All right, the next company we have presenting today for you is CECO Environmental. CECO is headquartered here in Dallas, just up the road on the toll road in Addison. CECO operates in three kinds of units, which are industrial air, industrial water, and energy transition. With us from the company they have sitting in the audience is Peter Johansson, our Chief Financial and Strategy Officer, and presenting will be our CEO, Todd Gleason. I'll turn it over to Todd.
Okay, thank you, Steven. Good afternoon. Let me start by not only thanking Steven, but Three Part Advisors for the Southwest IDEAS Conference and putting the whole program together yesterday and today. Of course, our opportunity to come and present and meet with investors is always appreciated, especially when it's local for us and can drive down the street. As he mentioned, Peter Johansson, Chief Financial and Strategy Officer, is with me today. I'm going to go through the material here fairly quickly, I hope. Many of you might know the company, so I'll touch on some of those updates and high points. You will resonate if you do know the firm. But, you know, also the cadence of the presentation is, you know, designed for an introduction to CECO for those folks that might be fairly new. Then we'll have time for some Q&A as we wrap it up.
Okay, with that, we are going to be making some forward-looking statements and referencing some Non-GAAP financials. So feel free to read this at your leisure. Company overview. Look, the headline of the slide is not just a throwaway headline. We believe and are committed to, and we have developed a nice momentum towards building, we believe, the leading global sustainable industrial environmental solutions company. So that's a mouthful. Not the building part, maybe. But, you know, we are, as you'll hear today, we're very global. We're proud of that. We've invested significantly to become an international organization with capabilities that touch the most important economies in the world. Everything we do sells a product or an engineered solution or a service that solves in a sustainable way industrial, heavy industry companies' challenges with respect to their processes. So we help them clean their air, their water.
We help their energy products and solutions be within compliance for regulatory purposes, but also prolonged and run efficiently for their process accuracy and ultimately their ability to create their end value to their customers, so on the left side of the slide, you can see that, as I articulated already, sort of we believe that we have been building, advancing, and transitioning three really very well-positioned areas within the industrial landscape. We have a leading position in industrial air. We have been building a leading position in niche areas of industrial water, and I'll touch on that again in a little bit, and then the company's legacy has almost always been an energy portfolio that solves two or three key areas within energy, and so we continue to invest in what is legacy energy.
But as it transitions to where energy is and is going, we feel the company is maintaining its leadership position during that transition. I already said about 50% of our sales are outside of the U.S. That has grown in the four and a half years that I've joined from about 35% of sales outside of the U.S. to now about a 50/50 balance. And we have been growing nicely over the last three, three and a half years. We've almost doubled the company revenues and more than doubled the company's earnings over that period of time. And two-thirds of that growth has been organic, one-third has been inorganic, and we're going to touch on those as we go. Being a programmatic acquirer of leading niche businesses is a big part of what we have done and will continue to do.
And along the way, we believe we have created a good operating model and therefore shareholder value creation all around sustainable results. And, you know, our focused capital allocation model, like I said, which does look towards acquisitions, but first and foremost looks towards great internal organic and capital investments to support our ability to execute, is where we spend our dollars and we maintain a really healthy balance sheet along the way. I can assure you that I and Peter and our management team are very aligned with what I think shareholders would want to be aligned with, which is to create a sustainable organization that delivers premium shareholder value, and our compensation is based on that type of value creation.
Backing up now, so if that is a bit of a bumper sticker on the company, while we are diverse and while we do serve a number of different industries, 100% of our products are sold for these three reasons. All three, or at least one of the three reasons. In fact, I would argue that it's almost unlikely that it wouldn't be all three. If you're manufacturing cars and you paint those cars, those paint fumes are dangerous. They're dangerous to the employees. They're dangerous to the work environment. And that could gum up machines and reduce the longevity of those machines. And it's certainly dangerous to the community if you're just spewing them into Mother Nature. That's just one example. We eliminate those volatile organic compounds for Tesla. And they depend on that. They depend on it because we're helping them protect their people.
