Feel like I'm always away from you. Here we go.
All right. Good morning, everyone. My name's Eric Luebchow, the Senior Analyst at Wells Fargo covering telecom services and communications infrastructure. Really pleased this morning to be joined by CEO Dan Peyovich from Dycom. He recently took over the role from Steve Nielsen. So thank you for having us. Thank you for coming today.
Yeah. Thanks, Eric. Thanks for having us. And I point everybody to the Safe Harbor statement that it's not on the screen, but apparently it's on the webcast, and refer you to our website for any forward-looking statements. Let's jump in.
Yeah. Let's do it. So just to start off big picture, Dan, you took over as the company's COO, I believe, in mid-2021, before recently taking the CEO seat from Steve Nielsen, who was in the role for a long time. So maybe you could frame your priorities as CEO today for the company, what the opportunity set looks like, what you're pursuing from a growth opportunity over the next, you know, decade or so.
Absolutely. So I'd start with it's an exciting time in our business. It's been a busy four years, certainly. But as we look ahead, you know, whether it's you can add AT&T's announcement this morning to the over 30-35 million homes that have been added from our customers to be passed, you know, in the coming years. That's significant. You got the whole AI hyperscaler space. That's significant. We'll see exactly how BEAD plays out, but certainly there's a number of rural homes that have to get passed. It's, it's really just an exciting time to be in our space. And certainly as we look forward, you know, with multiple three or five years ahead, we just think we're well-positioned. We're in all 50 states now, with some of the acquisitions we did this past year. We've got great coverage, you know, around the country, across different customers.
So, you know, I think our ability to see some of the opportunities is significant. And, you know, we're very, very bullish on the opportunities ahead.
And one of those, as you touched on, is fiber to the home demand. Obviously, AT&T had an announcement this morning to get to, I think, up to 50 million inclusive of their Gigapower JV.
Right.
You know, our estimates are that we're at around 50% of addressable homes today in the U.S. have a direct fiber connection. It might be a little north of that. Maybe you could talk about how much further you think the cycle could go. You touched on there's at least 30-35 million homes, and it seems like that number goes up every few months. But there are also a lot of other smaller telcos and overbuilders building as well. So where do you think that 50% goes longer term, in terms of fiber builds?
Absolutely. So, you know, before my time here, what we've been saying collectively is that private capital's gonna pass about 80% of the homes in the country. So if there's roughly 140 million homes, you know, that gets you to 110, 120 million homes that are gonna get passed. And to your point, let's say there's 75, 80 million that are passed today. So you still got a number that are just gonna get passed by our customers. And again, you know, I would point to, I mentioned AT&T, but to go deeper into that, you know, you've got T-Mobile and the acquisitions that they've done in this past year with Lumos and Metronet. You got the Verizon Frontier combination and what that's gonna look like.
Each one of these where they're investing capital, not only are they bringing the money, but they're also talking about, you know, what are the additional homes that we're gonna pass? And obviously the economics are working for them. So as we look towards that, you've got 35, so you got 9 million out of T-Mobile's acquisitions. You got 7 to 12 now that Verizon Frontier is added. You got the increase from AT&T. There's been others, you know, Uniti, and I think they added another million homes in what they're doing there with Windstream. So when we add all that collectively, it really just kinda tunes back out to that 80%. And in fact, Verizon's numbers, I think, amount to 80% of their footprint.
So really kind of just come back to that 80% and then filling in the rest, you know, with a mix of public funding and private funding.
Yeah. Fair enough. One other big thematic we've seen in the industry is just on fiber M&A. Some big announcements in the last few months: Verizon Frontier, Ziply, Bell Canada, Lumen has a strategic review for their mass markets business. Do you view further consolidation as an opportunity for Dycom, given that you tend to do well with scaled players that have, you know, large multi-market footprint builds? Is it a risk given it makes your revenue base a little more concentrated? How do you view M&A amongst your customers?
To your point and to my earlier comments, I guess I got a little ahead of that last question. There's been a lot of activity in this past year, you know, including refinancing as well too. Generally speaking, anytime somebody's gonna bring more capital, they're bringing it for a reason, right? They see an opportunity. It's no different than us with the acquisitions that we do. You know, we see an opportunity and we think that by bringing it into our business or for them bringing it into their business, that they can do more with it, right? So generally speaking, we always look at that as a positive sign and a positive indication. And as we talked about before, they've followed it up with announcements about how they're gonna take that and make it something better.
