Good morning, and welcome to Badger's 2022 Investor Day. We appreciate this opportunity to provide our investors with a business update and also an update on our strategic initiatives. It is very good to be able to hold this meeting again in person. This has been three years, and, as well, though today we're offering virtual participation. We're also very pleased to be holding this meeting at our Brownsburg, Indiana facility. We operate the local Indianapolis branch from here, and we also have this as the location of our North American admin center. We've been in the office now for just over a year. We're very proud of the team that works here, and we're very proud of our facilities.
Speaking of our people, I'll spend a couple of minutes on the introductory part of this presentation and then hand it over to the senior team for the rest of the review. If you've followed Badger for a while, you'll see that there are some familiar faces and there are some new faces here today. We're very pleased with the way the team has come together and the initiatives underway to drive Badger's growth. I'll just introduce today's presenters. If each person could indicate when I call out their name. Rob Blackadar. Many of you have already had the chance to meet Rob. He joined us in July 2021 as Chief Operating Officer and very quickly moved to build the team and develop our commercial strategy. On August 18, Rob was appointed President and CEO and a Director of Badger, effective October 1st.
We're getting down to the wire here with this presentation. Darren Yaworsky, our Chief Financial Officer. Darren's familiar with many of you, and he's led our finance and IT group through significant transformation over the last few years. Liz Peterson, our Senior Vice President in Operations. Liz is also familiar with many of you. She led our Eastern North American operations for a number of years and took over leadership of the operations group in January. Chris Gunn, our Vice President, Field Sales. Chris joined the company last December. He's leading development of our sales organization and sales strategy. Chris and his team are doing some very exciting things, and he'll share that in just a few minutes. Bobby Love. Bobby is also new to many of you. He joined us also in December last year as our Vice President, National Accounts.
National Accounts is a new and unique initiative at Badger. No other nondestructive excavation company in North America has the scale to undertake a true North American national account strategy, and we're looking forward to what Bobby has to share in a few minutes. Also, we'd like to introduce Stephanie Cuskley, who joined Badger's Board of Directors in May and is here working with the team this week. Welcome, Stephanie. Great to have you here. For those here in person, when the presentation concludes, there will be the opportunity to visit the Indianapolis branch location and see a Badger Hydrovac and an Airvac in person, and we have all the safety gear required if you wanna gear up and get on the dig wand and feel the power of the Badger. There was some good chatter last night on that. We're looking forward to it.
Like every day at Badger, today will be an interesting one. Before we get into the rest of the presentation, we need to address some administrative comments on forward-looking information. This is my favorite part. We want to remind everyone that statements made today during the presentation regarding management's expectations or predictions for the future are forward-looking statements. In fact, all statements made today that are not statements of historical fact should be considered to be forward-looking statements. These statements are made based on assumptions that we consider to be reasonable. However, forward-looking statements are always subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and undue reliance should not be placed upon them, as actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied.
For more information about material assumptions, risks, and uncertainties that may be relevant to these forward-looking statements, please refer to Badger's MD&A and annual information form on our website and on SEDAR. As we turn things over to Rob in just a second, I'd like to take a minute to discuss Badger's CEO transition that was announced on August eighteenth, as I said a minute ago, with Rob taking on the CEO role and being appointed a director effective October 1st. We've been preparing for this transition since late last year as part of the company's ongoing succession planning process. The process included hiring Rob as COO in late July, his integration into Badger's operations, getting to know the board members and they getting to know him, and integration into our corporate and governance processes.
The process also included the board's evaluation of Rob's key competencies and his experiences relative to Badger's strategy, along with his overall suitability to lead the company. All of us on the board are confident in his ability to lead going forward. We're pleased with how this process has progressed as it did, number one, address CEO succession in a well-organized way. Number two, it also brings together Rob's extensive operations and commercial experience, and it brings it together with the opportunity, the open-ended opportunity that exists in the U.S. and Canada for nondestructive excavation and the related services we provide. With the corporate and organizational foundation that now exists at Badger, the company is very well positioned to profitably leverage the significant commercial opportunity that we see across Badger's markets. The experience that Rob brings is not just himself.
It's the strong operations and commercial team that's coming together. The team is in the process of executing on Badger's commercial strategy across the business. When you get to know this group, you will be convinced, as am I, that Badger has the right group of leaders to drive the business going forward. With that, Rob, I'll turn it over to you.
Great. All right. Well, thank you, Paul. I appreciate that, and good morning, everybody. As Paul mentioned, we think it will be an exciting day for everyone here in Brownsburg and also online. We're very pleased to share more details on Badger's strategic direction, particularly our commercial strategy. For those of you who are like me and like to get your hands dirty, you're gonna get that chance today on our industry-leading nondestructive excavation equipment. As Paul mentioned, we'll have all the necessary personal protective equipment for you. Fortunately for those of you joining virtually, we hope to have additional hands-on sessions in the future, which you can participate in. Speaking of PPE and safety, which is at the core of everything we do here at Badger, let me start with a brief safety share from the company.
Badger is the industry-leading and largest provider of nondestructive excavation services in North America to a broad range of essential end-use infrastructure segments and industries. Many people are still unaware of the primary advantages of nondestructive excavation versus traditional excavation. Nondestructive excavation mitigates the risk of potential line strikes, resulting in business and service interruptions to critical infrastructure systems and the customers who depend on them. Traditional mechanical excavation methods run the risk of creating damage to existing infrastructure and to our utility networks. Badger's nondestructive excavation approach significantly minimizes the opportunity to damage these underground utilities by locating underground conflicts, which allow traditional excavation to proceed safely and avoid service interruptions and costly unscheduled repairs. In this way, we are safety and productivity partners to excavation contractors, helping them mitigate risk and reduce downtime.
In addition to the safety benefits that Badger's nondestructive excavation approach provides, we are also tirelessly focused on protecting our own employees and assets, our customers' employees and assets, and our community's infrastructure for avoidable risk. I would like to highlight three of the many approaches that we use here at Badger on the screen. The first is behavior-based observations or BBOs. Every employee in the company is required to perform BBOs. BBOs are intended to identify and mitigate behavior risk in our business before they actually become accidents. BBOs are closely tracked as leading indicators of Badger's safety culture. The second is field-level risk assessments or FLRAs. An FLRA is required to be completed at every job site before we begin work. We're actually gonna do one outside. An FLRA identifies any potential job site risk that require attention before we begin work.
Similar to BBOs, FLRAs are aimed at identifying and mitigating risk on the job site before they become potential accidents. Every employee here at Badger has stop-work authority if he or she identifies that risk cannot be appropriately mitigated. The final example is the exciting work we're doing with our onboard telematics. We've installed a best-in-class telematics technology in all of our trucks and vehicles. This telematics system monitors in the cab and around the vehicle to improve driving patterns and identify potential risk. The system is an integrated artificial intelligence or AI system and provides immediate feedback to the driver as well as sends reports to the field leadership teams for coaching opportunities. This technology is a game changer in reducing our vehicle incident rate and lowering our insurance premiums.
Liz will spend more time discussing our safety practices and philosophies in her section of the presentation. With that introduction, let's go ahead and get going into the presentation. As I shared with a few people at dinner last evening, and I'll share with the team today, we call this diagram Badger's Virtuous Circle, and I think it really helps to demonstrate the journey that the company started a number of years ago and how we will continue to move forward. The Virtuous Circle also will act as a guide to today's presentation. I will start off by providing an overview of Badger's solid foundation that Paul and the team began building a number of years ago. The company is in good shape and well-positioned to leverage its scale through our commercial strategy to grow the business profitably.