We're helping them to protect the environment around Austin, Texas, or Fremont, California, or other locations, and we're helping Elon Musk protect his multi-billion-dollar investment in the facility so that he and his organization will get every ounce of the duration of that capital investment in their manufacturing production process, so it's not just words that we say, it's mission critical. We believe our customer relies on CECO Environmental and our family of industrial brands for these three reasons, and in almost every case for all three of these reasons. Just a snapshot here of sort of our global balance. We don't just sell to global customers and then ship them and deliver them. We do that on occasion, but we're there. We're where they're at.
If we have a customer out of South Korea, it's because we have a facility outside of Seoul, South Korea, and we have a great position there for selling products in the rest of East Asia or Southeast Asia. We are in China, for China. We don't export out of China, so we've had a nice growing business in China. It represents about $30 million of our revenue, and it's growing nicely, but again, it's an investment for the region within the region. It's important that we have a footprint for sales, engineering, manufacturing and assembly, and project management, and that needs to be globally balanced. I mentioned our capital allocation just a few minutes ago. The left side of this slide kind of gives you a visual depiction of that, how it goes around the clock, so to speak.
And then on the right side of the slide, it sort of goes from top to bottom in alignment with that visual. So, you know, for every $1 that we generate in free cash flow, you know, before we generate that $1 in free cash flow, we're first and foremost investing in our businesses to sustain organic growth, to sustain a high-quality organization, to have the best manufacturing processes possible. And so in our operations, the first dollars that we spent is all about investing in growth, expansion, market leadership, and capital. Invariably, we have money left over in free cash flow. And we'd put that free cash flow to work, first and foremost, to support more growth. We find, we think, very good, well-run small businesses that we purchase for an accretive multiple. And then we help those businesses grow.
Coming into 2024, in my three and a half years coming into the year as CEO, we had made eight acquisitions, and starting in 2022, so 2022 and 2023, we made eight relatively small acquisitions. We've doubled four of the eight in less than two years in terms of their revenue. We buy businesses that we believe very much so that we're going to keep and incentivize the management teams. We're going to invest in them for growth. We might be leveraging our infrastructure. We might be leveraging our ability to help them grow internationally or introduce their product or their services and solutions to other industries. And many times we're actually using them to make introductions to us. They have approved vendor list certifications that we don't have. Now we can bring more products through their organization.
So in a way, it's sort of a reverse growth model based on the acquisitions we've made. But the acquisitions we make are for growth, and they're for future growth within our organization. We have maintained a very healthy balance sheet. We have no problem, you know, putting some debt on our balance sheet because we believe strongly in our financial results. We'll pay that off. We're currently at around one and a half times. We announced a fairly large acquisition for us that will close in the early part of Q1 next year. That will take us to about two and a half times levered as we enter the year. You can expect that is, you know, fine.
From a debt servicing perspective, you know, we can certainly go higher in our debt management program and our capacity, but we'll likely pull that back down to, you know, one and a half to two. So somewhere between one and a half to two and a half is our most comfortable zone, and then, look, we do have a remaining $10 million left on our buyback. We will be somewhat programmatic with our buyback or selective and, you know, timely. When the market, you know, we think unfairly, you know, forces stocks to go in a negative direction overall, then we'll put our capital to use. It's for us, it's all about driving economic value.
If the best use for our economic value is, and it first and always will be, our organic growth, if the next best use for our capital or our remaining cash flow is paying down debt, buying back stock, or making an M&A purchase, then we'll deploy the capital to create the most economic value. And so far over the last three years, we're proud of our results. And those results, I think, show on this slide. On the left side, you can see the pie chart that shows where we were when I joined the organization. We were 300 and doesn't say, but just have to take my word for it. So about $315-$325 million of revenue. We'll have almost doubled that by the end of this year. We were 65% in energy, and of that, about 80% of our revenues were long, long cycle businesses or projects.
We have, you can see on the right side, a much more balanced portfolio, and by the way, our energy business has grown. It has not shrunk in terms of dollars. It just has grown at a slower pace than our investments and our results in industrial air and industrial water, where yes, we have made more acquisitions. We made one in energy. The rest we've made in industrial air and industrial water, and those businesses have been growing at over 20% growth for the last three years. That said, we're pretty optimistic about our position in power markets and natural gas markets, which we would say are potentially going to demonstrate a supercycle over the next few years, and the investment thesis in CECO has long been, you should be interested in the company if there's a power supercycle.
