All right, I think we'll get started. Good morning, everyone. What an exciting day! It's an exciting day for our companies and our company's history to hear more about Everus and its future as a standalone company. Of course, we will be making forward-looking statements. They are available on our website after the event. The agenda for today will include a series of prepared remarks, followed by a Q&A session. So we do ask that you hold your questions until the end. Today's event is a landmark milestone towards Everus becoming an independent, publicly traded company, and in fulfilling MDU Resources' strategy to become a pure-play energy delivery business. We believe this spin-off, which will be effective October thirty-first, sets both companies up for success and long-term value creation.
The board and I are fully confident in Everus' position to successfully operate as a standalone public company. We believe this spin-off will unlock inherent value in both MDU Resources and Everus, each of which have unique growth prospects and investment opportunities. The separation will allow Everus to realize a sharper strategic focus, more tailored capital structure and capital allocation strategies, unique growth prospects, and distinct investment opportunities. Over the past three decades, Everus has built a solid foundation, becoming a leading provider of specialty construction services in the United States, with a national platform and market-leading local brands. Building off that strong foundation, Everus' focused strategy and execution are designed to create long-term value as an independent, publicly traded company. You will hear more about this throughout the day.
Everus' capital structure and capital allocation framework are fully aligned to deliver that strategy with the flexibility to deploy capital into attractive growth opportunities. Today, you will hear more about the multiple levers that the company has to drive profitable growth and create long-term value for its shareholders. As an independent company, Everus will also have a dedicated and experienced board of directors with a highly qualified executive leadership team, who are committed to the company's strategy and to achieving its long-term potential. Everus' board of directors includes seven highly qualified individuals with unique backgrounds, experience, and skills, who will help provide Everus' strategy into its next phase of growth. The board makeup ensures both continuity as well as fresh perspective with Chair Dale Rosenthal, Mike DellaRocca, Ed Ryan, and David Sparby, transitioning from the board of MDU Resources, and Clark Wood and Betty Wynn joining as new members.
Everus' President and CEO, Jeff Thiede, will be the only non-independent director. With their deep industry and public company experience, the board is well positioned to guide Everus' long-term strategy and execution. Everus is a people-first business with a strong culture of safety and integrity, and it starts at the top. The company has one of the most experienced, talented, and dedicated executive leadership teams in the industry, many of whom I have had the privilege of working with over the past several years. Across Everus, from those out in the field all the way up to the top with Jeff Thiede as CEO, there is a remarkable level of drive, determination, and deep expertise. Today, you will hear more about the outstanding team at Everus and all that they are capable of accomplishing.
You will hear from the CEO, Jeff Thiede, the COO, Tom Nosbusch, and the CFO, Max Marcy, who are all talented and tested leaders. Jeff and Tom have both had very successful careers with Everus for more than 20 years in various leadership roles in different areas of the company. Jeff has led Everus through a period of significant growth as its president since 2012. In fact, during his leadership, earnings for this business have grown from $38 million in 2012 to $137 million last year. That is phenomenal growth. It has been an honor and a privilege to work alongside both Jeff and Tom throughout my career at this company. Max joined Everus earlier this year and has more than two decades of public company experience and extremely strong financial acumen.
Among his prior roles, Max was Vice President and Business Unit CFO of the Engineered Adhesives segment of H.B. Fuller. I am confident that Everus is strongly positioned for its next phase of growth and value creation as an independent public company. Thank you all again for joining us, and with that, I'd like to turn the presentation over to my-
... Thank you, Nicole. Really appreciate the warm welcome and your great leadership. MDU Resources has been a great partner for Everus as we've created the foundation to become an independent company. I echo Nicole's thanks to all of you for joining us here today to hear more about our company, Everus. This is such an exciting time for us as we embark upon our next chapter as a standalone company. As Nicole said, I'm Everus' President and CEO, Jeff Thiede. I am proud to be a third-generation electrician. My grandfather was a line worker and an electrician, and my father was also an electrician and the president of an electrical company. I'm humbled to carry on my family legacy and the legacy of those who came before me at Everus.
It has been my greatest honor to lead this company as it has scaled to be one of the nation's largest construction services providers. Since I joined Everus 20 years ago, it has grown from an annual revenue of $400 million to more than $2.7 billion, and we've accomplished that growth in an incredibly disciplined manner. Today, we are a top 10 specialty construction solutions provider with over 9,000 highly skilled employees at peak across the United States. We have differentiated capabilities across complex projects of all sizes. We have a repeatable execution playbook and a disciplined capital allocation strategy to deliver sustained growth and create long-term value. Our mission is foundational to who we are as a company. We are safely building America's future as an industry-leading construction services provider while achieving sustained growth.
Our values at Everus are integrity, safety, respect, and teamwork, and they are deeply embedded throughout our company. They guide the way we operate in ensuring we provide high-quality outcomes for customers, employees, and shareholders. We have an excellent, highly skilled team with deep industry expertise and a track record of success. Joining me today in our presentation, our Chief Operating Officer, Tom Nosbusch, and Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Max Marcy. Also here with us, our Chief Accounting Officer, John Hunke, Vice President of Human Resources, Brittany Hendricks, and Chief Legal Officer, Paul Sanderson. Rounding out the rest of our executive leadership team are Ray Kelly and Jason Behring. I have the utmost confidence that this team, along with our highly experienced operating brand presidents and other key personnel, will lead Everus to continued long-term success.
Everus is one of the country's largest specialty construction services providers, with a national platform of 20 market-leading local brands positioned across the United States. We had more than 9,000 highly skilled team members at peak last year, with 82% represented by unions, where we have very strong relationships. Our highly skilled team, strong brands, and disciplined execution are all competitive advantages that enable us to execute on complex projects across our two segments, electrical and mechanical, or E&M, and transmission and distribution, T&D. We have an established track record of delivering consistent, high-quality outcomes for our customers, resulting in strong growth. We generated $2.7 billion in revenue over the last 12 months, achieving a compounded annual revenue growth rate of 9% from 2019 through June 30, 2024.
Our backlog has grown by 18% over the same time period and was at an all-time record of $2.4 billion as of June 30th. Over the next several minutes, I will dive into our revenue drivers, including our two business segments, diverse end markets, and our high volume of projects across more than 3,700 customers. This will illustrate the diversity of our business, which we believe positions us for sustained growth and resiliency across cycles. Let me give you a little more detail about our E&M and T&D segments. Our E&M segment provides construction and maintenance of electrical and communications wiring, fire suppression systems, and mechanical piping and services.