Or certainly at least affirm what they were gonna build before, but generally speaking, they're talking about doing more.
You touched on the BEAD program, but it's been an area of a lot of investor interest in the last few months, given the change in the administration. So we're seeing some signs of progress. We had Louisiana announce preliminary awards. Maybe you could talk about the opportunity you see for Dycom in building rural broadband and whether it's through BEAD or one of the other, you know, state or federal programs that's out there to provision broadband. Is that, you know, how big of an opportunity do you see that for your company?
Yeah. I think let's start with outside of BEAD, 'cause I think that's easy. It's less dynamic today to talk about what's happening outside of BEAD. Part of the reason Louisiana had five million, $500 million left over is because they've built a lot of those passings. And so there's a lot of other projects, whether it's RDoF, whether it's just many of the state grant programs, there's a lot of other money that's coming in from a grant perspective, from a federal or state perspective to hit these homes. So you've got that that's already happening, certainly, you know, moving along. As we look at BEAD, BEAD's a massive program, right? However things end up ultimately play out. And satellite fixed wireless has always been a part of it, certainly gonna be a part of it going forward.
Maybe it gets a little bit bigger. Who knows, right? I don't, I think that's too soon to call the ball. But regardless of that, you've got $42 billion that's committed. You've got the match that's gotta happen from the customers. That takes you to about $50 billion. Even if you slice a piece of that away, that's still a massive opportunity across our space that's gonna take, you know, by the terms, only four years to build. So that's, that's a huge amount of potential revenue across those four years, even if it does get scaled down a bit. So I think that's the first part. The second part, you talked about Louisiana, 95% of Louisiana is gonna be fiber.
So again, that's just an early indicator that, I think the point to point to there is that the customers are saying, "Hey, 95% of that build actually makes sense for us from an economic standpoint to bring 25% or more of our own capital and that we see value there." That's the takeaway. It's not about, you know, some of the political things and what's gonna happen there. As long as the economics work, and we'll see there's 10 other states right now, I believe, at last count that are going through the subgrantee process. If we see the same kind of results, then that means that it's attractive that the appetite is there from the market, right? From the subgrantees, from our customers. That's all a sign that the economics are there. It's probably gonna happen.
I would, I think it would be hard to believe that, you know, the T-Mobiles or the AT&Ts or, I think, the Comcasts, I'm trying to remember everybody that was in Louisiana. It'd be hard to believe that all those folks that are saying that we will commit our own capital and this works for us, that it would get rolled back later, that portion of it. Now, maybe like the other $500 million that Louisiana has left over, maybe something happens with that. Like I said, satellite's always gonna be a component because there's just some houses that it doesn't make sense for anybody to get out there with fiber. And if that gets a little bit bigger, we still think that the program is significant.
Yeah. No, that's fair. I think, I think it's come up a lot with the Trump appointment about what satellite could mean, but I think alternative technologies like satellite or maybe fixed wireless were always gonna be a part of the program.
Yeah. And just one more point on fixed wireless. For fixed wireless, somebody still has to get fiber to the towers, right? So that's still an opportunity for us regardless.
Fair enough. Fair enough. So one of the other big growth opportunities that you touched on your earnings call was, were AI and connecting data centers. So Lumen has been the most public around, you know, large awards from hyperscalers. We just talked to Verizon. They said that's, it's an area where they have interest as well. So you recently did announce an award with Lumen on your last earnings call. So maybe you could kind of help frame the opportunity set of what this long-haul and middle-mile build is going to look like for Dycom to connect, you know, data centers or connect fiber to increasingly remote locations.
Yeah. And I think the headline I would start with is, is this is hyperscalers talking about a need now for these long-haul networks that haven't been done in 20 or 30 years, high capacity, so we're talking about fiber counts that are significantly, significantly, if I can get the word out, in excess of what exists today. And they wanna do it, right? So high capacity, low latency, so they wanna make sure that as they move their data centers closer, 'cause they're trying to get us connected, whether that's AI or, or to our devices or what comes next, self-driving cars, you name it, they need that latency number to come down. They're also talking about redundancy and diversity or triversity so that they wanna have data centers being fed not from just one network, but potentially from two or three networks.