Chris and Bobby will address the sustainable revenue growth section, in which they will outline our data-driven field sales strategy and our national account strategy. Both are game changers to Badger. Liz will provide an overview of operations and how we are leveraging our scale, the commercial strategy and our operating discipline to improve our operating leverage. I'm proud of the work that the operations team has done and has undertaken to align with Chris and Bobby's team and our improved performance this year versus last. Darren will wrap up and will provide an update on Badger's financial strategy. He will briefly speak to our financial capacity and how it is sufficient to fund our growth capital requirements over the next three to five years.
Darren will finish up with providing updated financial milestones, which aligns with our strategic and long-range financial plan and will guide the company over the foreseeable future. Finally, we'll end up with closing remarks and take some questions. With that, let's go ahead and get going. Speaking of our foundation, we've shared this slide previously, and it does a great job, but I met some new people last evening, who are new to Badger, so this is a great opportunity to share. This slide does a great job of identifying all the hard work that everyone has undertaken to prepare Badger for future growth. We've updated our strategy, people, systems, and structure to leverage Badger's scale to address the significant opportunities that are ahead of us.
These fundamental activities have completely transformed Badger, and the best part of all, the foundational work is done, and we have now we are moving on to execution. To frame out the opportunity again, we've shared this slide in the past, particularly the 7x-9x growth opportunities that we see in Canada and especially in the United States. We've provided some additional details on where we see the respective opportunities. These opportunities have formed how we have structured our regions and market areas where Chris and Liz will speak to shortly. Overall, we continue to see significant growth opportunities across North America, and Badger's existing branch network provides the current scale to capitalize on that opportunity. Here's our approach.
As we've shared previously, the growth opportunities are meaningful, but the different growth opportunities on the slide require unique strategies to address the geographic market and customer segmentation differences. Said differently, not all market opportunities are created equal. Our commercial strategy has been developed to address the geographic market and customer segmentation differences. Chris will spend some time outlining how the enhanced commercial strategy is using data-driven, industry-leading field sales approaches to address the uniqueness of each growth opportunity. Bobby will outline our national account strategy and how it addresses the customer segmentation differences within each growth opportunity. These combined approaches ensure that we have the right resource in the right place at the right time to service our customers and earn a premium return.
We also believe that the national account customers will provide more consistent and more predictable work throughout the year, raising the seasonal shoulders, which you'll hear us talk about throughout the day. Our seasonal shoulders are Q4 and Q1, revenue opportunities, which historically have been the two seasonally slowest revenue quarters for the business. Liz will spend time speaking to how the operations team will leverage the work of Chris and Bobby to affect operating leverage from this increasing volume. Simply put, we're using our people and capital resources to work in the most efficient manner. Now on to our path. This slide provides a summary of where Badger has been and where Badger is going. To summarize, we've sized our regions and market areas with the geographic market and customer growth opportunities in mind.
We've established a professionalized sales structure which is aligned with our operations team as well as geographic markets and customer opportunities. We've built market and customer-specific penetration strategies across geographic markets, lines of business, and customers. We've also established consistent metrics to measure sales effectiveness and track pricing discipline. Finally, we've leveraged the data capabilities from the new ERP system, which was launched a couple of years ago, with KPIs, reporting and incentive programs to refocus the field's efforts on delivering safe, reliable solutions to our customers at premium returns. Although we're introducing some new strategies, we continue to build on Badger's legacy strengths. Let's talk about the evolution of our trucks. One of our legacy strengths is our vertical integration.
From our 1st-generation truck built in 1992, you can see it in the upper left on the screen, to our 5th-generation Hydrovac and Airvac units that we build today. Badger's been the industry leader in the development of nondestructive excavation technology for the past 30 years. Unit design, development, and manufacturing will continue to be a key competitive advantage moving forward for Badger. Now let's talk about vertical integration. Today, Badger is the only manufacturer of nondestructive excavation equipment that operates our own units as a contractor of nondestructive excavation services, and we are the only contractor that is vertically integrated into design and manufacturing. That's a key differentiator. Badger's vertical integration provides operating cost benefits and return on capital benefits. We get direct feedback daily from our fleet of over 1,300 units and our operators on ways to improve our safety, performance, and efficiency.
We then put this feedback to work via continuous design improvement at our factory in Red Deer. The operating cost benefits come from standard design and components and from an integrated supply chain that supports the fleet. Maintenance expenses are optimized from standardization and readily available replacement parts. With parts availability, maintenance downtime is minimized versus contractor competitors who have multiple brands of units. Minimizing downtime really counts when RPT is running in excess of $38,000. Return on capital is optimized from a lower initial unit cost versus third-party purchase units. We monitor market trends, and we believe that Badger's initial cost is below competitive contractors, which has historically been the case.
As you may recall, a part of the legal reorganization that Darren and the team did, we successfully implemented last year, that implementation targeted optimizing the operating and tax benefits of our vertical integration. The reorganization is working just as planned. Let's go on to manufacturing. 2022 has been a busy and productive year for our manufacturing operation as well. Coming out of the COVID manufacturing curtailment, we ramped up the plant to the range of 130 to 150 units this year versus only 36 units in 2021. This has included an increase in staffing at our Red Deer facility and in supply chain sourcing to support the higher volumes. Given the broad supply chain challenges faced by many manufacturers, we took a strategy to carry higher manufacturing inventories than we have in the past.
This strategy requires heavier working capital investment, which we prefer, we would prefer not to have to make, but has served us well as we've had very minimal production disruptions due to supply chain issues, which I took a lot of questions on that last evening. We also implemented a new MRP or material resource planning system this year. This was the equivalent to changing out the ERP system for our manufacturing business. We started the project last year when volumes at the plant were slow and low, with a go-live occurring as volumes increased this spring, and we added new staff. As we discussed in the Q2 disclosure, each month we have seen improvements as the team in Red Deer and our IT staff have driven training and efficiency together.
Also in May, we took possession of an adjacent property in Red Deer that expands our land and building footprint. We are in the process of integrating the two facilities today and consolidating two satellite shops into the combined footprint for better coordination and efficiency. The majority of this work will occur during Q4. Finally, our new Vice President of Manufacturing, Francisco Brondo, joined Badger just last week and is quickly integrating into the operation. Francisco brings significant manufacturing and supply chain experience to Badger with a successful operational track record in North America, Asia, and Europe. Welcome, Francisco. I'm sure that Chris, Bobby, and Liz will be keeping you and our Red Deer team very busy given their growth plans that we'll hear about shortly, wanting trucks. Lastly, let's go on to fleet.
I've often heard Paul refer to our manufacturing unit as a business within a business, which I believe to be true. I think the same can be said about our fleet support team. Lon Brown, who joined Badger last year, has been doing yeoman's work with his team in modernizing our fleet operations to enable better velocity. Now, what does better velocity mean? Simply put, we want to remove any barriers preventing us from having the right truck in the right place at the right time. Seems to be a theme today. This includes such things as one vehicle registration approach for all of the United States, establishing a transportation entity through Darren's legal reorganization efforts to avoid reregistering trucks when they are moved across state jurisdictions, and also productivity initiatives like standardized maintenance and repair programs.
All these actions translate into minimizing cost of ownership and maximizing asset life cycles. Lon and the team are looking to implement a best-in-class fleet management system early in 2023, which will be linked to our ERP system to give us even better data analytics on the fleet. I'll finish this section where I started. The company is well positioned for its next phase of growth, and I am very excited to be leading Badger into that phase. Speaking of growth, I'm gonna hand the presentation off to Chris Gunn and Bobby Love to speak about our field sales and national account strategies. Chris?
