All right, everybody. I'd like to introduce our next presenter here at the Planet Microcap Showcase. We're on in partnership with Microcap Club. Joining us on behalf of Thermal Energy International, we have Bill Crossland.
Welcome, everyone. Thank you for taking your time out on such a beautiful October morning. Thermal Energy International, we are the profitable path to net zero. Why do we say we're the profitable path to net zero? Number one, we've been consistently profitable for the last three years. Number two, we make our customers more profitable. Your standard forward-looking statement disclaimer. How do we do that? We provide proprietary energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction solutions primarily to very large multinationals like Fortune 500 and others. At the end of the day, we save them money by reducing their fuel use and reducing their carbon emissions. Just in terms of quick highlights, energy efficiency saves money and is the fastest, cheapest, and easiest way for our customers to reduce their carbon emissions.
We have a suite of complementary, unique proprietary solutions that deliver a high return on investments for our customers and a compelling payback, usually just a few years on a piece of equipment or a solution that will last as long as that plant is in operation. We have significant repeat business from our customers by design, and we have a track record of profitable growth, strong cash flow, and that's both organically and through accretive acquisitions. How do we do it? In a building like this or at your home, about 50% of the energy you're using is electricity, and the other 50% is thermal energy, heat, heat energy. Usually, it's a fuel, usually natural gas that you're burning for heat. 50/50 in a commercial building or in a home. In an industrial sector, only 10% is electricity and 90% is thermal energy.
All our customers tell us they've already solved the question or they already solved the issue of carbon emission reductions on the electricity part. The thermal part is much more challenging. Of that thermal energy, they only use effectively, efficiently about 50%. 50% of that energy is being lost as waste heat somewhere in the system. For our customers, improving thermal energy efficiency is critical, and it is by far the fastest, cheapest, and easiest way for them to reduce their carbon emissions and save money. That's what we do for them. How do we do that? With our suite of technologies, and this has two of them right here, the big silver tower is a Flu-Ace. The small box is a Heat Sponge. Often, with many of our projects, we'll implement more than one of our proprietary technologies.
If you use all of them, we can recover about 80% of the energy that's lost in a typical steam or heat system. Therefore, we can go from taking them 50% efficient to 90% efficient in theory. I mentioned we've got a suite of unique proprietary solutions all designed for thermal energy efficiency. Historically, our go-to-market strategy has always been to deliver highly engineered, site-specific, either turnkey projects or customized equipment. The big, more complicated projects are going to be turnkey, where we do everything for the customer. The slightly smaller ones might be where you just sell them a piece of customized equipment they can install themselves. These are all our technologies. The company started with the Flu-Ace technology years ago in Canada, and then we acquired the GEM Steam Traps in the U.K.. That gave us our U.K. and European base of operations and distribution.
We then acquired Heat Sponge and Rainmaker. That gave us our US base of operations and distribution. More recently, we acquired the intellectual property for these other six technologies. We now have engineering, sales, admin, and manufacturing in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K.. Significant repeat business, and that's by design. We tend to target large, multinationals for two reasons. Number one, our projects are sized by the amount of energy we can save. If they're using more energy at a site, we can save them more energy and do a nice big project for them. It tends to be the large companies that have the very large energy-intensive sites. On top of that, they have multiple sites around the world. The majority, about 60%- 70% of our business, comes from our top 10 customers. Combined, these 10 customers have about 1,000 sites worldwide.
We've already sold some product to about 100 sites. Usually, in many cases, it's just that we've done a little bit with them. There's much more we can do at each of these sites. Even with our existing customers, we're probably less than 5% penetration in terms of what we can do with them. There's lots of opportunity, even with our existing customers, let alone adding more customers. You can see we've had some great revenue growth over the last few years, 41% over two years. We like where that's headed. Last year, our year-end is May. We just announced our annual results a few weeks ago with about $30 million in revenue. We've also been consistently profitable. As I mentioned, you see that our EBITDA, our profitability dipped a little bit in 2025.
That's because in 2023 and 2024, we started an aggressive expansion program where we added a lot of people, we added a new manufacturing facility, and we developed something I'll talk about a little bit later, a Crest mobile app. That cost us about $800,000. That reduced the profitability in 2025. Those investments are impacting the bottom line. They're not yet benefiting on the top line. Despite that, net income remained positive at $160,000, and our operating cash flow for last year was actually $1.7 million. In fact, we've generated more than $5 million of operating cash flow over the last three years. What have we done with it? One of our acquisitions we did with debt, the most recent major acquisition we financed with debt. We've repaid about $4 million in long-term debt with our own cash flow over the last three years.