When you take that and you scale it across the country, you're talking about each of those being tens of thousands of potential miles, right? And then you multiply that, how many times, how many hyperscalers there are. And a lot of other companies that would be behind the hyperscalers, maybe not at the same magnitude, but still there. You know, we, we think that, very excited about the Lumen award, certain, you know, certainly a partnership that, we've been working with Lumen for a long time. We're excited to go do that build. We're already starting to ramp into the award that we got, with that first kind of $5 billion that they talked about. We really see it as a much bigger picture, overall. We're having conversations with multiple customers. We're having conversations with the hyperscalers, and just excited to see what comes out there.
But the magnitude of the opportunity is significant.
When you look at these builds, is it predominantly updates to the long-haul network? Are there opportunities in more kind of metro areas as well, that related to AI?
Yeah. I think it's a really good point, Eric, because it's not just a short-term opportunity. So you have the long-haul networks. So what Lumen talked about in the first $5 billion, right? This has got Microsoft and I believe AWS and Google that they announced that are in the first $5 billion. That's mostly overpull work. And so overpull work is existing conduits that they have, you know, they have a number of conduits that continue that go nationwide, you know, between these NFL cities, state to state, that they're able to just come in rather quickly in the world of our time, start putting fiber in place for the hyperscalers. That's a unique scenario, right?
To have that, that plant in place, not to have to go through the same kind of permitting, not to have to go through the engineering, really lets them, you know, hit that very quickly, and can ramp up much quicker. What they're talking about after the $5 billion and what a lot of other folks are looking at would be new construction work. I think they talked about $3-$3.5 billion, that's some mix of that. Then they have another $3 billion or so behind it. That's gonna take longer. You know, you gotta get through the permitting. Permitting to go through these major metropolitan cities takes certainly a lot longer than it did 20 years ago when the networks were originally built. These are gonna be ultimately multi-year programs, especially when you're talking about the potential for tens of thousands of miles.
And so we see it not only as an initial, you know, kind of immediate opportunity, but we see something playing out, you know, over certainly a five-plus year horizon. That's the intercity part, right? That's that long-haul part. There's the intra-city, where you gotta connect the data centers. So that's existing data centers. So you're gonna have a network that goes essentially data center to data center, city to city. And then, you know, we all have to remember that they're trying to build a lot more data centers, exponentially more than they have today. But there's power constraints and other things that are to come in the way. So you've got the immediate opportunity to connect those data centers within a metro ring or, you know, again, within the city itself.
But you also have the future opportunity where you bring new data centers to market, and now you gotta go get those connected. So it's really both.
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's been fascinating to see the increasingly rural locations that some of these data center builds have been announced, and it seems like that's a trend that's gonna go on for quite some time, so to kind of pivot to another topic, you talked about some of your smaller customers and how we define those depends on, you know, the quarter, whether they're top 10 or non-top 10, but you talked about a smaller customer cohort, outside the big telcos that may have slowed a little bit as they were assessing the opportunities, whether it was through BEAD or through some of the other state or federal programs.
So, what's your visibility on when those customers start to pick up again now that we have at least a little bit of visibility that BEAD is coming and, you know, we're starting to see some awards come out?
I'd start with, you know, we're pleased with the breadth of our business, so you know, we've expanded now to where our top 10 customers comprise about 80 or sorry, 75% of our total revenue, and our top five customers is about 55-56%. That's come down significantly over the past few years, so when you're looking, talking specific to us, and I'll talk about the smaller customers and some of the co-ops in a second, but when you're talking specific to us, you know, I would just point to, again, we've got a number of customers that are moving kind of in and out of that top 10. Some of these folks are real close on what the revenue burn is for us in a given quarter.
And so the kind of puts and takes that happen don't necessarily translate to more activity or less activity. Sometimes it's just a movement kind of within that machine. You know, for co-ops and some of the other folks, you know, they're trying to figure out BEAD, some of the other government grants, whether that's state or federal, and they're weaving that into what their plans are. So there has been a little bit of a slowdown and a pause as they wait to see what's gonna happen. And you know, we would think that that would time out likely with BEAD, so kind of back half of next year. But again, you know, we've built a really successful business serving these co-ops over the last handful of years. We've got really good run rate. It's been pretty consistent overall.