Thanks, Rob, and good morning, everyone. As Rob mentioned, I joined Badger in December of last year, which seems like a long time ago, given all the work that we've completed so far, and I'm very excited today to be able to share the outcome of the team's hard work with you. The overall objective of our enhanced commercial strategy is to push more revenue volume and density through our existing branch network. We have extensive branch network, which provides us operating scale in all of our strategic and core markets that Rob identified in his opening comments, as well as significant presence in most of our extension markets, either through a physical branch in that market or through the ability to work remotely from a nearby branch. My team's job is to identify and secure market and customer revenue share opportunities within each branch's market area.
My team and I also provide enterprise-wide pricing strategy to ensure that revenue is priced to provide the optimal returns on a market-by-market basis. To achieve these objectives, we have restructured the sales team with defined territories and accountabilities, which I will speak to in a moment. We have introduced the new commission plan to align compensation with revenue growth and added sales reps to increase our market penetration and existing customer share of wallet. We are leveraging the capabilities of Oracle, our ERP and CRM system, to set and track KPIs with the overall intent to utilize data to drive sales deployment and pricing decisions. Finally, we are professionalizing the sales team through best-in-class sales training and market support. I think it's important to take the time to dig a little bit deeper into how we determined our sales structure.
As Rob identified in his opening comments on slide 11, he shared what we believe to be the market growth opportunities by region. Based on regional growth potential, we sized each market area in response to the corresponding growth opportunities using both a combination of historical data and market potential data for each branch area. Market areas with greater volume opportunities are geographically smaller than market areas with less volume opportunities. Each market area has been divided into the appropriate number of territories that are resourced, each with an outside sales rep based on historical volume, near-term market potential, and customer share of wallet opportunities. We anticipate that further sales resources will be supported as we continue to capture more market share, driving both revenue density and customer growth within each market area.
For 2022, we paid forward some sales costs to initiate the commercial strategy growth program, which has negatively impacted our gross margins in the short term. Next, I'll spend a little bit of time to explain the data-driven approach to sizing a territory within a market area for sales deployment. The map on the right side of this slide outlines our sales rep deployment across the United States by territory. Also plotted on the map is Badger revenue at the job site address where our customers and operators work. Through our technology solutions, we have the ability to drill into each zip code with the same level of details. The territory structure and our technology solutions provide us the opportunity to utilize data with incredible insight on how we deploy or redeploy sales resources to drive volume density around each branch.
This data will also be helpful in determining branch resourcing requirements that Liz and her operations team will need from a labor and facilities perspective, as well as Lon and team will need from a fleet perspective. Overall, ensuring that the optimal sales coverage and that the right amount of branch resources are in place to grow revenue with optimal margins. We have been able to execute this process across the United States and Canada. Let's walk through a quick example for everyone's reference. Historically, we viewed the Greater Toronto Area as a mature market with potentially limited revenue and margin growth opportunities. We examined the data, we found a conclusion that was actually quite different. The GTA is one of Badger's largest markets, with one of the highest concentrations of active competitors in North America.
We quickly realized that our sales coverage was not enough to continue to secure the existing customer base and geography, much less grow revenue. Over the past nine months, we doubled the number of reps covering the GTA, resulting in both revenue and profitability expansion. Our previous existing sales reps today are now working in territories that are smaller than previous geographies they covered. New reps have been hired and trained that work in similar, well-defined adjacent territories. This density strategy has contributed to year-to-date revenue growth greater than 22% and gross income growth greater than 25%, with a margin expansion of over 100 basis points. The GTA was the perfect testing ground. Mature market, high competitor count, a dense population representing the most common opportunities and challenges present throughout North America. We are targeting similar results as we repeat this approach across the enterprise.
You've seen our overall strategy and a detailed example at the market level. Let me tell you more about how we've invested in the sales team at the individual contributor level. We're professionalizing our sales force. We have recruited and onboarded over 50 sales reps in 2022. We are seeing revenue growth from these sales resource investments to profitably support the commercial strategy implementation. Our data-driven approach to sales management is at the forefront of our commercial strategy. We have appropriately sized sales territories to market potential, and we are pushing sales leads to local reps using our third-party resources and our CRM system. As I mentioned previously, we've implemented commission programs to align incentives with profitable revenue growth performance. We are also investing in our salespeople. We have rolled out dedicated training to the entire team.
We started with consultative selling, and we will be educating the entire organization with formal negotiation in the near- future. We are also focusing on team selling, both multilevel and cross-territory to drive density, share of wallet, and better returns. As mentioned before, we're using data to drive our sales decisions leveraged by technology. With our technology solutions, we are enhancing the capabilities within Oracle's integrated CRM to scale sales activities. We are redesigning the lead-to-cash process to make it easier for customers to do business with Badger, as well as for our teams to transact business. One of our key initiatives, improving billing accuracy, reduces customer disputes, rework, and improves the customer experience. We are building a mobile quoting app to allow salespeople to provide a quote within minutes versus historical longer cycles.
The Oracle integrated CRM is being used to develop KPIs, targets, real-time sales tracking, and improved sales forecasting. Our overall objective is to provide our customers with the best possible experience when they choose Badger. Speaking about the customer experience, customer experience is our best predictor of customer retention and future growth. As you can all appreciate, the sales resources required to maintain a repeat customer are significantly less than having to source new customers. To that end, it is our goal to exceed customer expectations as we sell and execute safety, service, expertise, and accuracy to create customer stickiness. In turn, delivering this level of experience to our customers will support our value proposition and result in customer referrals as well. To achieve these customer experiences, our sales team works hand-in-hand with our operations team to ensure flawless execution.
In 2023, we are targeting the introduction of a net promoter score, KPI, where we will solicit direct feedback from our customers on areas where we are performing well and areas where we need improvement. Our technology solutions and field sales is only part of our broader commercial strategy. I mentioned multilevel selling earlier, and that is achieved through our enterprise-wide collaboration with our national accounts sales team. To that end, I'm gonna hand the presentation over to Bobby to walk you through the national account strategy.
Thank you, Chris, and good morning, everyone. As Rob and Chris mentioned, national accounts is a new sales and customer relationship program here at Badger. I'm gonna take you through the next four slides and which outlines the following: what is a national account? How does a national account work with other parts of Badger? How are we delivering our national accounts strategy? And finally, I'll walk you through a real-life case study here at Badger. What is a national account? In short, national accounts is Badger's approach to be a one-stop shop, providing nondestructive excavation solutions for our large, more complex customers who have operations across North America. Our customers have one point of contact, that's their national accounts manager, who has the responsibility to coordinate the service delivery requirements for that customer across Badger's North American network.
As Chris mentioned earlier, national accounts makes Badger easier to work with for our larger customers. What does Badger get from that relationship? Preferred vendor status for one, providing early access to future workflow and project planning across the customer's North American network. Strategic partnerships with many of our customers, and in many cases, our customers will include us in their project planning and requirement standards. Pricing power, providing us with consistent and often premium pricing that reflects the premium service that we provide. Consistent work, providing us with consistent volume throughout the year, and as Rob mentioned, helping to raise the shoulders on our seasonally weaker Q1 and Q4. Given Badger's scale and North American operational footprint, we are the only nondestructive excavation service provider who can provide these services across North America for our key customers. Properly executing a national account strategy takes coordination.