And if that does happen, I think that that's yet maybe another reason to pay attention to our growth story. In the middle of the slide, I won't read all the numbers, but we're certainly proud of the results. Top line, our backlog is a demonstration of our future growth. So the fact that we now have a record backlog of $438 million coming out of Q3. We've said that we expect our backlog to grow as we exit the year. In fact, October was our largest month bookings ever at over $100 million for one month. So we're excited about the markets that we're seeing. Some of it we feel has been delayed throughout the year. There's been a number of factors, the election, interest rates coming down, resource availability, just a lot of noise in the marketplace.
Not one thing in particular, but just been a bit of delays. We've been feeling delays in bookings, delays in revenues all year. So, you know, we don't have anti-gravity shoes if the market just has a bit of a reset moment. But the fact of the matter is that we would say our backlog being at a record level is very encouraging as we head into next year. For those that know the company, but kind of sometimes need a little bit of a refresher course, I've already said it a few times. Our revenue is 100% industrial. The industries we serve might be for home building, engineered woods, for example, or might be for automotive production or for, you know, other vehicle production, semiconductors, et cetera.
But 100% of what we sell is for those industries to manufacture product or to sell product into a variety of their end markets. You can see on the diversified, we highlight some of our bigger industries. None of these are usually greater than more than five, maybe 10% of our sales. So it's a very, you know, spread out, balanced industrial exposure that we have or fairly nimble. Semiconductors is having a good few years. We'll move some resources a little bit more to focus on that market. And if that market slows down, we'll kind of pivot our businesses to go focus on metals or electric vehicle or battery or something of that nature. Industrial production creates a lot of challenging air and water environments. So there's a lot for us to sell across industry.
And on the energy side, in almost rank order, I would say of both opportunities and strengths for us, the power market, the data center, midstream oil and gas, things of that nature are fairly important markets for our now 30%-40% of our revenues that are associated with energy. Those would be three of the larger, more important markets for our products. And you can see down below how we sort of highlight that we're 100% environmental solutions. You know, again, without reading, you know, all of the words there on the energy side, we eliminate emissions in the power generation space. We filter and clean gas as it's going through the pipeline process for safety and for efficiency and for capability purposes.
On water, you know, we're capturing oily water from produced water, and we're making sure that it's environmentally safe for reinjection and of the right quality for other uses. You know, in food processing, if you're Tyson Foods and you're making chicken nuggets, you know, again, you have a lot of heat and a lot of oil and a lot of things that are contaminating your environment. We're helping you with that capture, that filtration, that cleanliness, so that whether you're disposing of that water or reusing it, our systems are well known and fundamental in those processes, and then the other examples as listed on the slide. S o because we're 100% industrial and we're 100% environmental, how is it that our revenues sort of, you know, come to be? If you take $100 of our sales, the first 30 is relatively repeating. It's services, it's aftermarket parts.
We're selling into distribution with filters and small pumps and things on a very regular basis, so the first $30 of our $100 example is, you know, repeatable, short cycle, small products and services and aftermarket. The next $25 of our $100 example is what we kind of call it the standard products, maybe with some loose configuration, so you're ordering a dust collector, but it's going to have a certain design to it for industrial air capture. Or you're ordering an industrial water solution that has a certain capacity that needs to be associated with it. Standard for us, but we're going to tweak it a little bit. That's the next 25, and then the largest is we're hired to help solve a fairly complex challenge.
There's in every one of our markets where this 45% of our sales, we would say we're either a number one, two, or three market leader in the markets we play, and there's maybe three to five companies that we compete against in each of those markets. So if you're hiring somebody to solve a very large power generation emissions challenge, there's three of us that can do that, maybe four around the world. And that's, you know, represents a large part of our revenue is that we're very good at the engineering solutions, the project management, the supply chain management, the installation services for fairly medium to large complex projects. On the right side of the slide, we highlight our sales pipeline, which has grown from $1.5 billion when I joined to $4 billion today. Why has that grown so much in the last four years?
