Good afternoon, everyone. As she said, my name is Benjamin Urban. I am the CEO at DIRTT Environmental Solutions. Thank you all for joining us this afternoon. I'm looking forward to some dialogue at the end as well. I'm going to move through the slides pretty quick to make sure that we leave enough time for that. DIRTT. We are a leader in pre-manufactured modular construction through technology. We're over 20 years old. We've been publicly traded for 11 years. We operate in both the United States as well as Canada as far as manufacturing locations, about 850 employees and roughly 750,000 sq ft of manufacturing under roof. We've shipped over $2 billion worth of product, and nearly half of the Fortune 500 are DIRTT customers. Additionally, this year we were awarded number one in manufacturing by Fast Company, one of the most innovative companies globally.
We were also just awarded this month with Canada's safest manufacturing employer in the industrial sector by the Canadian Occupational Safety. What do we do and why do customers typically choose us as an alternative method to conventional construction? Typically, most of our consumers choose us for one of five reasons. One could be speed. We typically have a schedule compression of what could be months for commercial or workspace interiors to what could be even up to a year for health care or a hospital that we're deployed on. Another reason could be performance. That could be aesthetic. It could be a rating, like a fire-rated partition. It could also be around warranty. Performance is one reason. Reconfigurability is a third. We also call that design for disassembly in that all of our solutions have the ability to be modified and relocated as necessary.
Financial, because our product does qualify as personal property, it does introduce some more sophisticated ways to account for it from a financial basis. It does depreciate on an accelerated schedule versus conventional construction. Lastly would be sustainability. That's not just how we procure materials, but our entire system is engineered in a way such that it should never end up in a landfill. It's simply another way to reduce global greenhouse gas footprint. This is a great slide to show you what those different solutions can look like. I mentioned that it is technology enabled, and I'm going to touch on the technology here in a minute. It does allow for mass customization. This is more of a generic version showing glass partitions, solid partitions. It also shows casework.
Structural mass timber is a structural element there, as well as raised access flooring and connected infrastructure, which would include modular power as well as fiber-deep networks. Underpinning everything that we do is our proprietary ICE software. It doesn't only do configuration, visualization, engineering, and automation, it also allows for mass customization. Through that infinite customization, we still maintain a 10-day lead time because of this proprietary software. We also use this as a SaaS platform that is commercialized. We have half a dozen manufacturers that are currently using this platform for the same reasons that we utilize it. We also actually have two others that we're onboarding as we speak. We're also seeing expanded or strong demand in 2026 and the remainder of the year for existing customers to continue to build out their versions of the same software technology.
The primary verticals that we operate in are commercial office or workspace, health care, government, education. We've also expanded into aviation sectors as well as life science, and we're starting to see those different verticals expand. This is showing what the TAM is for us purely in prefabricated manufactured solutions. That $40 billion is what I would say is more aligned with our typical construction partners that we pursue. Through diversification and innovation, we are actually able now to expand that total addressable market even further into conventional construction through what we're now calling Construction Services Division. Previously, we had referred to it as Integrated Solutions. As we've continued to evolve and develop that part of our business, we're actually seeing expansion into true drywall replacement. We have roughly 40 DIRTT sales representatives and over 70 construction partners in North America. Yes, Allen?
Yes, what do you mean by drywall?
Yeah, so sheetrock, so conventional construction. Behind this brick, which is probably a veneer, is drywall, right? It's us replacing that one for one with a pre-manufactured solution from one of our factories.
Is it still drywall?
No, it's not. It depends on what the solution is. Typically, it's in either MDF if it doesn't need to be a rated partition. If it's a rated, then what we use is a magnesium oxide board or a non-combustible. We do full operating rooms, bathrooms. We're in the middle of doing airports as well. DFW airport washroom renovations are all of our product.
Whoa.
Yeah. This is just to give you an example of what our current coverage looks like from what I'll call our traditional construction or distribution partners. We have 40 direct sales representatives that support them. Within that, 70 of these partners represent roughly 140 different physical brick and mortar, what we call experience centers. You could also call it a showroom. In the last 18 months, I mentioned that we've diversified the channel as well. By diversifying, what I mean by that is we have created a direct channel to general contractors. Historically, we've delivered services through furniture dealer partners, so your Miller Knoll dealers, Steelcase, Haworth, others. There are a few that are true general contractors in that mix, but the majority are through a furniture dealer channel.