We feel good about, you know, that tranche of business. And again, we'll see how it plays out with some of the funding.
One other area that you guys have invested in recently, you acquired Black & Veatch's wireless business, and that was to help one customer in particular, who I can probably guess who it is, scale its Open RAN network. So maybe you could just talk a little bit about, you know, the opportunity with the Black & Veatch assets. Wireless was not a big part of Dycom's business prior to that. It seems like this gives you an opportunity with one customer in particular, but maybe there are more opportunities above and beyond, you know, doing work on, on that deal.
Absolutely, so we've had our wireless business for 16 years now, and of course, you know, it's ebbed and flowed with kind of the tides in that business line, but it's a business that we've invested in significantly. Again, you know, part of us being, you know, relatively pure play to the telecom space is that we really invest in making sure that we can deliver that top quality to our customers, whether that's quality certainly in the field, but quality of the process itself. So specific to wireline, you know, we've built robust actual software systems that lace into our customers that just we really think kind of put us at a level that we can deliver a more efficient overall process, so we put a lot of money in there, and we looked at the Black & Veatch opportunity.
We said, "Hey, this is something that we can see a lot of synergies come out of. It really fits well with our existing business. We know the customer." And in that particular case, you know, we know that they wanna do these equipment swaps, and then that's a good, you know, solid three-year program that we can really put eyes on and know that that's gonna be a good project for us. And then to your other point, you know, it gives us enough of a foundation that is, you know, the opportunities come up where the densification happens or there's other customers, you know, that we see opportunities with, you know, we can really pivot.
And if you look at your wireless business in general, I mean, outside of this one opportunity, you know, we cover the tower companies. We've seen wireless activity, you know, kind of peak early in the 5G cycle, and then it's kind of moderated over the last couple of years. But there are some signs that maybe they're starting to invest again in the network. Obviously, there's a wave of densification of cell sites coming. There's still mid-band spectrum upgrades. So any kind of reads on your kind of core organic wireless business on activity trends that you could see over the next couple of years?
Yeah. I believe AT&T recently said that wireless usage has gone up 20% year over year. So I just think as you kind of frame that out on a longer-term perspective, at some point, the densification's gotta happen, right? As the networks continue to develop, the AI conversations that we're having and the usage that's gonna come from that, at some point, you know, that business is gonna move up into the right. So, you know, again, we feel like we're in a good place for that. We'll kind of see what the timing looks like overall, but we feel really good about having the work that we have in front of us for the next three years and just being able to modulate into that.
And related to the Black & Veatch deal, Dycom has been more acquisitive in the last year than I think in previous years. You know, the Bigham Cable acquisition is another one that came up. You did a couple other smaller deals as well. So maybe you could just talk about the general environment for doing these kind of smaller tuck-in acquisitions. Obviously, you're the scale player in the industry. What's your underwriting criteria when you're looking for a deal, relative to deploying, you know, capital in other fashions like internal investment, buybacks, et cetera?
Yeah. I'll talk capital allocation first. So, you know, first of all, we're always looking to feed organic growth. And like I've talked about, we've had some significant growth these last several years, well, since I've been here, we've grown 50% by revenue. So, you know, quite a bit to make sure that we can continue to feed that machine. And I talked about our footprint, you know, the fact that we're across so many customers. We do wanna make sure that we can continue to serve them and meet the needs as they try and grow their network. So, you know, that's always first and foremost. We have, you know, just over a year, just over a year's time, we did four acquisitions. You know, all of them are integrating well. You know, we're certainly excited about 'em and the partnerships that we have there.
We're always out there looking for M&A opportunities. The industry obviously has gone through a lot of consolidation. We've done a lot of the consolidation over the last couple of decades. So it's not, you know, they're not falling out of the trees, but we see, you know, opportunities on a pretty regular basis. And, you know, we're opportunistic. If there's things that fit in with our culture, I mean, that's number one. It's gotta fit with the way that we look at the world, and then the second is, it's gotta fit with our strategy, right? Is it businesses that we can look to grow? Do they have a customer mix or a type of contract mix that we're looking for overall, and so, you know, where those opportunities exist, we're gonna commit the capital there.