A third of that comes from the acquisitions we've made, which have allowed us to expand our markets, allowed us to go after more geographic and vertical markets. Another third, it's probably the largest third, is we have incentivized and changed our team's focus to not only sell to just one or two end markets, but to instead now start to sell them to three, four, or five end markets. So I would say more RFPs. Our teams are bidding on and going after way more project opportunities than they were three, four years ago. And we've invested in that capability. One of our investments has been we've added 100 resources to our team in India. Instead of 30 resources, we now have 130 resources, and they put together a lot more sales proposal packages. We do a lot more engineering design work, project management work, et cetera.
So that team in India is a very cost-effective way for us to go after more growth. And then I'd say, you know, about the last third is our markets have been really good. They've been growing coming out of, you know, the 2021 timeframe. More industrial expansion in the U.S. and in Europe. More investment in infrastructure around the world. Energy markets, a tremendous investment in renewable energy, tremendous investment in infrastructure. There's been some things that have governed or have slowed down growth. We've had a lot of conflict around the world. We've had some economic challenges in various end markets and geographies. But overall, I would say the markets that we participated have been good.
While our growth has been strong over a three and a half year period, the Q3 was the result of some of our challenges in the year with the project delays and the booking delays that I mentioned. Now, there were some highlights in the Q3. Our backlog grew by 11% and our orders grew by 12%. Orders for us are real sales. These do not debook. Even at COVID, we had maybe 3% of our backlog debooked. 100% of those debookings rebooked the next year. Okay? When we get an order, these are signed purchase orders with fairly extensive terms and conditions, oftentimes comes with a deposit. So when we say our orders grew 12%, that's future sales. Now, in the quarter, our sales were down 9% and our Adjusted EBITDA was down a little bit.
We had about $20 million of projects that could have happened in the Q3, that should have happened in the Q3, all got delayed to the Q4 and into 2025, so we've seen a lot of projects that have gotten delayed, nothing canceled, but I would say our Q3 results were negatively impacted by some of those delays that sort of pushed things out, so we were very pleased with our orders bookings, which, like I said, are essentially sales. Those sales just don't hit the P&L, and they will in six months or in nine months, but they just won't right away, and unfortunately, the project delays did impact our sales and our results in the Q3 , but with that, we are proud to show on this slide, and we've articulated our commitment to not only growth, but margin expansion.
This slide shows our gross margin dollars and our gross margin expansion on a trailing 12-month basis. So every one of these columns is a new quarter looking back 12 months. So you can see that where we started a few years ago, our gross margins were a little less than 30% on a trailing 12-month basis. And the most recent quarter, despite some challenges, were almost 35%. So a four to 500 basis points expansion in gross margins, that comes from productivity, project execution, logistics management. That's about a third of that margin expansion. Another third is the intentional investments we've made organically and inorganically, our M&A to improve our mix, higher margin businesses, higher margin services. So that will be, you know, fortifying our margins going forward as well.
I think, you know, the last third of our margin expansion here has just been just good volumes absorbing some of our, you know, manufacturing costs. Our ability to get more lean enterprise as a result of that is in addition to our gross margins. And that really falls through to EBITDA margins as well. So really proud of the team's efforts to create a highly productive, high-quality execution organization. For us, it's imperative that we maintain and continue to grow our gross margins as we improve our business mix because it benefits our EBITDA margins, of course. Just a quick highlight here on our backlog. These columns represent, again, similarly a trailing 12-month backlog. It's a little bit of a busy slide. There will be a quiz later. I'll see if you guys were paying attention. The green line shows some of our sort of revenue.
And then, excuse me, the yellow line is the revenue and the green line is our orders per quarter. So you can sort of see how we've been sort of building our orders growth over time, which has been building our backlog over time. But regardless, three years ago, our backlog was at $200 million. It's nice to be exiting the year. And let's just call it $400 million-$450 million, which is certainly where we expect to be exiting the year with a new record backlog. Let's go with around $450 million. So that just shows the type of growth that we have coming up heading into next year. We did adjust our guidance. For the last two and a half years when we started to introduce guidance, it's always been an annual guidance. We don't give quarterly guidance.