We serve general contractors and end-use customers, and we are seeing increasing demand for these services, driven by secular tailwinds for infrastructure development, data centers, reshoring of manufacturing, as well as expansions and upgrades to facilities in commercial, industrial, institutional, and renewable end markets. When you walk through the Kansas City International Airport or Portland International Airport, the Fontainebleau Las Vegas Resort, or the Fredericksburg VA Hospital, you see tangible examples of the services that we provide. Our highly skilled team members are the people behind the conduit, wires, light fixtures, the low-voltage systems in data centers, hospitality and entertainment venues, and healthcare and higher education facilities. We focus on high-growth end markets where we have deep expertise and excel at providing diverse services.... We have seen strong growth in E&M, with revenue increasing at 9% CAGR since 2019.
We have proven our ability to deliver in a dynamic macroeconomic environment and are strongly positioned to benefit from growth opportunities going forward. Our T&D segment specializes in constructing and maintaining overhead and underground electrical, gas, and communication infrastructure, and is primarily focused on serving utilities and local municipalities. We primarily serve utility customers in the West and Midwest, but also provide emergency repair services in other parts of the country when needed following weather events. In fact, we have approximately 250 team members working on restoring power in the Southeast that was recently ravaged by hurricanes. We are grateful for the opportunity to provide restorative repair services throughout our T&D business to help those in need. Our T&D services are increasingly important as aging infrastructure across the country needs to be replaced.
Initiatives to modernize the electric grid are gaining momentum, too, because of the uptick in electricity demand for data centers and AI computing. This gives us significant growth opportunities. With utility CapEx budgets increasing, we see our T&D business continue to grow well into the future. Our success across both our T&D and E&M segments is made possible through our market-leading local brands that are strategically positioned in high-growth geographic areas and are supported by our scaled national platform. Across our national platform, we have strong relationships with customers, our workforce, and labor unions. Our healthy relationships with labor unions give us consistent access to high-quality team members so we can readily scale to meet our project demands.
We also use our national platform to develop, to share, and implement best practices, skills, and knowledge across our operating brands to ensure that our proven, repeatable playbook can be executed wherever and on whatever project we're called upon to perform. Our platform enables us to leverage our customer relationships and skills across our two segments. For example, the large data center customer, they had us perform E&M work on their facility. They also hired us on the T&D side to perform the work on an associated substation. Our scale also allows us to invest in our building information modeling and prefabrication resources, which Tom will talk more about. This gives us a competitive advantage on complex projects. Through our two business segments, we serve diverse and attractive end markets.
Our commercial work includes data centers, which I'll talk a little bit more about shortly, as well as hospitality and entertainment, such as Fontainebleau Resort and the Sphere in Las Vegas, and other commercial structures. Our utility-related work is best-in-class. 58% of our T&D revenue comes from master service agreements, providing visible and recurring work. The industrial market for us includes high-tech facilities, such as semiconductor manufacturing, as well as renovations and installations at refineries, water treatment plants, and other complex facilities. Within our institutional market, projects include new construction, as well as renovations and expansions of education and government facilities, including universities and courthouses. We also perform work at airports. Examples include the new modern terminals in Kansas City and Portland that I mentioned earlier. Our services business includes recurring and routine maintenance work, as well as emergency response work.
This type of work helps us develop long-term relationships with our customers. We also serve the renewable energy and transportation markets and are excited about the growth opportunities in those areas. Our ability to serve multiple end markets provides business resiliency across cycles and positions us for sustained long-term growth. Now that we've spent a few minutes on what we do and how we are well-positioned for the future, let me give you a little history on how we got to where we are today. We are built on a strong foundation that started 27 years ago when MDU entered the construction services business by acquiring a power line construction company. In 2001, we expanded into the electrical and mechanical area through an acquisition. Since then, we have grown Everus both organically and through acquisitions of strong local brands.
In total, we've acquired and successfully integrated more than 20 companies, forming the foundation of Everus' national platform. As our business has grown, we have strengthened our people-first culture with a focus on safety, while systematically sharing best practices across our local brands to develop a proven, repeatable playbook. Our focus on operational excellence and bidding discipline has ensured strong, profitable growth and business resilience. Everus is scaled for success, and we're built for growth, bringing us to where we are today... one of the nation's top 10 largest specialty contractors, ready to stand on our own as an independent, publicly traded company. We are extremely excited about our future and are confident in our ability to capitalize on our strong industry position and future growth prospects to create long-term value.
We believe by the end of the presentation today, you will share in our excitement and optimism about Everus' future, because Everus is strongly positioned to benefit from a diverse set of secular growth megatrends, such as data centers and grid modernization. We have a seasoned leadership team with a proven track record, and we are fully committed to executing on our Forever Strategy for operational excellence, disciplined growth, and long-term value creation. We have a scaled national platform with market-leading local brands. We leverage our scale to deploy our proven, repeatable playbook that utilizes best practices across our operations. We are a people-first business. We've set an industry standard of high-quality training, development, retention, and safety programs. Our ability to attract, retain, and mobilize a highly skilled workforce makes us a go-to partner across complex projects of any size and across diverse end markets and diverse geographies.
While we are a capital-light business, we will continue to be disciplined in how we allocate our capital, balancing the high return growth investments while maintaining a strong balance sheet that gives us strategic flexibility. Our foundation, scale, and disciplined approach to executing on our proven, repeatable playbook, have positioned us for sustained, profitable growth and value creation. Our Forever Strategy is designed to continue building upon our foundation, which has generated strong growth over the past decade. We believe we are well positioned to deliver sustained and profitable growth. We expect to generate long-term organic revenue growth of 5-7% on a compounded annual basis, and EBITDA growth of 7-9% on a compounded annual basis. Max will provide more details later in the presentation on our financial expectations.
Helping us deliver on our financial targets is our Forever Strategy for sustained growth and value creation. This consists of our employees, where we attract, retain, and train an industry-best workforce. Long-term value creation. We grow shareholder value by continuing to add value for our customers. Execution. We will continue to deliver top-quality results through safe, exacting, and precise execution. Relationships. We will continue to enhance our existing long-term relationships while growing new ones. Let me go through each aspect in detail. Our Forever Strategy starts with E for our employees. They are critical to ensuring successful outcomes for our customers and creating long-term value for our shareholders. Our highly skilled team brings extensive experience to every project, ensuring consistent, top-quality results for our customers. Our executive team, on average, has a tenure of 28 years with Everus and its operating companies.