I'd like to take a few minutes to explain how national accounts works within the company. We prepared this diagram to outline how the national accounts works within Badger. In short, the national accounts team manages all the corporate relationships. We manage all customer agreements, we manage customer penetration strategies, and lastly, the national pricing strategy for a customer. The national account team will coordinate with and rely on the service delivery within the respective branches, with each branch responsible for managing the relationship on the local project, managing the local service delivery, and managing the local customer meetings. The relationship between national accounts and the regional and local branches is critical to our success. Let me take a few minutes and explain how we manage these Badger relationships. Our national accounts customers come to us with complex problems. They require coordinated solutions.
The national accounts team addresses these complex problems by pulling from the resources across Badger. This is important as local branch managers don't have the visibility across Badger or quite frankly, the time to coordinate solutions across the enterprise. This is what the national accounts team does. We support our customers across North America. A dedicated national accounts manager develops the customer playbook in which the sales and operations teams follow. This results in a collaborative and coordinated strategy that national accounts, field sales, and branches can follow. The national account strategy for a customer can focus on certain sectors such as rail or energy on a project, such as the transit project in GTA, or on a customer such as a global general contractor. Let me take a few minutes to expand on the last point using a real-life case study.
Now, although we haven't mentioned any customer names here on this slide, I want to emphasize that this is an actual customer and our actual results thus far in 2022. In this case, we're deepening our relationship with a large general contractor who has roughly over $20 billion in project backlog. As part of the work that we've assisted them in completing, they were surprised to realize that they spend roughly $50 million a year on nondestructive excavation. 1/3 of the work they self-perform themselves, the other 2/3 is subcontracted out. By helping this customer understand their nondestructive excavation spend and the options available to them, they began to look at nondestructive excavation as a specific expenditure category that they could manage centrally. As a result, we renegotiated an existing MSA with more favorable pricing, terms, and service areas.
Most importantly, this customer communicates with us bi-weekly to provide visibility into new projects, allowing us to work with the local branches to plan and coordinate securing this work and supporting their projects safely, on time, and on budget. This is a level of proactive visibility that our branches would not have had previously. What's the benefit? Our coordinated national account strategy results in nearly 3x the volume from this customer than Badger would have generated through our legacy approach. The customer wins, national accounts wins, the branch wins, and our investors win. I hope this sheds some light on the additional opportunity with this or the, light on this, new opportunity within Badger. I appreciate your time this morning. I'll pass the presentation over to Liz to discuss our approach to operational excellence. Thank you.
Thanks, Bobby. Get my stool out for me. Sorry. Welcome again to Brownsburg. This year, Badger celebrates our 30th year of being as the industry's leader in both manufacturing nondestructive excavation equipment and providing nondestructive excavation services. Just this past weekend, we celebrated this milestone by hosting our first company-wide dig off here at Brownsburg, where we had 25 of our top operators representing each of our markets, competing for the title of Best Operator. I am quite humbled to be able to represent the power of Badger's operations team, which today consists of 1,500 operators and over 240 of the best field operations leaders across North America. 2022 has been a very exciting year for Badger, particularly related to the evolution of our commercial strategy that Chris and Bobby just walked you through.
Today, I'm gonna talk to you about Badger's enhanced operational strategy and later physically demonstrate the power of our trucks and the expertise of our operators when we move outside to the hands-on part of the presentation. Historically, Badger's growth over the past 30 years has been driven by opening offices in geographic white space, thus creating the massive footprint we have today as the industry's only vertically integrated, nondestructive excavation company in North America. For the past 10 months, operationally, we've walked hand-in-hand with our sales partners, and we've enhanced the execution phase of our commercial strategy. Our day-to-day operating principles remain very focused on driving high-quality customer experiences in order to deliver premium margins and returns. Simply put, operation focuses on safety, people and customers while we maximize assets and labor utilization through disciplined and consistent processes and systems.
With our enhanced services approach and our disciplined focus on driving operational excellence, we will deliver gross margins of 30%-35% and RPT in excess of 38,000 over the next three to five years. Over the next few slides, I'll talk a little bit more about our strategic focus areas and how we're going to accomplish these goals. As I mentioned on the last slide, 2022 has been an exciting year for the operations team at Badger. We've evolved from two operating centers and nine regions to four regions and 19 market areas. This realignment better positions Badger to capture the significant market opportunities available to us across North America.
With the creation of our robust commercial strategy, we've redefined our operating model and have refocused our branch management team so that they have more time to provide safe services and excellent customer experience each and every day. Additionally, we've created the position of market general manager, which allows one person that is both operationally and sales-focused to drive the overall growth strategy of a specific geography. Excuse me. As Rob mentioned in his opening comments, and Chris reinforced in his section, each region and market area has been sized to reflect the market and customer opportunity within that geography. This new structure has and will continue to support the commercial strategy and the growth objectives of the organization. A little bit about safety. Rob mentioned in his opening comments that I would spend a little bit more time expanding on the importance of safety here at Badger.
Simply put, safety is not what we do, safety is who we are. Our customers use nondestructive excavation to minimize the potential damages to critical infrastructure and protect our communities against loss, which sometimes can be potentially catastrophic. According to the Common Ground Alliance's 2020 DIRT Report, damage prevention should be considered an essential component of environmental, social, and corporate governance. Damages to underground infrastructure have the potential to significantly impact the environment and negatively affect communities across North America. Additionally, the Common Ground Alliance estimates the societal impact of damaged underground utilities can be in excess of $30 billion a year just in the U.S. Badger's the safest hydrovac company in industry. How do we know this? Not only do we design our trucks with operational and mechanical redundancies so that they perform at the highest level, we also engineer safety into all aspects of the units.
Safety ideas and enhancements come from our over 1,500 operators who are utilizing these units every day to solve various challenges in excavation. What our operators see and experience allow our engineers to continuously improve on the truck safety performance. The trucks, however, do not operate on their own. It's our operators that make up the secret safety sauce. Here in Brownsburg, we have a dedicated Badger University that oversees the training of each operator, both from a content and a delivery perspective. Our team of Badger University trainers are all prior operators, and they have the passion for teaching and coaching our new employees. Complementing our Badger University, we have a robust field mentor program, and our mentors continue the training of an operator after they finish their time here at Badger University.
Mentors spend an average of 90 days with each operator in the field, methodically signing them off on over 100 safety and operational tasks. As we move outside, you'll get to meet the lead of our mentor program, as well as one of our trainers from Badger University, both of whom have been operators and mentors. Feel free to ask them yourselves on our commitment and safety and passion for training. As I said a bit ago, safety is not what we do, it's who we are, and that's why our customers hire us and continue to allow us to serve their infrastructure challenges. Safety is rooted in our people, so it makes sense to spend some time now talking about Badger's commitment to our people.
Our number one asset at Badger is our people, and therefore, our people management is one of the most important focus areas to support future success. As I just shared, Badger invests a lot of time into training our operators to ensure that they provide safe and premium services to our customers. Currently, we have approximately 250 mentors, all of whom have been promoted to this position after having been an operator for at least one year for us. Additionally, of over 100 branch managers, approximately 20% of them were at one- time operators. Finally, of our almost 20 general managers, 85% of them were at one- time branch managers. Career development and career progression is at the heart of how we develop our employees and how we continue to grow our organization.