Nothing wrong with companies that give quarterly guidance, just not what we do. In 2022 and in 2023, we consistently sort of beat and raised our annual guidance. We're proud of that. Not because we were trying to be uber conservative. We believe that we give a good guidance and it's balanced. But we can see things that could go better in the year, and then we execute on those things. And when we have challenges, we try to offset those. This year, we started off with a guidance at the very top. We raised it halfway through the year because our backlog was looking good. Our pipeline was looking good. And the projects that we had delay in the second half of this year, we did not anticipate delaying in the second half of this year. So we thought that we could raise our guidance again.
Turns out we were a little optimistic or that we had these project delays that had happened that we just couldn't quite overcome. So we went back to our original guidance. So where we entered the year with our guidance and as we now start to exit the year, it's the first year that we unfortunately haven't been able to just consistently beat and raise, but we're proud of the fact that we sort of went back to what we said initially. The one thing that we did raise was our book-to-bill. Where we started at around 1.1, we're likely going to do 1.2 for the full year. Again, book-to-bill just adds to more backlog as we go into next year, and it's exactly what it sounds like. That's 20% growth for future quarters.
These are just a highlight of the acquisitions that we've either announced and completed already. Those are the top two on the right. In EnviroCare, you know, $13-$14 million-dollar revenue business for industrial air. In WK, a business of similar size, a little bit larger, internationally based in both Germany and Singapore. They sort of have a dual headquarters. Both of those add vertical market expansion and geographic market expansion for our industrial air business, which is already in a very strong leadership position. And then the most recently announced acquisition, our first public transaction in my tenure here at CECO, not in my career, is we announced the acquisition of Profire, a Nasdaq PFIE. We closed on that acquisition. We expect in the early part of 2025, so in just a month or two down the road. And significant synergies on growth on all three.
And Profire represents our first acquisition where we've said and we expect to get cost synergies. And those cost synergies are specific to the fact that we don't need them to have their public company costs. You know, two boards of directors don't make much sense. Two listings on the Nasdaq certainly don't make much sense. And the list goes on. So we will get synergies on the cost side with Profire almost immediately. And all of these things are reflected in our 2025 guidance. We give our next year's guidance on the Q3 earnings call because we look out a year. And so our guidance as we look out for 2025 is reflected here. Getting a range on the revenue side between $700 million and $750 million, the midpoint of which is about 25% growth. How do we get to 25% growth?
About half of it comes from acquisitions. And that's the acquisitions that I already mentioned. So these are known deals that we've already closed or will close in the early part of the year. And those acquisitions we sort of put in at normal organic growth rates for those businesses. So we're not putting, you know, unrealistic growth in our guidance for next year for those acquisitions. The other half of our growth is all organic. A portion of that are the project revenues that delayed in 2024 that roll into 2025 that we will most certainly execute in Q1 and Q2. And then the balance of our organic growth, which would represent sort of mid to high single digit growth, if only on its own, is just our organic growth based on our backlog and our order book that we see.
So the top line to get to 25% revenue growth is reflected in those categories that I just articulated. And the bottom half of the slide is our EBITDA dollar growth. Each of those represents 20% EBITDA margins. So the, you know, the carryover, the additional organic, and the M&A deals all have 20% EBITDA margins. And that's based on either the business profile of the M&A that we've acquired, like Profire, which currently has 20% EBITDA margins, or the fact that it's in our backlog and we have productivity as we head into next year. And of course, we're able to leverage our G&A infrastructure that's already in place. So the gross margins fall through at a higher rate for growth.
Anyway, regardless, you can see that our outlook for next year is to reach somewhere between $100 million-$190 million of Adjusted EBITDA or margins in the 13%, 13.5%, 14% range, which obviously would be a nice uptick from this year, so in summary, it's all about, for us, sustainable value creation. Sustainable work environment for our employees, sustainable solutions for our customers, environmentally sustainable solutions. For us as all shareholders, having a sustainable value creation model that is built on a balance of operating really good businesses in really good markets and capturing the growth that we believe is rightfully ours. Investing in those businesses to grow beyond the markets that they've served historically, whether it's vertical markets or geographic markets. And of course, finding good smart acquisitions at the right price that add economic value to our business on day one.