This extensive experience helps us maintain our disciplined approach to growth and execution across our entire platform. Our focus on training and retaining our workforce also ensures that we have the expertise to execute on our project playbook. For example, our general foremen have an average tenure of about 11 years, ensuring consistent project execution and outcomes. Our extensive training program ensures that we constantly maintain, grow, and share our skills across our national platform, and our strong union relationships, representing 82% of our workforce, ensures that we have access to highly skilled and scalable workforce as we grow. The second E in our Forever Strategy is execution. Tom will go into greater detail on our proven, repeatable project playbook, but I wanna highlight a handful of our processes that enable us to provide consistent, top-quality execution. First, we bid with discipline, leveraging platform-wide lessons learned and best practices.
We focus on complex projects where we can maximize the value of our differentiated capabilities and our very highly skilled team. Our pre-construction, design-assist, and planning processes create greater project efficiency. We partner early with our customers, which helps us identify and solve potential issues before commencing work. Our rigorous pre-construction approach results in accurate bidding, which is crucial to ensuring margin resilience, as we've demonstrated over the past two decades. During our construction phase, we deploy our well-tested execution playbook that ensures consistent, top-quality outcomes. Our playbook includes our rigorous standards for job site safety, and our industry-leading safety record is a testament to our employees' commitment each day to our high standards. We have a robust communication process that ensures project stakeholders are informed, aligned, and we systematically share best practices across our brands. Communication is a key to our customer satisfaction and long-term relationships.
Finally, in post-construction, we prioritize customer relationships. Keeping detailed records of each system we install positions us to anticipate and win follow-up service work, ensuring long-term customer relationships. Relationships is the R in our Forever Strategy. Our high-quality execution on complex projects for marquee customers ensures repeat business. We are very committed to building and maintaining these long-term relationships. We have partnered with our top customers for an average of more than 30 years, with some of the relationships predating our acquisition of the local operating brand. These long-tenured relationships prove that our highly capable team provides long-term added value through safe, top-quality project execution. Our customers view us as a trusted partner, and they choose Everus because of our distinguished safety record, our differentiated capabilities, and our proven execution on very complex projects.
Our Forever Strategy is designed for sustained growth, and our diverse opportunities provide us with multiple levers to grow our company. We have a strong track record of growing with our customers, as we are well-positioned to continue doing so through strong relationships. Tom's gonna share a couple of those examples during his presentation. Another way we grow with customers is through satellite projects. When we've successfully executed on a complex project in one geographic location, our customers have asked us to perform the same or similar work in another location. Because we have a national platform with local operating brands across the country, we can readily transfer our capabilities to another area and utilize our proven, repeatable playbook to efficiently execute the work. This expands our geographic footprint. We are also well-positioned to continue growing and gaining market share across high growth end markets.
We have extensive and proven expertise in delivering consistent, high-quality outcomes on large, complex projects in mission-critical areas such as data centers and high-tech manufacturing. In addition to these organic growth opportunities, we also expect to grow through discipline and strategic M&A. As a standalone company, we have a significant and expanded ability to deploy capital to acquire financially attractive, complementary, high-quality businesses that extend our geographic reach and our capabilities. As I described earlier, we have a strong track record of successfully integrating the businesses that we acquire. I'd like to take a few minutes to expound on why we believe that we are well-positioned, because of our proven capabilities and experience to capitalize on growth in diverse end markets and megatrends that industry experts expect to grow in the low double digits. For example, we have been executing on data center projects for nearly 15 years.
For the twelve months ending June 30th, data center projects were the third-largest contributor to our revenue, and they are a top contributor to our backlog. There's no question that opportunities for this work are growing at a high rate, driven by cloud computing and, more recently, advances in artificial intelligence. Data centers are also contributing to the demand for electricity and electric infrastructure, alongside the push to modernize our nation's electric grid and expand renewable generation sources. We have long-term relationships with large utility customers and are working with them to execute on their growing capital investment needs. We also have very strong long-term relationships with high-tech customers, and we have performed work on a number of complex facilities, particularly in the Northwest. The CHIPS Act and robust private investment give us notable opportunities for more of this type of work in multiple areas of the country.
We are also well-positioned as one of the largest solar installers in Nevada, to capture opportunities in renewable generation projects across the country. We are already transferring those skills through our repeatable, proven playbook and national platform to capture opportunities in some of our other operating brand locations, particularly in the Midwest. The bottom line is that we believe we have the people, the expertise, and the proven track record to grow and gain share in a fragmented market, expected to be about $365 billion by 2026. As I mentioned earlier, a key driver of growth for us is geographic expansion through satellite projects in the U.S. with existing customers. Because of our high-quality execution on complex projects, our customers have asked us to perform similar work in other locations. We leverage our national platform with local operating companies.
We transfer our capabilities to another geographic area, and we use our proven, repeatable playbook to successfully execute the work. A good example of this is with one of our data center customers. Since completing our first project in Oregon, we have successfully executed on the customer's projects across the country, even as the size and complexity of the projects have grown. By using our repeatable playbook and our scalable workforce across our operating brands, we've been very successful in this area. And by repeatedly improving our expertise on data center projects, we continue to gain more work, not just for this customer, but for a growing number of other customers as well. In the last twelve months, our backlog of data center work has doubled, and the size of our largest projects has also doubled.
Another key driver of growth and geographic expansion that I touched on earlier is strategic M&A of complementary businesses in high-growth areas. We have a proven track record of successfully identifying and integrating acquisitions that have generated compelling financial results. Most of our acquisitions have been through our strong local relationships. Our people-first culture makes us an acquirer of choice for business owners and their employees. A recent example of our acquisition success is PerL ectric, which we acquired in 2020. PerL ectric is a market-leading E&M business, headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia. The team specializes in providing services to government and healthcare facilities, particularly with very complex projects. We quickly and successfully integrated PerL ectric into our platform, and we've grown its revenue approximately 60% and its EBITDA approximately 250% since acquiring it.