Our branch footprint, which I shared with you earlier, allows us to hire locally from within the communities we serve, and as a result, our operators get to go home every evening to their families rather than spending countless days away from home. Family is always first at Badger, and ensuring that our operators work locally means they will be away from their families for shorter periods of time. As well, being part of the communities where we're located allow us to contribute back in more ways than just being an employer. Community involvement creates a culture of belonging and service, which is another core value at Badger, and one that's very important to our employees.
COVID was not kind to the labor market, yet Badger successfully navigated the challenges, and we continue our journey to becoming North America's nondestructive excavation employer of choice. One considerable headwind going into COVID, and is becoming more of a challenge post pandemic, was the numerous CDL operators that are exiting their profession. According to the American Trucking Associations, there's a shortage of approximately 80,000 commercial drivers, and this deficit is expected to continue and possibly grow into 2030. In late 2021, Badger began the process of developing our own commercial driver certification program. We teamed with a local university here in Indiana and have created a process through which we can hire employees who do not currently have a commercial driver's license and enable them to obtain this certification while being employed at Badger. Currently in 2022, we've graduated 16 of our own employees from this program.
Each of these employees were operators for us in the field, but had no viable way to obtain their commercial driver's license. Through our university school, we were able to help them obtain this certification. We expect to finish the year with 48 graduates, moving to 72 for next year. This is a great addition our wonderful training department added, and we look forward to continuing this career enhancement program into the future. We create a positive employee experience because that creates an equally positive customer experience. For 30 years, Badger's been creating and expanding the nondestructive excavation industry throughout North America, and that has led us to being today's industry leader. Our approach to customer longevity is simply grow the relationship, provide safe and reliable services, and leverage our scale when needed.
Chris and Bobby already shared our commercial strategy and the subsequent growth of our field sales force, and these folks are making a big difference already in Badger's ability to grow and maintain relationships with our customers. This partnership between the sales and operations is becoming stronger and stronger each day and delivering the results. This enhanced partnership between sales and operation also allows branch managers to focus on growing their teams and proactively scheduling and managing over 2,000 jobs we do each and every day. Our geographic footprint allows us to leverage our assets and ensure that we have the right operator in the right truck in the right location, performing to their best on every project. How do we know the commercial strategy and the complementary operational support structure's working and it's working in concert?
As Bobby and Chris shared in their respective presentations, in operations, we're also using data to drive our decision making. We're following the same path, and it is through this data we can see the success resulting from our changes. Because we operate on a common business platform, we are leveraging the increased collection of data in our system as the basis to establish and standardize and report key performance indicators for the business. These indicators align with our strategic priorities, which we believe to drive the maximum value for Badger's investors. In essence, everyone's being measured using the same measuring tape and being held accountable through branch rankings for their performance. I think Tom Ellis, our RVP for Eastern U.S., who is not with us here today, probably said it the best. Operationally, we've simplified the business and what people need to focus on.
The new organizational structure and span of control, coupled with standardized and simplified reporting, are allowing our field staff to focus on our customer experience while maximizing financial performance. The final piece in this recipe is incentives. Our incentive programs are directly tied to the KPIs reflected in our standardized and regular reporting. The obvious benefit of the reporting and incentive alignment is the entire organization focusing on the same strategic priorities. Perhaps the less obvious, but likely most important benefit is transparency. Each branch manager, general manager, and regional vice president know where they stand with respect to their personal incentive plans. No surprises, no biases. This approach to incentive management builds trust. Trust builds dedication, and dedication leads to great operating discipline and results. I do wanna leave you with one updated metric before I hand it over to Darren.
Mixed currency RPT of $38,000 or better. This is an updated target from previous periods, and this RPT level reflects our focused effort on pricing and execution in order to optimize the utilization of assets and labor. You would have seen in our Q2 numbers an elevated RPT versus the RPT reported in previous years, and we're targeting sustained RPT at or above $38,000 level going forward. Our improved RPT reflects the use of data to evaluate specific KPIs that allow the business leaders to maximize the performance of our assets. This information, coupled with our enhanced fleet management capabilities, allow us to optimize the size, placement, and use of the fleet. We've seen that our asset utilization efforts is translating into more consistent hours for operators, which helps improve the employee retention rates, reduce recruiting requirements and reduce training and non-billable time.
We also anticipate that our asset utilization efforts, coupled with the increased growth visibility from our commercial strategy, will assist in planning our unit build program, all of which will lead to more efficient use of capital and result in superior returns. I look forward to seeing everyone in the hands-on part of our presentation shortly, and in the interim, I'll pass it over to Darren.
I feel short compared to Liz now. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us today. As Paul and Rob said earlier today, this is gonna be an exciting day. From the conversations that we had last night at dinner, I think everyone's really looking to get their hands on the unit. It's me that's standing between you enjoying that time. I'll go quickly through my section. Building off Rob and Rob's team's presentation earlier, I'm gonna spend some time this morning to summarize three key points. The first of which is liquidity and financial strategy. Our second is capital allocation and how we're directing our capital requirements over the next three to five years.
Finally, providing some details on key financial performance metrics, again, which will guide our operations over the next three to five years. Before I get into it, I would like to congratulate Paul. Thank you for everything you've done for the company. You've built a really solid foundation. Congratulations, Rob. I know you'll lead the team into a great future for the company, and it's exciting time to be at Badger. I think we need to move a little bit forward, please. Let's spend a few minutes just walking through our funding approach. Our current asset position provides us with roughly 2x asset coverage over the current liabilities. Similarly, our fixed asset position provides us with 2x asset coverage over our long-term liabilities.
Overall, our working capital and net fixed asset position provides us over $250 million in balance sheet capacity to fund growth CapEx. Perhaps let's dig a little bit deeper into the significant improvements we've made in our working capital management, particularly receivable management and shortening our cash conversion cycle. I'm very proud of the work that the finance team has done to date. In particular, Pramod Bhatia, who's here today, and I think a lot of you met with him last night, and Kim Kiggins on his team, both of who have done significant work to improve our customer credit granting and receivable and collection discipline over the past few years.
This slide summarizes the journey over those past three years in which today, over 80% of our receivables are within the 30-day typical terms, versus roughly half of that level in 2020. Substantial improvement, and thank you, Pramod. I'm also pleased to report that 92% of our outstanding receivables are with customers who hold investment-grade equivalent credit ratings. The majority of the receivables that are aged over 91 days are with high- quality credit counterparties relating primarily to co-contractual payments and holdbacks with each of those customers. Said simply, they're collectible. The improvements in credit granting, contractual terms, and ultimate collection has significantly reduced our risk, which is reflected in our reduced after provision. These improvements have also significantly reduced our cash conversion cycle.
Simply put, we're getting our cash faster, and we're redeploying it into the business faster. Let me take a few minutes to connect with what Liz, Bobby, and Chris all described in their operational section, in particular, Badger's financial discipline. As Chris and Bobby described, we have significant opportunities to grow both our market opportunities and customer base, and they have smart paths to execute on both. Similarly, Liz and the RVPs have done a fantastic job in strengthening Badger's operational group across North America. Revenue and margins have materially improved year-over-year across all of our market areas and regions. As Liz mentioned earlier, she is targeting strong margins in RPTs, as we've just talked about. The finance team has completed its work to maintain a strong balance sheet and improve the cash conversion cycle. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention Pradeep Atluri.
Many of you met him at dinner last night. He leads our IT group. Pradeep and team are ensuring that the ERP, and most recently, the implemented MRP system, are functioning well and playing a key role in improving our operating discipline. The leaders at Badger have access to information that they've never had in the past, which is providing timely information, supporting data-based decisions to drive Badger today and into the future. All of these actions support our return to historical profitability levels, operating cash flow to fund growth. Our liquidity management is the cornerstone of our financial strategy and provides the belt and suspenders to our operating cash flow generation. Earlier this month, we extended the maturity date on our credit facilities, and many of our bankers are here today, and thank you for your support, for an additional five years.