It shows there there's $300,000 left as of May. All of that debt will be totally paid and gone by January. It's something I'm exceptionally proud of that, with our own cash flow, we've not only grown the business from about $15 million in revenue to $30 million, but we've repaid all our debt. The balance sheet remains strong with about $2.8 million in cash and $2.4 million in working capital. Most recently, we've had a real surge of orders, which is great to see to start off the year. I mentioned we have a May year-end. The first quarter ended in August. For the quarter ending August 31st, we had $11.3 million worth of orders. Q1 historically has been a weaker quarter for order intake, but not this year.
That $11.3 million was 4x what it was last year, and it was 3x what it had been the average of every year before that. With our Q1 results that we announced on September 22nd, by that point, the additional orders that we had taken in put our order backlog at $24.5 million, which is the highest order backlog we have ever reported. I mentioned earlier that our go-to-market strategy historically has been direct sales, direct to the customer, large complicated turnkey solutions or custom equipment. That's been a great strategy, and we plan to continue that. We think there's another way that we can also tackle the market now that we have, you know, 12 different technologies. We've identified a few initiatives that we're just starting this year that we believe will further scale our business, increase our revenue growth, and increase our margins.
The first of it is to develop indirect sales channels throughout North America. We want to develop and promote a group of standardized products that these individual reps can sell. We want to establish manufacturing. The manufacturing that's been done in the U.S. is primarily Heat Sponge. We want to start manufacturing that in Europe to make it much more cost-effective. We're going to do all of this leveraged through our new proprietary digital platform called Crest, which I'll talk a little bit more about later. Digging down in terms of developing independent manufacturers’ reps, these won't be just one sales guy out selling as a rep. There tends to be, and this is very common in the industry, what they call manufacturers' reps that sell usually a certain line card of products.
As an example, there are reps out there that service the boiler room for industrial companies, and they have every product and service related to the boiler room, and they're on site all the time. We want to develop a network of these guys that will sell a line card of our products because they're going to site all the time, and they see opportunities to sell a little bit of product here, a little bit of product there. We see it as a real opportunity for more sales with less investment, less cost. The IMRs will be 100% success-based on a markup basis, and that will free up our internal team to focus on the larger, more strategic opportunities. In order to do that, we have to develop some pre-engineered solutions sold from a line card.
You develop a solution that can all be put on a skid and just shipped to the site. That will create more opportunity for smaller projects. Our big turnkey projects tend to be $1 million- $10 million. This could be, you know, tens of thousands of dollars typically. It reduces project development time. For these big, long, complicated projects, there's a fairly long sales cycle. There'll be no bespoke design required, and it opens up an opportunity to sell smaller projects and smaller equipment sales to our customers and to our non-customers. Then establish Heat Sponge manufacturing in Europe. Again, I think that's pretty self-explanatory. Why? I mean, these are big stainless steel boxes. It's just not economic to ship them across the ocean. We're going to establish some marketing there. It'll likely be contracted manufacturing. We're not going to have our own shop.
Most of our business, we've got 12 different technologies, 80%- 90% that we outsource the manufacturing. We sometimes do a little bit of finishing, and we manufacture a little bit. The model is primarily an outsourced manufacturing model. Finally, Crest, which stands for Carbon Reduction and Efficiency Scoping Tool. We've spent the last several years developing it. We launched it less than a year ago. Historically, as we added more technologies to our suite, the sales and the engineers would go out to site, usually with only one technology in mind, and they'd want to gather the data related to that technology so they can put together a proposal and a pitch, and then write it down on a piece of paper or they'd even write it down on their laptop. They would go back to the office and then prepare the pitch.
The Crest app, it's a mobile app. It prompts them to ask certain questions. Once it's entered onto the app, we've got it in our database, so it all goes back to the cloud. It's going to speed up sales time. It's going to open up opportunities for cross-selling. For example, if they're there trying to sell some steam traps, they might not necessarily ask, "What size is your boiler? What's your energy bill?" All these sort of questions that once we get on site will be much easier to have follow-on revenue. That's going to reduce the time for internal sales team ramp up. If you've heard me talk before, one of our challenges historically is we're selling complicated projects direct to the customer. That's a long sales lead time, but it's also a long training time for our sales team. We bring a new salesperson on.
It's going to take them a few years just to understand the technology, develop the customers. This will speed this up a lot. It'll also help our independent manufacturers’ representatives that we're going to hire, that they can now sell all our products. The benefit of that is if a salesperson leaves or a manufacturer's rep decides not to offer our projects anymore, we're going to have all their data. Everybody that visited, what the boiler sizes are, what the energy use is, what the site is, we're going to have all that data internally to capitalize on. Recently, this app, we just launched it last year, and it won Mobile App of the Year award at the UK Technology Awards for an app that solved a real-world problem or delivered significant efficiencies. We're pretty proud of that.