And we believe grow exponentially higher with our ownership and our investments in those businesses, which produced great free cash flows for future investments. You can see some other things that we highlight here in terms of our, you know, strength of the markets that we're in and the pipeline that we're building. But with that, I'm just going to go ahead and open it up for any comments and questions while we have about a little over five minutes left. Yes, right here. What percentage of the business is regulatory? Look, it's a good question. I'm going to start by saying if you told me that regulations go away, there's no scenario that it doesn't create a lot of noise. You know, like I just don't understand what that means where I sit today. Let's just be clear.
But there's an entire infrastructure, not just products, but I mean, you know, you almost have to sort of to make the point, you almost have to make it sound like I'm joking about it, which I'm not. We take this topic very seriously. But there's, I mean, every engineering design for a natural gas power plant has a regulatory emissions management solution associated with it, right? I mean, it going away, just everyone goes starts from zero, right? I mean, it's not like they go, "Oh, well, just take that off the end product and good news is we'll just kill everyone on the job site." No, I mean, you have to reconfigure the whole system. So part of me wants to say zero, right?
I mean, if a regulation goes away and we're comfortable with extremely risky air, water emissions, like, okay, over time, that has to be a negative to a whole bunch of companies, right? But on 2020, I don't understand how that could benefit or hurt anyone in the beginning, right? It's just going to create a lot of confusion and noise. So I'm more interested in that negative than I am regulation going away because our products are just so fundamental to the product success category beyond just the environmental regulation, right? Now, I will say that easing of permitting and certain regulations actually moves projects much faster. I might submit, regardless of how you felt about the election, that a Harris victory would have created more sustainable stability moving fast.
You just go, "Okay, this is we're going to make a prediction that you're going to keep most of the programs in place." A Trump victory certainly turns things on in a different direction. Natural gas pipelines are already moving faster in anticipation of faster permitting and less regulation on natural gas infrastructure. That's a benefit. So I think it's a balance between pluses and minuses at this point. But I don't expect there to be a significant change in regulation that no one's modeling that. And we talked to the GE Vernovas and the Siemens, and we talked to all the industrial companies. And I would say people are interested in the topic, but they're more interested in things moving faster. Yes, Beck here.
I was going to ask a different way.
Have you quantified how much of your backlog in sales has been attributed to the Infrastructure Act? And do you have any better visibility or not so much now on future?
Yeah. Look, I think it's more thematic than the Infrastructure Act. If anything, part of our delays this year were the complicated nature of governmental monies being distributed. So while the theme of the CHIPS Act and the Infrastructure Act has influenced investment in industrial production and bringing things onshore, reshoring, that those projects are sort of still evolving and not yet underway because there's a lot of challenges with those acts a little bit to get, you know, to sort of really get the... So we haven't benefited, we wouldn't say, from a lot of projects yet that come out of that.
So if those acts were to go in a different direction, we still think that the real, you know, growth and according to all of our, you know, sort of projects, they still move forward, that we want to have more production in semiconductors here in the U.S. And the CHIPS Act certainly is an interesting investment, but those projects all seem to be pretty secure. Look, again, time will tell, but I think we all sort of suspect strongly what's coming. And that's an unknown, but I think we suspect strongly what's coming with there's going to be some challenges to those, you know, governmental programs. What we've booked so far in the Q4 wouldn't reflect that there's any difference other than a significant amount of need for industrial expansion and power.
Hey, John.
What do you...
Kind of going back to the first question about regulations, what do you see, if anything, going on internationally in the areas we all see destroying affordable air conditioning in China and the US? Do you see that driving business potential in those areas, not so much because of regulation in those areas, but just the desire or need seeing that?
No, I mean, like, I think that's the right way that we're thinking about it, John. I mean, you go to places in, you know, Asia, you know, you go to places in the Middle East where regulation has either been nonexistent. Certainly, there's not been regulation, right? And so you can certainly have a different power process and a different, you know, emissions process. That's all changing. Like we're being asked now to bid more and participate more on programs there, even without government regulation.