To that end, we have $350 million in committed credit facilities with a syndicate of six of the top banks in North America. The credit facilities provide us with an option to increase the limit to a further $120 million using our accordion feature, potentially providing us up to $435 million in committed credit facility capacity and additional funding capacity within our balance sheet. We currently have $150 million drawn on our credit facility, providing us with ample undrawn credit facility capacity to fund growth CapEx and associated working capital. On the right side of this slide, we continue to target a leverage position of 1x-2x debt to EBITDA. Given the financial structure that we have in the credit facilities, we have ample financial capacity to fund growth CapEx.
We're looking to put our capital resources to work in the most accretive manner for shareholders. To that end, let's just spend a little time talking about our capital allocation philosophy. Our first priority remains the funding of organic growth. As the team described, we have a lot of that opportunity ahead of us. As Rob mentioned in his opening comments, the growth opportunity in nondestructive excavation industry is meaningful, especially in the U.S. We'll continue to focus our attentions on thoughtfully allocating capital and broader company resources to fund market expansion opportunities and customer penetration activities. As Rob mentioned, we have completed the foundational work and built the necessary infrastructure to scale the business while achieving profitable growth over the foreseeable future.
Our near-term focus remains on addressing meaningful organic growth opportunities, but our foundation provides us the opportunity to investigate acquisitive opportunity growth over the longer term. As always, we continue to return surplus capital to shareholders in the most accretive manner, and that practice is not gonna change. To find organic growth targets that Rob mentioned in his opening comments, we estimate that we'll have to build 600 to 800 net truck additions over the next three to five years. Based on our current truck build cost of roughly CAD 525,000 per truck, we estimate that our growth CapEx requirements will be approximately $250 million-$350 million cumulatively over the next three to five years. We estimate that our retirement CapEx will be approximately $125 million-$200 million over the same period.
Based on our current liquidity and balance sheet strength today, we have sufficient financial capacity to fund our retirements and organic growth requirements over the next three to five years. We don't believe that we'll need to raise equity to fund our growth, and we'll remain within our leverage targets, as I mentioned earlier. Finally, I'd like to end my section with providing a summary of some key financial performance targets that will guide our operating philosophy over the next three to five years. We have estimated a revenue compound annual growth rate, or CAGR, of approximately 15% using our fiscal 2021 as the base year. This target is consistent with previous strategic milestones in doubling the U.S. revenue over the next three to five years.
We estimate that our direct costs will range between 75%, which is where we are today, and reduce towards 65% as we achieve our revenue targets and affect the operating leverage that everyone was talking about earlier. We believe that we can affect these meaningful operating leverage improvements, gross margins through direct cost management, volume, and revenue increases. Our branch costs, which include the cost of operators, fuel, maintenance and repairs, op support, and branch managers, are more variable in nature, making them more closely aligned with the trends in revenue. However, our branch costs, which include sales and marketing, fleet, safety, and field leadership, are less variable in nature and can support further operating leverage improvements as revenue increases.
We are targeting branch support costs to be in the mid-teens, reducing to low double digits to high single digits as a percentage of revenue as Bobby and Chris push more revenue and volume through our business model. We remain committed to maintain our G&A costs between $30 million- $35 million, which can support meaningful increases in our revenue. Finally, we also remain confident in achieving our adjusted EBITDA margins in the 28%-29% range over the next three to five years, as revenue expands and the business experiences more operating leverage. Of course, all of these targets are supported by the RPT targets that Liz shared earlier of $38,000 or better on a mixed currency basis. I'll pass the presentation back to Rob for his closing comments.
Great. Thanks. Good job, buddy. Appreciate that. All right. Appreciate that, Darren. I'd like to end where I started the presentation this morning with our Virtuous Circle. We're pleased with the work that we've completed to strengthen our foundation. The work is done on that foundation, and now again, we're moving on to execution. Chris and Bobby shared more details of our commercial strategy and the ways in which we're leveraging our new sales and marketing capabilities to generate sustainable revenue growth. Liz shared how we've aligned our operational group to support the execution of the commercial strategy and the ways in which we're operating with a renewed discipline toward customers, people, and assets. Finally, Darren just shared more details on our financial strategy to fund the growth and how we plan to manage that growth into stronger financial performance.
I'd like to summarize by saying our actions should translate into sustainable growth, improved earnings stability, and disciplined capital management, which all supports our alignment with investor expectations to maximize shareholder value. At this point, let's go ahead and go into the Q&A portion of the event. If you are online watching our presentation, you can send a quick email to Trevor Carson, our head of Investor Relations, and Trevor's email address is tcarson@badgerinc.com. If you're in the room, we will take your questions. I'm gonna ask that you identify yourself by your name and the firm you represent, and go ahead and fire your question. I'm also gonna ask while we do just a quick reset, that we take it down, Les, just for a quick moment.
It'll probably be 60-90 seconds from the video feed. Then I'm gonna actually put Paul Vanderberg to work. I'm gonna make him work up until the very end. Paul and Trevor are gonna moderate the questions, and then we'll go from there. Give us about 60 seconds, Les, or on your screen. Let's get going, Les. All right. We'll get underway with our Q&A portion. Again, we have the whole team here. I'll kind of take the questions. I'll either answer or if it's something that's historical in nature or really historical in nature, we'll either lean on Paul or Darren. Then the rest of the team here obviously can answer any questions directly. Do you have any questions yet?
Anyone in the room? Don't tell me everyone really wants, Yuri, don't tell me everyone really wants to run out to the big ones.
Daryl Young with TD Securities.
Okay.
Just on the national account strategy, where are you at today in terms of % of revenue coming from national accounts? Then what are the targets you're looking to get to in terms of % of mix in the future?
Yeah, love that question. We're not disclosing the exact percent, Daryl, on purpose. Reason being is, while we believe we are the only one in our industry doing a national account program, we don't want to start disclosing that percentage yet because our program is just getting launched and underway. I will tell you my long-term desire, as the person who ran national accounts for some other really large Canadian firms, I really have not a lot of desire to ever have our national account business grow greater than 50%.
If we aren't able to grow our local accounts because the reason you don't wanna have greater than 50% penetration on national account business, while it's large revenue in nature, it can also, if you lose one of your largest accounts, it can really dramatically affect the company's business. We wanna be very smart on what that is. It's under 50% at this point. We have ramp up to grow there, as well as Chris said, the local accounts are growing pretty aggressively as well. Between the two. That 50/50 is the max target I'd like to see. Ideally, most best-in-class companies are 30%-50%. If you have less than 30%, you probably have a lot more opportunity within the national account sector.
If you have greater than 50%, you have a lot of your eggs in very few baskets. Hopefully that makes sense.
Yes. Just following on that, the margin profile for these national accounts, they get the benefits of smoothing out the workflow. Is there a margin benefit or a degradation to having-
Right.
the national accounts?
Yeah. National accounts, if you look at some other large industrial business companies that do a lot of national account business, and many of those large industrials, Chris and I had a discussion last night at the dinner table about the industrial companies. They actually get greater margin out of their national accounts, but they require a greater level of service and almost customization. For example, the example that Bobby referenced that, a $20 billion backlog, really large company that we have, they want customized billing. They want customized invoicing. They want. They may want different terms. For that, they're willing to pay extra. They actually like a very almost a boutique-ish type service level. In exchange for that, though, we charge for that.