And then, you know, the other one you talked about is share repurchases. And you know, over Dycom's history and certainly, you know, with Steve and Drew, you know, prior to myself and in the past four years, I mean, the really a lot of capital and a lot of attention in making sure that we're buying back shares and trying to return that value to shareholders. So, you know, we'll look to see where we can continue that.
Yeah. And do you see consolidation in the supply chains of your customers as well in terms of they wanna use fewer vendors, right? Like they, as they ramp up these large programs, they don't wanna have to deal with as many small fragmented companies. Do they really prioritize having, you know, a single customer with or, or single contractor with a whole lot of different MSAs?
Yeah. What we've seen over this fiber to the home cycle over the past, you know, three or four years, you know, a lot of our customers that are publicly traded companies are making commitments to the street, you know, setting goals to the street on what they wanna hit. And what that means internally is they wanna make sure that, again, I talked about that quality as a brand concept that we try and execute on. They wanna have a partner that they know that if we tell them we can pass X number of homes in our market, that we can pass X number of homes in our market in a given period of time.
And so that whole idea of wanting that certainty of both, you know, certainly cost and then also the certainty of schedule has become critical to them. And what that has translated to is this enterprise look. So instead of having, you know, maybe 40 different partners that they're relying on, trying to consolidate to that smaller number that's more manageable and looking for folks like us that have a footprint, you know, broad national footprint and again, that proven expertise where we can deliver on these programs time over time, month over month. Because that's a challenge, right? When you're working across many, many markets for a customer, going at high rates of speed, trying to ramp these programs, there's a lot that goes into it, right? There's a lot of complexity there that we have to meet.
So the systems, the tools, the processes, and most importantly, the people that know how to do that work, you know, certainly has been at the forefront. And, you know, that's been a tailwind for us, obviously, these last few years, and we see that as a tailwind for us going forward.
Have you seen any change at all in competitive environment in terms of smaller EC firms, in terms of pricing aggression or, you know, with this period of higher interest rates, has it maybe squeezed or pressured some of these smaller firms in that, you know, they don't have the scale that Dycom has? They, you know, are more reliant on the capital markets to fund their growth. Have you seen any changing dynamics there in terms of how you compete against perhaps some of the other kind of more subscale ENC firms?
Yeah. Well, one, you've had some consolidation, you know, over the past few years, certainly, you know, in our space. And I think as we look forward, we think that will continue. You know, I talked about the customers and them wanting an enterprise partner. That's obviously favored us. And when it favors us, you know, it can create pressure for some of the smaller folks. Again, I would go back to the complexity of some of these programs and the size of some of these programs. So, you know, when Lumen's talking about a $5 billion program or a $3 billion program, or, you know, when AT&T, you know, today is talking about 35 million new passings, sorry, 45 million total passings, combined. Let me do all the math for you just so those numbers become clear.
45 million total passings is what AT&T talked about. When you add that to our other customers in this past year, that's about 35 million new incremental passings that have been announced in this last year compared to a year prior. When you talk about the scale of some of those programs, they're significant, right? And it takes, you know, businesses that have been around for a while and have a certain amount of capacity that they can go deliver and execute on. So again, we think that's all stuff that favors who we are and what we've built over the years. And to your other point, makes it challenging for some of the smaller folks.
As part of that AT&T deal or announcement as well, they talked about moving to 5 million new passings with Gigapower, their out-of-footprint, you know, joint venture, and you have, you've done some programs in the past out-of-footprint. I think you've talked about some of the challenges in some of those programs in terms of getting, you know, permitting in place, in terms of timing, in terms of, you know, some of the margin impacts they've had. Like, maybe you could talk about some of your learnings from doing out-of-footprint builds in the past and how you view those going forward.
Yeah. Again, it's a bit of a different animal, right? There's no CO that's known. There's new municipalities that you're trying to work with. There's just unknowns in those markets that just take a little bit of time to figure out. And what we've seen over the last few years with the different overbuilders, and you've certainly heard some of it in the space, they've been working through that, figuring out what markets make sense for 'em, you know, what rate of build that they should be looking at, what kind of penetration they're ultimately gonna get, you know, what that ARPU is gonna be. They've been working through that over the last few years. I think a lot of 'em, and obviously what you heard from AT&T today about Gigapower, that tells you that they pretty well got it figured out, right?