PerL ectric is well positioned for continued growth in its existing end markets, and with the benefit of our national platform, PerL ectric has opportunities to expand into other high-growth areas, such as data center work in the DC area. Like the PerL ectric acquisition, we constantly evaluate strategic M&A opportunities to grow our geographic reach in high-growth end markets, and we look forward to our expanded ability as a standalone company to deploy our capital in these growth opportunities. To bring this all together, our highly skilled employees, our proven, repeatable execution playbook and our strong customer relationships all position us to deliver on the V in our Forever Strategy: long-term value creation. Before I turn the presentation over to Tom, I want to reiterate why we are a compelling investment opportunity.
First, we are strongly positioned to benefit from multiple mega trends in the end markets that we serve. We have a seasoned leadership team that has been instrumental in developing and executing on our forever strategy, which is designed to create long-term value. We have a scaled national platform with market-leading local brands and long-tenured customer relationships, very important. We have a people-first culture, and that helps us attract and retain top industry talent and maintain industry-leading safety results, and our diversified revenue base, our capital-light model, and disciplined capital allocation position us for sustained growth and business resilience. With that, let me introduce you to our Chief Operating Officer, Tom Nosbusch. Tom is a seasoned leader who has been with the company for 25 years. Tom?
Thank you, Jeff. It's a privilege and an honor to be here with all of you today. I'm proud to be a part of the Everus team. It's been an honor to be a part of the growth of this company over the past 25 years, and I'm excited about our future as an independent, publicly traded company. I've been fortunate enough to be able to see Everus grow from a company with a small footprint to a national platform, from a few hundred employees to more than nine thousand dedicated, highly skilled employees, safely building America's future. Jeff provided you with the who, who we are and what our mission is. I'll cover the how, really the execution part of our strategy. There are key factors within our execution approach that give us a consistent competitive advantage for long-term value creation.
First, our project execution starts with safety, and our people-first culture gives us an advantage in attracting a highly skilled workforce, which ensures we can consistently execute on our diverse mix of projects. We invest in our programs, we train our employees, and we are relentless in getting better. This is good for our employees, good for our customers, and ultimately, that is how we win. Second, our execution strategy includes a proven, repeatable playbook that begins during the design phase of projects and carries through project builds all the way to post-construction, when we provide ongoing service to our customers. Third, we are able to take our differentiated capabilities, apply them at scale across geographies, end markets, customers, and project sizes. I'll further explain some of these unique capabilities later on. Fourth, our pre-construction process allows us to efficiently deliver on projects with predictable outcomes.
Combined with our prefabrication capabilities and our knowledge sharing across our national platform, we provide consistent, high-quality results on complex projects. Finally, our successful project execution helps us retain our highly skilled employees while continuing to strengthen our customer relationships, resulting in additional project opportunities and driving sustained, profitable growth. Let me start by sharing the unique ways that we consistently execute on our strategy. Let's start with safety, which is where we start every project and is core to everything that we do. This is why we have industry-leading safety results and an incredibly strong people-first culture. Safety is key to our ability to execute. Our strong safety record is recognized by our customers and is critical in winning new work. This is a key non-price factor that our customers use when they're selecting us as their preferred partner on projects.
Our commitment to safety starts at the top of the company with our leadership team and is evident all the way through the field crews. The presidents of our operating brands regularly visit project sites, specifically to complete job site safety evaluations, and we always conduct an executive-level incident review if we do have a safety event. We invest in these programs, training, and the best equipment and tools to ensure our employees are able to perform their work in the safest way possible. We're relentless in improving our safety results, ensuring our high standards are being met. We are industry leaders in setting safety standards, including being a founding member of the OSHA Electric and Transmission Distribution Partnership for Line Worker Safety.
This partnership is one of only two partnerships in the country, and we are proud to continue to contribute to the improvements of the safety in our industry. As Jeff touched on, we have a proven, systematic approach to project execution that spans the entire project life cycle, from pre-construction, when we bid with discipline, focusing on technical and complex projects where we can take advantage of our scale, our differentiated capabilities, and our highly skilled workforce, all the way through post-construction, when we provide ongoing service to our customers. Our execution playbook has been built on decades of experience and is designed to help us deliver repeatable, high-quality outcomes. Our ability to deliver on our playbook starts with our outstanding workforce, our extensive training programs, and our people-first culture.
Strong relationships with our local labor unions allows us to attract and retain premier talent that we need to win and execute on these projects. Safety, as I just talked about, is a crucial component in our playbook and a value that is core to everything that we do. We leverage our unique capabilities in pre-construction design assist as part of our bidding and pre-construction planning process. As an early partner in our customers' projects, we can better manage the delivery schedules, gain operational efficiencies, and ensure high-quality outcomes, making it a win-win. We create extensive, detailed plans for each project. We employ our decades of experience on projects of all sizes, end markets, geographies, and customers to ensure that our project managers and field teams can rely on those plans for execution.
This leads to high customer satisfaction and allows us to manage project margins and outcomes with greater predictability. You've heard a lot today about our people-first culture. Our relationships with labor unions across the country and our ability to attract and retain highly skilled workforce, allows us the flexibility to scale our team to meet project timelines and deliver great outcomes. As I said, our playbook is field-tested and proven, but we are also constantly focused on refining and improving that playbook. We systematically share lessons learned across our brands to further improve the advantages of our national platform. Jeff shared an example of how we did this with a data center customer, expanding from one location to multiple projects across the country, utilizing our operating brands across the platform. Our systematic approach to execution helps us provide consistent, high-quality outcomes.
Consistent outcomes provide benefits to our employees and customers with high retention, more project wins, and sustained growth, with a resilient margin profile that ensures long-term value creation. Let me dive a bit deeper into one element of our playbook that illustrates our commitment to delivering efficient, high-quality outcomes. We have been an early industry adopter in expanding the use of prefabrication on projects. Through prefabrication and modular construction. We build portions of the project at a remote site in a controlled environment, providing us many benefits, including cost savings, faster project completion, higher labor efficiency, and improved job site safety. We have shared our prefabrication expertise across our operating brands, standardizing project planning and improving processes for sharing and communicating these best practices. The result is that we are able to deliver a higher quality, lower-cost service to our customers.