They're actually happy to pay it, but they have to feel like they're getting the value for it. There's always a misnomer in the national account world that, because of all this volume they do, they just get the cheapest rate. Where in fact, it all depends on the customer, but more often than not, you actually get better rates, but you have to give a higher level of service. Margin-wise, it's very, very accretive to the business.
Yuri Lynk, Canaccord Genuity. I guess related to the national accounts, I'm just wondering, are the branches still running their own P&L? If so, how do you manage the potential friction of, you know, a national account business maybe at a rate that the branch manager doesn't like? I would imagine there have to be some friction there.
Yeah.
How do you manage that?
Great question. That was one of the first things we addressed, Yuri, is making sure that the national account group that we stood up, and we're very fortunate because we're standing this group up from scratch with people who have a lot of experience in that world. Bobby ran a large portion of national accounts for Ritchie Bros., a big auction company in Western Canada. Other companies have a lot of conflict between national accounts and the local branches. It could be a conflict on the revenue recognition, it could be a conflict on commissions, as well as you said, the pricing.
What we've done is there's no pricing agreements in our national accounts program that doesn't get vetted by our operations leader, either Liz overall, if it's something that's company-wide or regionally by one of our RVPs. Bobby, before he says, "We're gonna do an agreement with this large national account," he gets a sign-off for the RVP. That way, they have ownership from top to bottom within that. If a branch goes, "Well, I don't wanna do this business with XYZ national account," their RVP blessed it, and it's easy enough to have the RVP make a phone call, and they'll engage on it. As I was sharing with Daryl, we're not seeing a lot of really low pricing.
Now, I will also share with you, though, Yuri, we do have some customers that have been doing business with Badger forever. Obviously, we're not going in and resetting all these relationships. As we continue to grow the national account program and get wider and deeper, we're nine months into it, we are having sit-downs with each one of those customers and identifying what can we give you more as a value add, but we have to have more rate, and it's actually working. Again, you have to give the customer some value. You can't just ask for rate and you're not giving them anything.
Okay.
Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, absolutely.
Yuri, the first part of your question about the individual P&Ls and the autonomy that previously our branch managers had, and Liz touched on it in her section about the incentive programs, the span of control, and the discipline. We brought all of that stuff together. The branch managers are actually incented on the national account work. There's a correlation between getting that business and how they get compensated and how their branches get compensated. The first part of your question about different P&Ls, that is what we've standardized across the organization through the CBP or the ERP system. Every branch has the same P&Ls. Every branch pulls from the same source data. Every branch has the same performance KPIs.
There is no way that you can have different sources of information driving a different type of decision. We really nailed it from a whole bunch of different sections of standardized data, standardized reporting, and commonized or standardized incentive programs. Sorry, Bob.
Yeah, no, that's perfect.
Can I ask a quick follow-up?
Yeah.
Just on truck economics. Given your CAD 525,000 replacement cost per truck disclosure, it looks like your truck costs are up about 25% from 2019, and your RPT goal is only up about 17%. Am I thinking about that the right way? That kind of implies a reduction in truck economics.
Yeah. No. You're looking at it the right way. Yuri, the one thing that both Darren and I will share with you is as that plant continues to ramp up, our truck costs will continue to be reduced just purely sheer volume. We're also seeing really strong RPT opportunity. Obviously, we have a lot of strong utilization within the business today. You can hear about the demand. We're actually building our own demand. We're not waiting for it to come to us. We're actually driving the demand for the utilization. The last opportunity that we're really focusing on across the organization, and we're gonna continue to focus on because I believe it's one of our biggest opportunities, is pricing.
You're gonna continue to see us continue to push on the RPT and drive RPT. Then those truck economics, as far as the cost of them, we're gonna continue to do everything we can to get the cost down on them. As we build more and more volume, we obviously, again, historically, from what I've come down to understand, we don't give that truck build rate for the following year until after the current year is closed and we report on current year. You'll see that with the demand we have and the pricing we're seeing and the opportunity for more additional pricing in the business, we're gonna be able to start driving down even more on that truck cost, so. Do you wanna add? Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah. Sorry.
Yeah.
Maybe, Yuri, just to unpack the truck costs and the components that are associated with them. If you look back to 2019, and remember, 2019, we had the Gen4 truck. The typical cost on the unit was around CAD 450,000. I'm gonna speak in Canadian terms, even though we report in U.S., so that there's common measures. The CAD 525,000 or the roughly CAD 75,000 difference is broken into thirds. The first third is related to the evolution of the new chassis. We've gone from a manual transmission to an automatic transmission to open up the operator pool. The second third is inflationary costs that we've experienced over the last year that was somewhat unexpected.
The third is our production labor cost increases as we get more and more efficient at building the units. The MRP system that I believe you, Paul was in the manufacturing plant every day, and I think on Friday, he's gonna be back there again. The whole MRP system and ramping up that final third of labor is about how do we take out supply chain surplus costs, and how do we build efficiency and standardization in the truck build as quickly as possible to attack those final 2/3 of those cost increases. Sorry, Rob.
No, that's perfect. Yeah.
Hi. Michael Doumet, Scotiabank. Thanks for the presentation. That was great. You've talked about, you know, expanding the sales and the operations, to build on the shoulder seasons. Presumably, you know, your customers have their typical patterns and, you know, Q2, Q3 is typically busier for them regardless. I'm just trying to think about how you build the shoulder seasons if it's a market share penetration or if it's a little bit more nuanced than that and you're looking to build up opportunities maybe you didn't have before.
Yes. That's a great question. Our focus, and it has been for the last 60 days, Michael, is really focusing on our customer base and our customer diversity. You'll find in a lot of our locations historically, we are really, really good with a certain classification of customers. We have certain branches that are really good with oil and gas, really good with utilities, really good with construction, et cetera, on and on and on. But they weren't looking at some of the other opportunities within their markets.
Chris's and Bobby Love's, but really Chris's, sales approach, when he talked about that consultative selling, he also has loaded in a whole lead program, that is a very inexpensive way for us to actually open up the eyes of our sales reps to get out of the focus of just one single customer base or one single customer industry. That is how we believe. Right now, we have strong utilization, obviously, Q3. As the business historically would be slowing down, we've already been laying the groundwork of opening new accounts, identifying new customers that we haven't worked with before. We don't believe it should only be going and chasing our competitors' customers only. That's one way to do it, but it's not very cost-effective.
You can get into a little bit of a bidding issue with that. Rather, let's identify new industries and new areas that we haven't worked in that are existing in all of our markets. There's not one single market that we are fully penetrated across the board. It's basically customer diversification is how we're gonna start driving additional revenues in Q4 and Q1.
Okay, that's great. Thank you. An unrelated question, just on the retirements. Could you discuss maybe just the shape of the curve for the next three to five years? Maybe, you know, because there's been a lot of focus on fleet management, some of the evolution in terms of how you're thinking about maintenance costs, uptime, and capital costs, and if that's changed at all versus previously.
Yeah. I'll give you the high level, and I'll let Darren probably give you more color from a historical perspective to today as far as the curve. I think most everyone knows that we have our trucks as 10-year life cycle, and we believe that our trucks can very solidly run for 10 years, and we get that out of most of our trucks, if not close to all of them. If you look at what our 10-year replacement cycle is though, Michael, we have a couple of years that are. It's time to start replacing and a pretty large replacement year is coming up.