If they're gonna go increase from, I think the number was 1.5 million before and up to 5 million passings now for Gigapower, that certainly sounds like, you know, they feel good about where they're at. They understand how those builds look. And I think generally the industry has sorted that out over the past few years and figured out, you know, for the overbuilders, what's the play for them and what does it look like, compared to other overbuilders.
Yeah. One of your other business segments that we haven't talked about as much, hasn't gotten as much airtime the last couple of years is the cable segment. Maybe you could just kind of talk about activity levels within cable. Obviously, your two large customers, Comcast and Charter. You've had, you know, some success with Charter with helping them with their RDoF build. I know the Bigham Cable transaction gave you some more exposure to that company. But it seems like core activity in cable markets has been a little slower as they kind of focus on, you know, mid-splits and eventual path to get to DOCSIS 4.0. But maybe an update on what you're seeing from the cable companies would be great.
Yeah. I think you just said a lot of it right there, so I think the first part, RDoF, you know, we're doing RDoF work and some of that roll work, has been going well. And I certainly see that continuing forward. You know, I don't, I'm not gonna shock the room by telling you that DOCSIS 4.0 has taken a little bit longer to roll out, I think, than everybody initially thought. You know, that's across our cable customers. It's still stuff that they're committed to and working hard on. And, you know, we certainly think that we're gonna be a part of that as it continues to build out. You know, and overall, I mean, they, we still go back to this 80%, right? So you have 140 million homes in the U.S.
You're gonna have two connections for about 80% of those homes. One of 'em's gonna come from one of our cable customers at the cable side, and one of 'em's gonna come from the telco side. So exactly what does that look like and how they get there? It's still gonna happen. It's just really a question of timing and overall pace. But you know, again, still really good work for us, and we'll continue to work.
I think your view, you touched on this a little earlier on fixed wireless, is that it's, you know, you can do some work to the tower sites. You can do some work to connect small cells with fiber. You don't think it ultimately is gonna have a huge impact on the kind of overall competitive dynamics in the industry. It's had some impact in metro markets taking share away from cable, but any, any kind of view on how fixed wireless will, you know, transpire in your business over the next handful of years?
Yeah. And to your point, right? Anywhere there's a tower, you gotta get fiber to it, which is good business for us. And of course, we have our wireless component of our group. So, you know, if there's towers going up, you know, we certainly wanna try and be a part of that. You know, how does fixed wireless play out over time? I mean, there's obviously a lot of speculation out there. What we're seeing certainly from a lot of our customers is there's been growth and penetration that's happening. Does that ultimately get replaced with some of the fiber work that they're doing? I think that's gonna depend on the customer and the location and exactly what that looks like. And then just how the bandwidth is used.
Again, when we talk about using more data for our phones, when we talk about, you know, the 20% increase that AT&T said from cellular usage, where does that, how does that ultimately impact fixed wireless? I don't think anybody has a crystal ball to see that today. But, you know, regardless, still opportunity to continue to build that. We're glad to see it grow and certainly something we can support. And if that gets in, it ends up getting filled in with fiber, that's great too.
So just touching on a couple of the financial pieces. So your EBITDA margins have gone up nicely over the last couple of years, even though you've had a couple spending modulations from some key customers. So maybe you could talk about areas of continued operating leverage within the business, your ability to continue to push those margins higher, whether that comes from SG&A, your, you know, on the gross margin side. That'd be great.
Yeah. No, appreciate it. So, as you noted, for the last few years, you know, we've been working really hard to try and, you know, push our EBITDA into the place that we can get it. I think as we look out towards the future, obviously, anytime we're growing revenue, there's an opportunity there to get additional leverage that can increase our EBITDA and increase our margins. You know, generally, you know, we wanna be really good partners to our customers, right? Through good times, through bad times, and from longer terms. We really have that overall partnership perspective.
And what I would say is with the market, you know, whether it's the AI opportunities, you know, whether it's the wireless space, whether it's the maintenance work that is still a significant portion of our revenue, you know, we still find all of that work to be attractive from a margin perspective. I think when you look at more diversified peers, we think that we get a premium, you know, for being kind of pure play there that again goes to our shareholders. You know, something that we're always working on for sure. You know, our hope is if we continue to grow that there's more leverage that we can find.