Since 2019, we have increased cost savings to our customers at a 21% compounded annual growth rate. This value that we provide to our customers helps us win additional work, while also providing margin improvement opportunities for us. So it's a win-win. We are able to reduce our costs for our customers and get their projects completed faster. We use prefabrication across diverse types of projects and end markets, enabling us to drive efficiencies and improve customer results across our platform. And we continuously look for opportunities to expand the use of prefabrication because of the competitive advantage it gives us, along with the benefits to our customers. Let me share examples of two specific customer relationships that demonstrate the success of our repeatable execution playbook. The first is on the electrical and mechanical side of our business. We have partnered with W.A.
Richardson for close to 20 years, and I truly do mean partnered, because we view our relationship with them as a two-way partnership, where we work collaboratively while leveraging our execution playbook to build complex projects that utilize our technically superior capabilities, which our competitors cannot easily replicate. Our relationship with them began with a small project for MGM in Las Vegas. As we have proven our capabilities, the relationship has expanded over time. So as W.A. Richardson has grown, so have we. We have become their go-to subcontractor for both large and small projects. Our business with them has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of 65% since 2018. A recent example of this partnership with W.A. Richardson is on the Fontainebleau Hotel in Las Vegas.
Because of their confidence in our ability to execute, we were a part of the entire design assist project delivery on the Fontainebleau. We were involved from pre-construction through the execution of the project. Utilizing the expertise of three of our operating brands, we completed the electrical, the mechanical, and the fire suppression system on this outstanding venue. Our early involvement in the project helped us meet a very aggressive schedule while successfully delivering the work W.A. Richardson and the owner expected. Our exceptional relationships with the labor unions also allowed us to quickly scale up our workforce on this project to more than 650 highly skilled team members. Having close relationships with the labor unions is vital to being able to meet the schedule and deliver on the complex timelines and projects of this project.
Now that this project is complete, we continue to provide post-construction services to the hotel because we are the experts on their system, and we are focused on growing and maintaining that customer relationship. Ultimately, we executed on this project like we do every other project, by systematically deploying our execution playbook, and just as we brought our best practices and knowledge to this marquee project, we took what we learned from it, shared those lessons across our national platform to meet other complex projects across our markets. The second example that I want to talk about is our long-standing customer relationship on the transmission and distribution side of the business with PG&E. We have been providing transmission and distribution services to them for more than 26 years and are a full turnkey T&D partner, providing services from 5 kV all the way up to 500 kV projects.
We have been working closely with them in more recent years on their fire hardening efforts. Through this work, we are focusing on their transmission system, where we are doing pole change-outs, reconductoring, hardware repair and replacements, as well as raising line clearance levels. We also build substations and provide emergency restoration services across their entire service territory. Their project quality standards are rigorous, and we are very proud to have consistently earned their highest contractor ratings across multiple factors, including safety, quality, and execution. Over the years, as we have exceeded their standards, our work and number of jobs has continued to grow. Our demonstrated expertise with this long-standing customer, leveraging our execution playbook, has also allowed us to partner with other large utilities in their undergrounding efforts.
Through our experience with these and other utility customers, we have integrated key learnings into our operational playbook, allowing us to deploy those best practices across our entire national platform. Fontainebleau and PG&E are just two examples of thousands of successful customer relationships and projects where we are extremely proud of our ability to deliver these types of high-quality results for all of our customers. Following our execution playbook, we provide unique capabilities across the entire project life cycle. Our capabilities and processes allow us to deliver high customer satisfaction and better manage margin outcomes. Our playbook ensures long-term customer relationships, helps us retain premier talent, and win new projects, ultimately leading to sustained business growth with a resilient margin profile.
Because we have the right people and the right strategy in place, and because we are continuing to apply and build on our execution playbook, I'm confident we will continue to grow and safely execute on complex projects while providing long-term value to our shareholders. Thank you for giving me the opportunity today to talk to you about this great company. It's an exciting time to be a part of Everus, and I look forward to what our future holds. Now, we're going to take a 15-minute break before Max comes up and provides an overview of the financial profile and outlook. We'll see you back here in 15 minutes.
... All right. Welcome back, everyone, after that quick fifteen-minute break. Okay, before I jump into my section, allow me a few minutes to introduce myself. So my name is Max Marcy, and I joined Everus Construction Group in August as VP, Chief Financial Officer, and Treasurer. Finance, working for publicly traded companies. At H.B. Fuller Company. VP of Financial Planning and Analysis and Business Unit. I am very the opportunities ahead of us. That is motivated, talented. Me to Everus and drew. Really stood out and opportunities as a standalone public company. Only as good as the people in this field. Some of the best. The team is excited. Operating presidents. And the will continue to drive sustained and profitable growth.
And this leads into the second factor that really excited me about the opportunity, and that's the potential to strategically deploy capital in our next phase of growth. I will discuss this in a bit more detail shortly, but we really see a tremendous opportunity to leverage our platform, technical expertise, and local knowledge to take advantage of some of the exciting secular megatrends and drive growth. So with that, let's move into the financial section. During my discussion today, I wanna drive home these key messages. First, since this company was formed 27 years ago, Everus has consistently executed across its end markets and delivered strong and growing financial performance. This performance has positioned us to stand on our own, poised to deliver long-term value for all of our stakeholders.
Second, we have positioned ourselves in a variety of attractive markets and built strong positions that provide us levers needed to grow as trends shift between markets. Many of our markets are also aligned to key secular megatrends that Jeff covered, positioning us for sustained growth. Third, this has historically been, and will continue to be, a business with low capital intensity. The modest capital requirements should allow us to deliver strong cash flow generation going forward and give us the financial flexibility to invest in growth. This allows us to invest in things like new equipment in our T&D segment and new prefabrication facilities that support projects exposed to secular megatrends. Next, as you heard Jeff and Tom describe, our Forever Strategy creates a strong foundation for our growth strategy and long-term value creation, or the V in our Forever Strategy.
Finally, we are working with MDU to be positioned with a very strong balance sheet, with optimal leverage at spin-off, providing maximum flexibility to choose the investments that are best suited to support growth in our business. All right. Our Forever Strategy is designed to generate sustained growth and business resilience. Our revenue base is diverse across end markets, customers, project types, and sizes. This diversification is the result of our differentiated capabilities and allows us to generate sustained and profitable growth and makes us more resilient across market cycles. We're showing three distinct views of revenue on this slide. On this far left-hand side, we're showing the market breakdown of our business. In the middle, we show our revenue by customer, and on the far right, we show revenue by project size.