When I was talking about expanding the channel and expanding the total addressable market, our construction services group allows us now to transact directly with general contractors. Why that's important to us is for our ability to scale. We currently have about $400 million in capacity. If we do, let's say, $175 million, clearly we're only halfway there in utilization of what that excess capacity is. Of that $175 million, more than 90% of it is the furniture dealer partner model. The direct model that we've stood up over the last 18 months, that's where we're seeing significant expansion in our overall pipeline and growth into 2026. That's only through a handful, let's say, three to six large general contractors. Why that's so impactful is for these large general contractors, they also have a self-perform division.
If you pick one of the larger ones that does $10 billion annually in construction services work, $1 billion of that is self-perform work. That is a Bird or a PCL, any of the top 10 in the United States general contractors where they have, let's say, 1,000 drywallers, carpenters, glaziers, electricians, et cetera, on staff. That is also their highest margin revenue stream for these GC s. They want to expand that as well. The challenge that they have is people. Skilled trades, there aren't 3x the amount of skilled trades out there for them to triple the amount of self-perform work that they want to do. DIRTT conveniently is a 3x multiplier.
Because it is prefabricated off-site, when it shows up on site, that speed acceleration that I was talking about in the schedule compression allows them to install it 3x faster than drywall, magnesium oxide, all those different conventional construction methods, such that for them, now they have the ability to triple the amount of labor that they actually are able to bill out. Allen?
When you are putting together the product in your plants, are you using it so that a customer can get processed, or are some of the skilled workers there?
No, it removes that skilled worker from that entire chain. No, they are not. They are your $20 an hour factory workers that are truly manufacturing with raw materials, be that aluminum, MDF, as you mentioned, or we discussed Magrock.
So.
Yeah.
Sorry, did somebody open the floor for a question?
Yes.
No, don't be mean. The 10% that you mentioned, is that kind of a general rule of thumb for the large general contractors that 10% of their overall revenue would be self-perform, or is that just a number that you throw out there?
It is a good benchmark. That is from the smallest of the top 10 general contractors in the United States, $10 billion in backlog, $1 billion in self-perform. That also tends to correlate to other GCs. Part of it is the underlying nature of they can't get any more skilled trades. Even if they wanted it to be 10%, 20%, 30%, 10% is pretty much as high as they can get. Then it is saturated. There just aren't enough people for them to do more of it on their own.
Sorry, one more color.
Yeah.
Would you venture a guess what the, you said, the highest margin for the general contractors, that 10% self-perform, can you give us an idea of what that is relative to the other 90%?
Yeah. On average, when a general contractor delivers a project, they will end up somewhere between 5% and 7% net profit. Through the actual self-perform, it's threefold or fourfold that. They're looking at margins in the 20% range versus 5%- 7%.
Thank you.
I had mentioned half of the Fortune 500 are DIRTT customers currently. In fact, many of you probably have been in an office or a building that was actually DIRTT material and probably didn't even know it. That's actually when we've done a really good job. The reason I say that is because of that software that underpins everything, it allows us mass customization, which also then allows for self-expression. For us, no project would be the same. If you went into a Google build-out, which is all DIRTT, it will look entirely different than a Microsoft build-out. Even though they're in the same vertical, you would have no idea that that product is actually manufactured off-site by us. Yes?
Yeah, I'm going to put it in a little bit of context. I looked at these customers for the, let's say, interior wheel there. What's their typical, what's the cost to them typically per square foot? Do you have one improvement?
Yeah, no, that's a great question. Around the cost per square foot, or I'll just say cost comparison of what we do to conventional construction, right? We could talk all day long about, OK, what's the cost per square foot for health care versus education? They're totally disparate. When we go through our furniture dealer channel, we tend to be somewhere, if you're starting at a commercial workspace location, we could be as high as a 20% premium. As you get more complex towards, let's say, a health care delivery where we're doing an ambulatory surgery center or something, we tend to be cost neutral even through our furniture dealer channel. Once we go through a general contractor in a direct channel, we are absolutely cost neutral regardless of workspace, health care, education, government, simply because it's direct to the GC.
