives. We want to make sure that on an annual basis, we’re also looking to the future and the types of strategic initiatives we have are with respect to the environment, DE&I, how well we’re integrating acquisitions. Also, are we investing in international and also our e-commerce area, so there’s five components to the strategic initiatives.
And gross margin expansion, you saw we changed our evergreen model. Now, we’re saying, we’re going to expand faster in the future. And that rains money. And then you can spend that money back on marketing and back on SG&A and again, international and e-commerce. And when that’s part of your incentive comp, if you’re an employee, you’re asking yourself, okay, how can I get it? How can I participate? And here are some of the ways that we run after it. One is Good to Great, which is the name of our continuous improvement program. I always like to joke that, that’s the book that everybody has heard about but nobody’s read. The next one is supply chain optimization. And this is just investing in our plants, automation, et cetera, new products, you want to launch new products that have a higher gross margin than the gross margin of the products that they’re replacing.
And then finally, acquisition synergies. When we buy businesses, that’s one of the levers we have to improve the businesses that we buy, so our procurement supply chain, et cetera. But also, it’s helping our gross margin going forward because of the mix. All right. Number four is leverage assets. This is something else we pay a lot of very close attention to. So it is kind of a pretty slide, and we say 2% of our — 2% of sales is generally what we think is our sweet spot for investing in CapEx, but we play close attention to the relationship of our cash earnings to our property, plant, equipment and working capital because we believe that every company is a machine. In the machine, you need to invest in assets, both property — net working capital and the relationship with the cash earnings, so that matters.
Okay, and finally, if you do those first four really well, you’re going to have a good company, you’re going to get good returns. But if you put on top of that good acquisitions, and that is the skill of this company, if you look at all these acquisitions we’ve done over so many years, almost one per year, we (inaudible) in 2023. We did look at four deals this past year, but we’re very fussy about what we’re going to buy. So we’ve gone from $1.5 million to $5.9 million and a lot of that was through acquisitions. And I went through these before. We’re very fussy. We stick to these. And with seven big ones today with the opportunity to be even bigger, but more to come in the future. And just to kind of wrap up here, strong organic growth in 2023, strong organic growth in 2024.