What you can see is the amount of diversity we have across our revenue base from a project, customer, and market standpoint, with each contributing to our ability to grow in a diversified way. You've already heard from Jeff about our strategy here, but I want to highlight the breadth of our offering. For financial reporting, we categorize our revenue into seven markets, but in reality, we provide services in twenty-five distinct sub-markets that all have different drivers and cycles. This market diversity provides a natural hedge against market-changing trends. Plus, we serve markets that are supported by megatrends, which will grow faster than industry averages. The chart in the middle represents our customer diversity. As discussed, we completed over 44,000 jobs over the last 12 months.
Our top 10 customers accounted for 36% of our revenue during those last 12 months, but that was spread across more than 3,700 different projects. Our long-term relationships with these diverse customers are an important driver of our growth. These customers have an average relationship, as Tom mentioned, with us of over 30 years through our operating brands, predating the formation of Everus. In addition to our end market and customer diversity, we're also well diversified across project types and sizes. While the exact split moves around from year to year, we generally see a pretty even distribution of our revenues across small, medium, and large projects. It's important to note that we're defining large projects as anything over $35 million of contract value. So with all this said, we pride ourselves in our ability to execute on projects of all shapes and sizes.
Tom highlighted our technical expertise and execution playbook that enables us to successfully complete even the largest and most highly technical jobs. So in summary, on this slide, we're highly diversified across end markets, customer project types and sizes, and we bring a comprehensive set of solutions and expertise to a wide array of projects and customers, which enhances business stability. Okay, so our history proves our success. Our recent financial performance highlights our strong growth profile and consistent operating results. This is a function of our diversified revenue base, strong execution, and disciplined bidding process. Our track record demonstrates the stability and durability of our results across various cycles and end market trends.
As you can see, we have generated substantial growth, 18% in our backlog, and that momentum has continued into the first half of 2024, with a record $2.4 billion backlog as of June thirtieth, driven by our favorable end market trends, strong market position, and deep customer relationships. Revenue has also grown considerably at 9% CAGR, driven by the significant volume of projects that we continue to win. Our more recent revenue growth rate is below our backlog growth rate, and that's really reflective of timing on some projects in the first half of 2024. The timing of project starts has pushed out some of that revenue in the short term, while our backlog is continuing to build. This growing backlog strength gives us confidence in our outlook as we look into 2025 and beyond.
It is important to note that a lot of our revenue comes through without ever hitting our backlog, including things like MSA contracts, which account for just shy of 20% of consolidated revenue. So backlog is not always a direct indicator of revenue trends, but it is nonetheless an important measure of business momentum and health. In addition to our solid revenue growth, Everus has strong cash flow business with a very capital-light operating model. As you can see from the chart here on the left, we have a very disciplined capital investment strategy that is generally run somewhere between 1.5%-2% of revenue. This low capital investment has primarily focused on maintenance CapEx, with some small growth components over time. Our business also has low fixed costs operating model at just over 10% of our revenue base.
What this means for Everus is that we have a lot of financial flexibility. As our workload increases, we can readily add more people, and we can flex down as needed, which you've seen this year with our EBITDA margins remaining strong, even while our revenue stream has been pushed out a bit. Based on our consistent execution using the playbook Tom discussed, our bidding discipline, our focus on higher margin markets and operating leverage, we have very consistent and resilient EBITDA, which has been running at around 8% on a margin perspective. As you can see from the last five and a half years outlined on this chart. This year, we are running higher than that. As revenue has been pushed out, we are quickly able to flex our variable costs.
This consistent margin performance has led to a consistent track record of EBITDA growth, averaging 10% on a compounded annual basis over the last five and a half years. Given the nature of our business, I think it's important to reiterate the key factors and key initiatives that enable us to mitigate project risk, thereby resulting in margin stability. Our projects are growing in scale and scope, and our customers are demanding more sophisticated and technical solutions. As complexity grows, it is all the more important that we remain disciplined in the execution of our strategy. The first factor that helps us mitigate risk is simply our diversified revenue base. The second is our bidding discipline. We are strategic in the projects we pursue, which must meet our strict return and risk parameters. Sometimes, the projects we choose not to do are as important as the projects we win.
Finally, is our repeatable execution playbook and highly skilled workforce. We have a strong record of execution, which is not only a direct reflection of the execution playbook, but also a testament to our people. We have some of the best-skilled labor in the industry, and we take tremendous pride in our ability to deliver for our customers. As I will discuss shortly, we are focused on maintaining our margin levels as we drive growth. However, we do see some opportunity for stable margin expansion based on operating leverage, a focus on higher margin markets, and continued bidding discipline. Okay, so switching gears a bit from our past results to our near-term performance. As we approach the fourth quarter and approach our spin-off date, we have greater visibility into our results for the year.
As you may have seen in our press release and 8-K this morning, we are confirming our 2024 guidance. We expect revenue in the range of $2.65-$2.85 billion, and EBITDA in the range of $220-$240 million, with margins higher than in 2023. We have seen strong demand this year for data center projects, government and education jobs, and utility and transportation-related work. The confirmed ranges keep the midpoints unchanged. In addition, it is important to note that this guidance is consistent with the segment guidance that MDU provided at the start of the year. It does not account for additional stand-up costs or dyssynergies that have been disclosed in our Form 10 filings.
We will reconcile our fourth quarter results, which will include some dyssynergies, to the range I've given you here following the end of our fiscal year earnings call. We currently expect public company stand-up costs of approximately $5 million in the fourth quarter. Okay, on that note, let me spend just a few minutes bridging our segment EBITDA to how our EBITDA will look as a standalone company. On the left, you can see that midpoint of EBITDA guidance that I just discussed. This is what we would deliver as a segment of MDU. As disclosed, there will be some dyssynergies to stand up a public company. This amount is estimated to be approximately $28 million and includes normal things you might expect to stand up a public company, but the highest cost as we separate is standalone insurance.
We estimate that many of these costs will be included in our project bidding going forward, and the rest will slowly become a smaller percentage of revenue as we execute on our growth agenda. The bar on the right represents a baseline EBITDA for 2024 that includes these dyssynergies at the midpoint of guidance that we will grow from going forward. As mentioned, when we complete the spin-off, we will be around one and a half times net leverage. Going forward, we'll be targeting one and a half to two times net leverage while prioritizing investments in growing our business, both organically and through strategic M&A, and we'll maintain ample liquidity to meet operating needs and ensure financial stability. On the date of spin-off, we will have ample liquidity to opportunistically invest in our capital allocation priorities.