That's where all of a sudden we have this ability to supplant conventional construction or drywall with DIRTT as that solution.
I'm just looking for dollars per square foot.
It's an elusive one. Put it this way. If you've got a project that's, let's say, $200 a sq ft in a commercial office, call it $40 a sq ft premium. If you're spending $400 a sq ft for a hospital or more, zero. There is no delta. If anything, it could be, depending on the purpose of it, it could actually be less. If it's a high acuity med gases, head walls, things of that nature, we will actually be less. On a $400 per sq ft , you may have $20- $40 per sq ft savings by going down this path. That's just apples to apples, day one construction. Where this becomes more important for a service industry like health care is that commercial office, they have some flexibility when they open. Doesn't necessarily mean they're not going to be turning revenue through it.
For a hospital, if they were to build and move in a year early, that's a year of operating income that they wouldn't have if they built it conventionally.
That could be good for a boutique hotel.
Yeah, so we have done a couple boutique hotels, actually. What's changed for why we haven't pursued it, or multifamily for that matter, in the past, we didn't have a fire-rated partition. That was the barrier to entry for us in that if we're just adding our solution on top of a drywall fire-rated partition, it's not cost competitive. Now that we have our own fire-rated partition that doesn't use any drywall and is apples to apples cost competitive, now we can expand into hospitality, multifamily. Predominantly, where we're focusing now is actually in higher ed, so dormitories. Where in the past we couldn't perform there, now we can actually do every partition in those spaces.
Looking a little bit further back, right, I don't know that much about the company. It sounds like if you compare your numbers now versus what you were pre-COVID, sales are down high. Your stock price is down about 20% or 30%. How do I think about telling a story from scratch? You've been in public company for 11 years. Where are you now relative to then? What happened? What changed?
That's a lot.
30 seconds or less.
30 seconds or less, yeah. Clearly, COVID had an impact, right? More so on the commercial office industry than for health care per se. If you were to look at our actual project or vertical mix pre-COVID to what it is now, pre-COVID, it was 85% commercial office space. The remainder was maybe 10% health care, and then the leftover, government and education. Last quarter, or we'll just use 2024 as a benchmark, 55% of that was commercial office. 30% of that has effectively transitioned roughly to health care, with the remainder of them being government and education. There are a lot of variables in what happened to where we are now. In its most simple terms, 2022 was full turnaround. Bifurcating COVID, bifurcating previous management in the path we were on, we effectively used that as a reset.
In its most simple terms, 2022's turnaround, 2023 proving profitability, 2024 building blocks for expansion and growth and leaning into the corporate strategy to where we are now. There is an air bubble in there. I'm just going to call it that with regards to tariffs, which I'll unpack here a little bit. It's actually a great segue to talk about where we are now. We are fully on the other side of a turnaround. We are now engaged in the execution of the business transformation. I'm going to separate the restructuring. That's not transformational per se. It got us profitable. The next challenge was how do we actually transform the business to support the work that we've actually managed to make to this point, at the same time also executing on the corporate strategy of growth. That construction services group is clearly a significant portion of that growth.
You'll start to see that coming into Q1. Once that represents more than 10% of our revenue, we will account for that separately. You'll have visibility into seeing what that diversified channel is doing for us from a growth perspective. Further to that, I’ll talk on tariffs a little bit. Up until Q2, we actually had eight positive adjusted EBITDA quarters. Tariffs clearly impacted us. We also disclosed this in the last earnings release that we anticipated that by Q3, due to the mitigating efforts that we had implemented, we would be covered and be positive EBITDA in Q3. Back to what I would call more normal operating for us by Q4 and similar EBITDA expansion, that's all showing to be true. There is that piece of it, which I encourage you guys to listen in on our earnings release on November 6th.
We will dig into that a little bit. Also balanced with that is the pipeline. We also disclosed that we are seeing not just expansion in the pipeline, but the tariffs also forced us to recalibrate. If you were to go back all of 2024 and you looked at what we call push out, what projects that were supposed to end up in a quarter and then pushed into the next or pushed into the next year, on average, it was 18%- 19% every quarter. Q2 was 27%. We simply did not have visibility into what that was going to look like. Those projects did not disappear. We are not talking tens of millions of dollars, right? For us on a quarterly basis, three or four can have that amount of compression that moved not just three months, but most of them moved into Q2 of next year.