The one thing that we have been reviewing, and we're getting more and more of those data analytics on our fleet that we've never had before, and I think this new system that's being spun up now, but we'll start getting the rich data in January, February, is, can we change a little bit of that replacement cycle a little bit? Because COVID, we didn't run our trucks as heavily. Obviously COVID, our utilization was softer. We think we can actually squeeze a little bit more life, if needed, out of them. We're just not gonna give that guidance in advance at the end of the year.
As far as kinda long- term, what the cycle looks like or, I mean, historically, how we've done it, maybe you can give some guidance on that.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah. Darren.
Thanks, Rob, and thanks for the question. I think there's probably three parts to your question, at least in my mind. The first was, what does our retirement profile look like? How does that impact our cost? And the third, how are we going to manage it a little bit differently to be able to absorb the pig in the python? The pig in the python, my words, not Rob's.
Yeah
is over the 2023 and 2024. We've disclosed this previously. Our peak retirements are around 222 units in 2024. It's a little bit nuanced. Some of the stuff that we're actually doing to carve off those retirement towers is bringing forward some of our build program, and we have carried extra inventory to be able to accelerate our build program and everything that Paul has been doing and Francisco will be doing is to potentially carry a little bit more inventory, which isn't a bad thing. The second component of it is exactly what Rob said. As we're looking into the data analytics a little bit better, the chassis, which are typically the shortest pole in the tent, have a 20,000-hour life over 10 years, 2,000 hours a year.
That also has been informing some of the work that we've done on RPT, that we think we can utilize the assets a little bit better to extend the life or at least the productivity of the life of that asset. To Rob's point, COVID has given us a bit of reprieve where our asset utilization wasn't as high. We think we could push out some of those towers as well. I think some of the other question that you had on the shape of your tower, once you or your 30 towers, once you get past 2024, it falls off pretty steeply. We also wanna make sure that we're balancing off the build program in our manufacturing so there's a nice level between not having to have peak or valleys in our manufacturing part of the business.
On the cost structure, really doesn't change anything. You know, we shared the number of C AD 525,000. That's likely gonna be our run rate as we hit our stride on production towards the end of this year. We're just a little bit higher than that today, but nothing that material. I think the glide path is even better. As our manufacturing folks get more and more used to the standardized build program, that final third of labor, we're gonna attack. Then the MRP system and how we're managing our procurement process, we're also gonna attack that third piece. Even if we do see continued deflation, we're probably likely gonna see reduction in our production cost as opposed to further increase in our production costs. Sorry, Rob.
No, that's perfect. Is that good? Okay. Thanks, Michael.
We do have one question from a virtual participant, Rob.
Great.
This one comes from Dennis Ly at Heathbridge. He says, "Could you unpack a bit more into how the company was able to unearth new growth in the GTA, which was previously believed to be a mature market? For example, was the existing customers buying more or entirely new customers? Did Badger win market share from competitors and/or from traditional excavation?
Great. Right now, and it's Dennis, correct? Okay. Dennis, thanks for the question. Right now, and I felt the same way. Boy, Toronto, the GTA is a very mature market for Badger. We have a lot of trucks, and we thought we had everything kind of lined out. But when Chris started using some data analytics, which we've never had in the past, to decide what sales territories look like, what customer bases we're covering and which ones we're not, and he puts it into, I'm gonna butcher it, Chris, but a sales territory optimization software. Basically all it does is it says where and who has Badger done business in the past, and then where and who do our lead sources and this optimization software say the opportunity is.
Once we loaded that in, we realized we have been under-penetrated. We had two sales people in the GTA, and a lot of folks in this room, and probably a lot of folks online are from Toronto, and that's a massive market to only have two single sales reps, for a company our size with the number of locations we have, in Toronto. We realized we're under-penetrated. We started realizing what are we, what are we doing, just like, the question, earlier about, how are you gonna grow the Q4 and Q1 shoulder seasons. We started realizing we weren't very diverse with our customer base. Some of our operating partners or franchises, did really, really well with some construction business. We had some branches doing really, really well with the utility business.
We weren't really very broad across the industrial space. We weren't very broad across some of the rail opportunities, covering it wide and deep. All of that, Dennis, is not even mentioning any of the national account opportunities that Bobby and the team are uncovering with some of the largest contractors across Canada. It is unbelievable the opportunity in some of these markets. That, just to give everyone the perspective, was a small snapshot as purely an example in Chris's presentation. I could say that same thing in several other markets. Obviously, we're not gonna name them because I'm sure for competitive reasons, we don't wanna do that. Okay. Does everyone wanna go dig or any other questions? Yeah. Yeah.
Just with respect to the 28%-29% margin target, are there regions that you're operating consistently quarter in, quarter out at a margin profile that would give you confidence that you can get to that 28%-29% someday in the future? I know you've, you know, invested a lot in the ERP system, and there's been lots of corporate shifts in the last few years, and COVID interrupted things. Maybe on a regional basis, is there something that gives you that confidence you can get there?
Yeah. Obviously, we don't give local market, nor will I ever see us giving local market data. Yes, we have some very profitable different branches as well as what we call market areas. We used to call them districts. They are very, very profitable driving that profile. We actually believe that the company overall can do that profile. That's why Darren put it in the slide. Yes, we do have some right now today that are performing at a very, very high level right now. Again, I can't give you the color. It's just not appropriate. We don't do that.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
Just as you think about the commission structure that you've added in, for your sales side, are you needing to offset with higher prices to keep your margins, or is it the utilization?
Yeah, great question. We actually, and I think Chris covered some of this, I don't know if we went into the detail on it. Without giving actual specifics regarding the commission plan itself, 30% of that commission program is on a fixed basis, so a salary- type basis, and 70% is variable. Because of that, as the volume ramps up, and the pricing ramps up, we're able to capture more. We do not have today on our first iteration of our sales commission, we didn't set up a sliding scale tied to pricing or profitability. We have debated on that a little bit internally. Like every one of us, we have our own morning meetings.
Several people last night shared with me about their morning meetings and very interesting how the companies in here do it. We do our own, and that was a big discussion. This was our first year, Daryl, to do a commission plan, and we didn't wanna make it overly complex or cumbersome for people who've never been on commission in their lives. That will be in future iterations, because we actually want to pay more commission for more pricing. 'Cause the pricing, once we start putting more pricing on our existing business, the flow-through is almost pure. It's phenomenal. Paul and others reference our operating leverage. It's unbelievable for the flow-through off of the pricing, any additional pricing.
Us paying a little bit additional commission is nothing, so negligible.
Can you just compare the 30 fixed 70 variable to where we were in legacy?
Yeah. We were about 90%. I don't have an exact number, but we were 90% fixed, so high base salary and a very modest quarterly bonus that was paid on a previous. A lot of our salespeople actually were starting to request being on commission plans. With us launching this entire commercial sales strategy, pretty enthusiastic. We actually offered a bridge program because some people who were on this fixed salary and small, modest bonus, we were concerned that they were gonna be so comfortable with their salary. We've actually had phenomenal acceptance of the commission program.
It also allows us to say, "Okay, whereas we're getting the growth, where do we actually need to add in additional salespeople?" Obviously, if we're adding in additional salespeople, we need to make sure we have enough trucks for them, enough marketing support, and all the additional things that come with that. It's so far, Daryl, it's been well accepted within the company.
Cool.
I think that's good. With that, thank you everyone for attending. Again, we're gonna be around all afternoon, so come grab any of us. We'd love to visit with you. Thank you very much for attending our Investor Day. Thank you.