In addition to our strong balance sheet, our robust cash flow will be sufficient to maintain our leverage targets while investing for growth. We may flex up leverage or pay down debt, depending on when opportunities present themselves. If we do stretch slightly higher, we expect to quickly delever with the high amount of cash flow we generate annually. Okay, so the busy slide. How do we plan to deploy our cash flow? Our framework is really laid out on this slide. We have historically generated solid cash flow and have deployed that to support our growing business. As you can see from the very far left-hand side of the chart, we have historically allocated capital towards maintenance capital, working capital needs of a growing business, and some M&A. The largest portion of our cash flow is deployed back to our parent.
As we spin out and stand up on our own, that portion of our cash flow will become available to support our investment priorities that you can see later on in the slide. Our first priority will be to continue to invest in ourselves. We have consistent opportunities to invest in CapEx. Historically, that has amounted to between around 1.5%-2% of revenue. Going forward, we plan to increase that slightly to between 2%-2.5% of revenue, with the incremental amount really focused on organic growth opportunities. Second, we will look for interesting opportunities through M&A that either expand our geographic reach, strengthen our market position, particularly in high-growth sectors. It is important to note that we will only complete a transaction at the right time, with the right metrics, at the right value.
We will look for deals that are financially accretive, and we intend to maintain optimal leverage. Throughout our history, we have demonstrated a successful track record of growth through acquisitions. As I already mentioned, Everus was built on a series of over twenty acquisitions over the last 27 years. Our sixteen operating presidents, located across the country, are experts on their businesses and are tied into their local and regional markets. This unique structure provides a tremendous advantage in sourcing potential deals through the benefit of their local knowledge. As a result, most of our acquisitions are non-brokered and are integrated into our platform swiftly. Our people-first culture makes us the acquirer of choice for business owners and their employees.
When we are looking for potential acquisitions, we are generally looking for partners that will extend our geographic reach, provide product line expansion, expand our technical capabilities, or give us a new vertical market exposure. As discussed in detail, we have a great organic growth plan and don't need to do a deal, so we will be disciplined and selective in acquiring companies that are a strategic and cultural fit with a compelling return and aligned with our forever strategy. Third, if we don't see the right organic or inorganic investments, we plan to pay down debt and delever our balance sheet. This provides ample dry powder when the timing of investment, either organic or inorganic, is right. Lastly, we currently do not have a dividend policy or share repurchase authorization in place.
Our board will work with us to decide if and when those returns are prudent in the future. But right now, as a new standalone company with meaningful growth opportunities, we feel it's best to invest in ourselves to drive maximum shareholder value. So in summary, on a long-term basis, we expect our Forever philosophy and value creation strategy to drive us toward the following financial framework. We expect to invest 2-2.5% of our annual revenue and capital spending to drive growth and grow our organic revenue 5-7% annually. The revenue growth, coupled with our disciplined approach to project execution, will enable growing EBITDA 7-9%. We will accomplish this growth while maintaining a strong balance sheet with a target of 1.5-2 times net leverage. These are our long-term targets.
Some years will be better, some years will be below. Importantly, this is our expectation for organic growth, which we think is compelling. We think that M&A will play an important role in our growth framework and supplement our organic growth strategy. As we execute on our strategy, we expect to deliver on these targets over the long term based on our attractive market position, strong execution, and disciplined capital allocation. Before I turn it back to Jeff for his closing remarks, I want to wrap up with just a few closing remarks of my own. Hopefully, you can tell I'm excited to be here, and I'm very optimistic about the opportunities ahead for Everus. I'm confident we have the right strategy and the right team in place to execute on our forever strategy.
I really, really appreciate your time and attention, and I look forward to continuing this conversation with you in the future. With that, I'll turn the call back to Jeff.
Thanks, Max. Thank you all again today for joining us here. Throughout the morning, you heard about our strategy, our people, and our differentiated capabilities. I want to emphasize that we are strongly positioned to capitalize on our diverse growth opportunities. Our leadership team is committed to successfully executing on our Forever Strategy.... Our national scale with market-leading local brands gives us a distinct advantage in maintaining and growing our customer relationships. Our highly skilled and scalable workforce, our people-first culture with a focus on safety, and a repeatable execution playbook, help us deliver consistent, high-quality outcomes, and our diversified revenue stream and disciplined approach to Capital Allocation ensure a strong financial position and sustained profitable growth. Our revenue is diversified, but our strategy is not. We are focused on shareholder value creation and long-term sustained growth.
We are confident that we are built for growth and scaled for success as we become a standalone public company. Now I'll call Tom and Max back up, so we can start the Q&A portion of our presentation.
Good morning. As they get ready for Q&A, let me just say thank you again to all of you for joining us this morning. Given the number of people we have in the room, we ask that you only ask one question at a time to start, so I can try to get around to as many of you as possible. We'd also ask that before you ask your question, if you would state your name and the firm you're with, we would appreciate that. You guys ready?
Ready to go.
Okay.
Who wants to go first?
Hi, Ryan Levine with Citi.
Hi, Ryan.
Hi. I guess congratulations on the Analyst Day. I guess, in terms of the longer-term outlook, how much of a headwind is the recent decline in the hospitality business? And I guess married with that, in terms of the data center opportunity, does that more than offset that growth, or are those the two biggest drivers in terms of your outlook? Thanks.
Thanks for your question. If you think about Las Vegas and all the projects we've built over many, many years with our four highly capable companies, the race to get all these projects done for the Super Bowl earlier this year was a result of just an incredible amount of work opportunities for us. Think about Formula One, Fontainebleau project that Tom talked about, the Sphere, Durango Station, to name a few. All those projects came to... They finished. So we anticipated that when these jobs finished, we would have some very highly capable, skilled craftspeople and management that would be available to do other work in other locations of the country. We think about the Las Vegas companies, we think about the hospitality, gaming work that we do.