Even discounting that out, when we recalibrated, the pipeline that we disclosed in Q2, which is roughly $330 million, continues to expand. We are seeing similar numbers. If you were to take the same pipeline number, even though it is significantly higher than it was in 2024, when we had confidence around the guidance that we gave, that was also assuming a much more aggressive push out and conversion rate. On top of it being more conservative because of what happened in Q2, it is still showing expansion. In the earnings release, we will also be sharing Q4 guidance to bridge what we expect 2026 to look like, but also to give some greater confidence around not only do we have a handle on it, not only have we mitigated tariffs, but we are seeing continued growth.
Yeah. I think it may be helpful for some people that don't know the story. I don't know if you've made it clearer than you did. This is like when you say a term now, it's not just about the risk mix. It's the leader, the leadership figure, and the board. I don't know.
Yeah, no, for sure. Thank you for that, Jeff. Yeah, so when I came on in July of 2022, we had had an entire board turnover. All new board, not a great proxy battle, all new management. I came in, new CFO, new COO, all new senior leadership team, all new board, all the while doing a full restructuring to get us profitable, but then also to position us for we have some convertible debt coming up. There's a tranche in January. There's a tranche in December of next year, ensuring that we were positioned well enough to either pay that out of cash or free cash flow or a combination to ensure we had balance there. As far as leadership goes, part of the reason I took the seat is that I actually am a bit of an insider, but not an insider.
I managed our largest construction partner out of Texas for 15 years prior to coming to DIRTT. In all terms, an SME for all things DIRTT, from manufacturing to design. I'd say more importantly is that construction services piece. It's been very elusive in how do you stand something up that is a diversified channel without cannibalizing your existing channel and make it complementary, all the while stabilizing the business. We've proven that to be true. Where we are now, when I say on the other side of the turnaround, but also in our own, I'll call it commercial transformation, is that if you, I'm going to kind of put it this way, through our traditional partner channel, we do about 8,000 projects annually across all verticals. The average value of those projects is somewhere between $50,000 and $75,000.
The construction services channel that we've stood up, we have about 10 projects under our belt, some that are in various forms of delivery right now, some go into next year. The average dollar amount for those is around $2 million a project. They're much larger. They're much more significant. More importantly than all, they help flatten out the demand. Because of that software, we have a 10-day lead time. If any of you were to come visit us, we'd give you the presentation. Here's a facility. This is the software. Go on a factory tour. When we're giving you that presentation, we'll use the software. We draw something, casework, walls, power, it makes no difference to us. We send that to the factory. By the time we get back from the factory tour to have lunch, whatever it is you drew and whatever color you want is manufactured.
It cuts both ways, though. With a 10-day lead time, it makes labor leveling nearly impossible. The more volume we can get on the top line to take down some of that $400 million, the greater the margin expansion we have. That is not even taking into account the transformation process that we're under at the moment to try to find some additional EBITDA expansion. The reason I bring that up is if you go back and you do some analysis, even at higher OpEx and SG&A, when we did a $20 million month, we had a 6%- 8% expansion in AGP month over month. We know the fixed cost leverage is there. Really, all strategy is focused on how do we grow the top line, how do we diversify the channel, and that helps all parts of the business. Any other questions? Yes?
I think you'll go back to the one where I can sell on a fire-rated partition system.
Yeah, yeah, so why that's such a game changer for us. I'll just give you a simple example. There's a multifamily housing on a university that we're pursuing in California right now. Through our traditional solutions, it would be worth about $100,000 to DIRTT. By having this rated partition, it's roughly $22 million for one building. Part of it is that fire-rated partition. What's unique about it is that there is no gypsum involved in it. It's all steel. It is much more environmentally friendly. It's also demountable, so it has the same behavioral characteristics as our quote unquote design for disassembly and how we treat engineering. We actually have already, there's three projects. I can't name the name of the health care company that we're doing it with, but there's some ambulatory surgery centers that we're delivering in Florida right now that have prototypes of that.
We should be fully operational and manufacturing it in both of our facilities in Georgia and Canada in Q1.
Thank you.
Time.