So look, for us, I think as a global citizen, most companies and most organizations just see that it's some of it is regulation for the environment or it's environmental, you know, sustainability, but it is. It's just. It's almost like a quality of workplace environment for safety and for you know, I call it machining longevity, right? So for us, I don't think there's. I would say this. I'm not changing my guidance for next year or for the next three years based on this topic. And I'm not saying I'm not poo-pooing it off. And again, I'll go use the term again. We don't have anti-gravity shoes. What I'm more what gets me probably and other CEOs a little bit more nervous isn't necessarily the environmental topic.
Just like I didn't get excited and raise guidance when they came out with the CHIPS Act or the Infrastructure Act. And I can't think of a single project that somebody's told me, "You won because of the CHIPS Act." Not a single one. If anything, we've seen projects that we've won that they're going... we're trying to figure out how to get access to these dollars. So it's going to take us longer, but we're going to build it anyway. We're just trying to... we're pausing to get access to these dollars. But I would say most CEOs would probably stand here before you and say, "We just... we'd like stability," right? So if you give me high costs or no regulation, like, we'll adjust. If you give me low costs and you give me, you know, more regulation, we'll adjust.
But if you tell me that interest rates are going from three to eight over the next two years and then from eight to three over the next two years, everyone's waiting to see what that means, right? Now, I'm just using that as an example, right? So I would say the faster we can find out what this all means, the better. But for us, I feel like we've seen and felt the pause in our most important markets, and that's impacted our 2024. And I think now that we're feeling like that, the lights are turning on and those pauses are going away. So we'll probably have some more things to figure out. Yes, sir. Who are some of those competitors on your job that you're running? On power, it's a company out of the Netherlands called Braden. That's our most formidable competitor.
are others, but it's largely us and Braden on power emissions. On other areas of industrial air, it's a product line, by product line, you know, theme. Most of them are private companies. Most of them are regional private companies. There are a few companies like Donaldson that sell industrial air baghouses and dust collectors, things of that nature. But most of the companies are, you know, Dürr Megtec does a nice job with regenerative thermal oxidation for VOC elimination and some other products. But most of our competitors are regional and privately held. Or if they are part of a big company like the Donaldson example or PECO within Parker Hannifin, which does natural gas separation and filtration, it's a relatively small part of a very big company. So, you know, we like the competition that's out there. We think it's fairly stable.
There's a relatively large moat around the qualifications that are required to get into these markets. So we don't see a lot of disruption from a competition perspective. Big, small, or medium, we're probably one of the larger players in all the markets we play in. Back there. How did you pay for it? Cash. We'll be using cash. I mean, we tried to give them an IOU and they told us they preferred the cash. So we'll go ahead and just have to pay them in the first quarter. So yeah, we're using cash from our revolver. Yes. And that'll get us to the 2.5-2.7 times EBITDA levered sort of on day one. And then we're, you know, going to obviously work that down. Back to you. Yep. Just got one last one.
So when you look at your backlog, what is the difference between, let's say, your standard margin and your real margin? So you booked them and you're seeing a big difference. What does that range look like of even execution of the backlog?
Yeah. Well, I mean, are you saying that what goes into our backlog, does it get better when we actually deliver it? Yeah. It goes, yeah, probably we execute at about 100 basis points better than what's in our backlog. So what we see is in our backlog, we typically have executed 100 basis points better. We have some contingency that we put in there and now with all of our major projects. And so that contingency gets, you know, gets released as we execute. We do a good job of managing our supply chain, getting some more productivity.
So we're a little conservative on most of our, you know, expectations on margins. So if a job goes in at, you know, 30%, our expectation wouldn't be that it would come out at 31% or 32%, but that's been our realization. On the standard products, if we're selling more short cycle standard products, it's higher margin than our big projects. But the big projects still have really good EBITDA margins. So you might see us a year from now, if we have a significant pipeline of power jobs that are $50 million-$75 million projects, you might hear us explaining to you why our gross margins are down 100 basis points, but our EBITDA margins are up 100 basis points. And it's just because those projects have very little SG&A. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Good luck.