Summary, revenue up 41% over two years, a solid, consistent track record of profitability and strong cash flow, strong balance sheet. We're going to have basically no debt and lots of cash. We're in a very strong position to continue growing the business going forward. Record Q1 order intake and order backlog. We're rolling out some key strategic initiatives to leverage our growth going forward, which is develop indirect sales channels, increase sales of standardized equipment, expand Heat Sponge manufacturing into Europe, and leverage the Crest mobile app. With that, I'm done. I welcome your questions. Yeah, right here. Questions, what's driving the record Q1 order intake? Our order intake can fluctuate fairly significantly because these are selling large projects, so you never know when you're going to get them. Historically, Q2 and Q4 were our strongest.
Q2, because that's right at the tail end of most people's financial year, and if they have any capital left, they get it out. Q4, because that's right at the front end of most people's financial year. We've been developing a lot of projects, and I think the strong order intake was so strong in Q1. It's a fact that the pipeline has been growing very nicely over the last few years, but it's also luck and timing, to be honest. There's nothing specifically that made it go, you know, to be increased by a factor of four, but it's an indication that the order intake is growing. If you haven't heard my presentation before, I tend to focus people on a last four quarter basis on just about everything because there can be lots of quarterly fluctuations.
Whether it's financial performance or order intake, it tends to be good to look at the last four quarters. The last four quarters is at almost record highs now as well. Back here in the...
My question is based on pricing contracts. For existing clients within the new trending contract, how big of a price increase would it be for them? At that level, any clarity of pricing?
Yeah, I mean, every project is a little bit different. Usually, in our pricing, we don't have standard, you know, when we're selling, if we're just selling equipment, we usually have a standard. For the big turnkey projects, which is sort of two-thirds of our revenue, there is no real standard price. We have a margin that we want to get. The challenge that we're always, we work with our customers. Often, you know, we're finding out where are they losing the energy and where can they use the energy. There's always a lot more waste heat. There's way more heat source than there is heat sink. The projects are always limited by the heat sink, and there tends to be diminishing returns the more energy you save. The first $500,000, you might be able to do it at a one-year payback.
The next $500,000 of savings might be a four-year payback. We work with our clients and say, do you want to save $500,000 with a one-year payback or a million dollars with a four-year payback? We work with them to achieve their targets in terms of the return on investments for their projects. The big turnkey projects tend to have a margin in the 30s. If we're just selling the equipment, it tends to be in the 50s. Usually, we average in the 40s somewhere when you blend the two of them together. Right here, back.
In terms of where's the opportunity?
Yeah, so the question, where's the opportunity? She talked about, you know, geothermal in Iceland, which I'm glad you asked that question because that's the most common misconception. Geo means ground, thermal means heat. So thermal energy is just heat energy. Geothermal is heat energy you get from the ground. That's not what we do. We're just doing heat energy usually from a fuel source. They're burning something on site, usually natural gas, but it could be biomass, it could be oil. It's what are they using to generate their heat energy? The opportunity for that is global. I mean, that's everywhere. Every country, every industry uses some sort of fuel to generate heat on site for their processes. The opportunity, I mean, you know, we have about 50% of our revenue is Europe, 50% is North America. That's where we have our salespeople, and that's strategic focus for us.
The opportunity is global. We could sell in Asia, we could sell in Africa, we could sell in Latin America. We do sell a little bit there, but it's not a strategic focus. Yeah, straight here. The white blue shirt, yes.
The requirement there for the process. You had some, worst of you get 20% IRR on any project. I know that's better than nobody else got one on nothing. Curious to look in. Is the stability in your customer base?
Yeah, the question was, is there stability in the customer base? He did mention that food and beverage and pharma are probably 80% of our business. Food and beverage is 60%, pharma is 20%, and then the rest is mixed. We have exceptional stability. The customers that we've sold, if we've sold more than one project, there's multiple projects. As an example, we've sold our single largest customer. We've probably done now 15 heat recovery projects and sold probably another 50 sites, other technologies, and we're still working with them. That was just one of their divisions in North America. We're now trying to open that up in Europe. We announced pharma is a relatively new one in terms of being a significant presence. We've always sold a little bit to pharma, but two years ago, we announced our first large project with a pharma company.