It sounds like though, you alluded to these builds that you're doing in increasingly rural markets, whether it's RDoF, BEAD, whether it's the AI builds, you're not gonna take any of this business, you know, to sacrifice your margins just to generate additional revenues, right? That's clearly a focus.
Yeah. We're not perfect. We're not perfect, and so sometimes we have projects that are more challenging, and sometimes we have projects that go better. Generally, generally speaking, you know, when, when we're in a place that we are today where you have these different dynamics happening, whether it's, I, I keep mentioning the same things over and over again, right? The fiber builds, the AI work, you know, the maintenance business, the wireless business. When there's a ton of opportunity out there, obviously we wanna prioritize the things that, that make sense for us and where we can really deliver success and that the idea of quality, as a brand for our customers. So that's gonna be where we focus. And generally speaking, that's gonna ride with margins.
So you've outlined a lot of big opportunities for Dycom over the next couple of years. I mean, one of the questions is, do we have the labor supply to support all of these programs? When I look at your employee headcount in your, supplemental or your presentation, I think it was up about 4% year over year. Maybe you could just talk about, you know, the labor market today. What do hiring conditions look like, to meet all of the demand that you see in the future? You know, do you have to continue to invest in the labor force?
Yeah, I would start with, you know, one of the things I'm most excited about with our company is our people. I believe we got fantastic people that are working hard every day to deliver for our customers and for our shareholders. We've grown significantly over the past few years. All of that has taken a lot of strategy, you know, a lot of focus on how we look at our talent and how we manage that. I think I maybe mentioned earlier, we grew 22% a couple of years ago. We were able to stay ahead of that from a labor perspective, so you know, again, it really takes a lot of focus. Right now, we've invested in new training programs across every level of our organization. We're building new training facilities to make sure we can stay ahead of things.
You know, we're already doing today, you know, a lot of work that's based on grants and other things. We're trying to get ahead from any of the requirements that'll be related to BEAD from a labor perspective. So we really feel like we're in a good position. We'll see how the kind of shape of these different curves comes together. But, you know, however it ultimately plays out, we feel like we're gonna be certainly at the front of it.
It seems like as well, like some of these programs will be layered in over multiple years. So you'll have the opportunity. It's not like there's gonna be, it's all gonna happen in one quarter. So you'll have the ability to kind of, you know, grow into that at a steady pace instead of having to, you know, a huge surge in demand in a given quarter. Is that fair?
Yeah, and I think, again, all, all these different programs we're talking about, there's complexity to all of 'em. That complexity generally takes time to get figured out, and so that's certainly how we see it playing out.
Yeah. No, fair enough, and I guess just to, just to kind of finish up, you know, obviously, you know, you took over for Steve Nielsen. He had been there for, I think, 25 years. You know, any kind of learnings from Steve about how you wanna operate the company going forward? I mean, it seems like you've learned a lot in the last four years. You have a lot on your plate, but any kind of other strategic priorities going forward that, you know, you plan to imprint on the company, or are you gonna just continue the nice momentum that, you know, you guys have delivered over the last few years?
Yeah. I mean, it's an exciting place to be and certainly an exciting time to get to take the reins, right? When you look at the opportunities that we have, you look at the successes that we've had over the last several years and just look at the history and the legacy of the company. You know, certainly humbled and very excited to be part of the team. The first part I would say is that, you know, we've got, we're very well positioned to seize the opportunities. You know, we're in a great place. Again, from our proven ability to execute over the past few years, our ability to grow our labor forces, we talked about what that we've been able to not only grow top line, but grow our margin as well.
That can be tough to do, especially in years of significant growth. When we look at all those things and we think about going forward, it just, like you said, there's a ton of opportunity. We wanna make sure that we're in front of it so we can pick the right opportunities, be successful for our companies, and ultimately be successful for our people and our shareholders.
I think that's a great place to end it. Dan, appreciate you joining us today. Obviously a lot of, a lot of opportunity in front of Dycom, so we'll look forward to continuing to track it and appreciate your time.
Thanks, Eric. Appreciate it.
Thank you.