Over the last two years, we've now done two more projects with that company and one more project with another pharma company. We have a fair bit of stability with our customers. Once we have a successful project, they learn us and trust us because there's a lot of trust in our relationships. Any other questions? Anybody? Okay, yeah, and then we'll move you out. We'll go take turns. The longer term, short term, nothing. These are exciting opportunities, but they're going to take a while to develop, right? First, we have to develop the network. We have to find the people. We have to train the people. Then they have to sell it. We're selling, not really, I don't think it'll have to be positive or negative. There's no cost to that, right? It's just our guys out there talking.
We sell some product now through the rep network, not a lot, but a little bit. It's about a 50% margin. We think the gross margin will be higher. It'll drive the margins higher because a larger proportion of our sales will probably be selling equipment at a 50% margin as opposed to a turnkey project at 30%. That's short term, no impact. Long term, we think it'll be a positive impact on margin. Yes, sir.
I'm not sure about customer base. How many employees do you have? How many of those are salespeople? What percentage of your existing customers? The full Crest survey has been done on 10,000 sites.
Oh, so we're about 70 people. We're roughly 40% salespeople, 40% engineers, and 20% admin and marketing. We're seeing that change. Historically, we need an engineer for every salesperson. Now, because we're getting the sales guys to sell more and more, the ratio is more like two engineers for every salesperson. Sorry, what was the second part of your question? Oh, percent. Yeah, it's a very small percentage because they do it as they go out. They're not going out serving the sites for no reason. It's when they have a service call, they're out there quoting. We launched it in November of last year, but that was probably six months getting the team to engage and start using it. It's hard to say, but I would say it's less than 10% have been surveyed so far using Crest.
How long on a daily basis per added to average sales? Is it typically 12 months? Because the larger projects are...
Very good question. I'm glad you asked that question. As you said, it tends to be the larger projects. Most of the revenue comes in the second six months. If we got $11 million of projects in Q1, most of that revenue won't be till Q3 or Q4, roughly. It used to be one-to-one. It was one-to-one. Now we tend not to need one-to-one. It's more like two-to-one because the salespeople are selling much more than they used to sell. They're selling more projects. The revenue per salesperson has gone up pretty significantly, so they don't need the same number. They need more engineers to engineer that revenue, which is good. With the cost per, you know, our margins, our bottom line should improve because we don't need the same number of engineers, the same number of salespeople to sell the same level. Always need the engineers. That's right.
They're using all their time to develop and cost out those projects and implement them.
We should speak to your next news. Talk about some benefits of the research at the end. Maybe typically wait five times in to invite the EBITDA, and what does it look like as far as potential stuff?
Yeah. Historically, we've always looked at, we're looking for complementary projects. We still are looking. There's lots of little companies out there that could be a complementary tuck under for us. Right now, we would still take a technology, but even more so, whereas before we were focused primarily on technology, we now think we got enough technologies to sell our customers unless there's something new. Now we're looking not only for technology, but also for somebody that's doing something similar to us in either a geographical or vertical market where we don't have a strong presence. If there's somebody. Oh, yes. Here we go. Accretive to the bottom line, complementary companies with commercialized products and potential revenues of $2 million- $20 million. You know that they can sell our technologies through their channels. We can sell their technology through our channels. Historically, these are small privately owned companies.
One-time revenue would be a rough metric that we would typically buy at. We're still interested for sure. Now we have a strong balance sheet with no debt, lots of cash. We're in a strong position to do that.
Where are you buying them from? We're going to crank up the margins.
Yeah.
That was at 5% a few years later.
Yes, they all vary. With these small independent companies, private companies, you know, there's founders' fees and there's lots of other costs. We want to make sure that it's accretive. As a rough rule of thumb, it's usually about one-time revenue. That's going to depend on how profitable they are and how much EBITDA they're delivering to the bottom line. Yes.
Capital is a key driver. It's one of the things that basically you have to achieve in order to create profit.
Basically, profit. We have an employee profit sharing plan that right now everybody participates in at differing levels. The Board of Directors have said a certain percent of profit goes into the pool and then is allocated to virtually everybody in the company other than the salespeople because they have their own incentive plan. It can't be higher than a certain percentage of net income after tax before the profit plan has been taken out. What we were doing before, that was, you know, always driving there. It's a challenge because if we want to grow the business, it's just the nature of the business we're in. We're a people business. We have to add people. If we want to grow, we're going to add costs before. We had $2 million in EBITDA on $25 million in revenue or $20 million in revenue. 10% EBITDA would be a good target.
I think my time's up. I'd be happy to talk to any one of you. I'm doing one-on-ones today and tomorrow. Come and see me. Thank you so much.