However, we finished a data center project about four years ago, and our customer called our Las Vegas company, the electrical company, the gold standard. So with that expertise, we were able to talk to other customers and pick up two projects in Arizona, and also go to the northern part of the state, also to deploy that expertise. So this helps offset the work that we completed in Las Vegas. Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, we are involved in pre-construction on a number of other projects that are in the planning stages. We're helping with design assist and some budgeting, and we're positioning ourselves, so when those projects start, that we will most likely get our fair share.
Hey, great. Thanks. Brent Thielman with D.A. Davidson. Appreciate the presentation. Jeff or Tom, I was hoping you guys could give a little more context around your competitive advantages. Tom, you spent a lot of time on this, but some of your public peers do utilize BIM, prefab capabilities, among other things. So I guess what I'm looking for is more what's the secret sauce for you guys that's gonna allow you to capture some more incremental sort of market share, and who are you getting that from?
I know what you said. Yeah, I'll start just briefly, and really, our people and the development of our people is crucial, from the field to our management staff, and we have over 85% of our people are direct labor. A lot of our leadership came from the field, so we are focused on the field and execution, and attracting, retaining, and providing the tools and equipment so our people can work safe. If you have the top industry talent like we do, our people can work anywhere, so they wanna be treated with a high degree of respect. They wanna be given the information, the tools, and the support, and they wanna be rewarded for performance, and I think we do that very well.
I think the other secret sauce that you referenced there is really our ability to share this expertise across the platform. So we're continually working with those groups, prefabrication groups, as an example, where we're getting our entire prefabrication groups across all of our operating brands together on a regular basis to say: "Okay, what worked really well? What maybe didn't work so well? How would you do better on that next time?" And so that sharing is really important to us, and we can share that not only across different geographies, obviously, but across different project types. We talked about our diverse revenue mix, right? And that comes from different kinds of jobs and different end markets that we're serving.
Being able to take that knowledge and share that across the group just increases our learning curve on all of this stuff so much, that I think that's an important piece to how we do it.
... I didn't want to ask you to throw it, so I appreciate it. Because neither of us have the hands to catch it here. Good morning. Mike Dudas from Vertical Research Partners. So given where the super growth that we're seeing in data centers and AI demand and where your customer base is, how are you aligned relative to the utility side, to the customer side on the hyperscale of your positioning, of where your locations are, your access to kind of get involved where all that money's going to be spent? And is that you think through that as you're thinking about your acquisition strategy over the next several years?
You know, we have been able to capitalize on, data center and the, electrification of the grid opportunities for our utility customers in the locations we are currently operating. Nevertheless, if you think about Ohio, we took one of our companies. This is a great example of transferring that information from one of our other operating companies' expertise and some people, to be able to help support and build that company up, to be able to capitalize on the data center work in that region. And that also has a T&D component, because we, with some of our customers, we're doing both T&D work and E&M work for some of our data centers. They see that we could do both.
And so by providing more services to be able to help solve their challenges of getting their projects built safely and on time and within budget, you know, we go to market with both, both services. So I do think that the opportunity for M&A is in the areas where we currently are not. There are opportunities where we've been able to take a core group of people and go into a market where we don't have a business, but that has to be very selective. We have to be very disciplined, and sometimes we get involved in a joint venture. Rather not, but sometimes we do that to serve our client.
So, if you look at our M&A opportunities and our internal prioritization of where we are looking for, anticipating our market growth and the geographic expansion opportunities, this is one of the things that we're most excited about, standing on our own as our own publicly traded company, to have that capital, to have that optionality for strategic M&A.
Just to follow up on that comment, maybe for Max. As you're looking at acquisition opportunities, can you talk about your return on capital employed targets, how you think through them, thinking about funding some of these opportunities? And what historically, come to mind, like, what type of size have you been acquiring, and what do you feel comfortable with as you move forward, as you get to be standalone and you recapitalize your balance sheet? Thank you.
Yeah. Yep. So I think we already have our, you know, our facilities ready to go, you know, pretty minimal leverage. So I think we will have ample dry powder, I think over $200 million of liquidity available when we stand ourselves up. Now, that would lever us higher than I'd feel comfortable with. You know, I think we set some leverage targets to say, "You know, this is kind of comfortable where we're operating the business." So, you know, in terms of size and scale, I think we'd want to stay somewhere in that, you know, two times leverage. So, you know, you can do the math on your own and decide how big of a company that is.
Stretch maybe a little bit more than quickly pay down, but, you know, really kind of minimal leverage is where we want to keep that.
Return requirements?
Yes, we look for things that are financially creative, right? So I don't have an ROIC metric to give you today, but of course, we wanna continue to build that up over time. One of the things I said, right, is we want to do the right deal at the right price at the right time, right? I mean, we really are looking at these things and looking at all the different return metrics.
Thanks. Good morning. Brian Brophy, Stifel. Wondering how much of your work are you leveraging prefab today? Where can that go over time, and how meaningful is that for margin expansion?
Want to take that, Tom?
Sure. So we measure our prefabrication across all of our operating brands, and we're continually driving and challenging those teams to continue to increase that percentage of our field work hours that we're doing on prefab. And so as we're setting those baselines and pushing the growth of that as we go forward, it's very dependent on projects, right? Some projects are, I'll say, ripe for prefab, where they're very cookie cutter. We can go in and do a lot of prefabrication work. Some are a little bit different, and a lot of that depends on our customer and where they're at in the design phase of their projects as well. If we're starting that project early and they're not completely through their design phase, it hampers some of our ability to prefabricate on that job.
Yeah. Other questions?
Hi, Jeff Hoffner, Engle Capital. Just on revenue growth, it's two questions, so I apologize. But, the 5%-7% revenue growth, I know you haven't given official 2025 guidance, but, you know, given the headwinds that you've seen in hospitality impacting 2024, do you expect them to continue in 2025, that those targets wouldn't be achievable for some reason? And then just secondarily, can you help reconcile some of the mega trends that you've outlined? And, you know, one slide was specifically dedicated to the CAGRs, you know, over the next 10 years, which are all higher than your financial targets, which would suggest that obviously there are certain areas in your business that might be good businesses, but perhaps aren't growing as fast. So can you help sort of identify what maybe those more sluggish areas are?
or how do we think your exposure to those megatrends are, what they actually are?
I'll start that question and turn it over to Max. First, if you think about our Q2 release, we reported a record backlog for at the end of Q2. So our Q3 earnings release will be November seventh, and I hope you listen in to that. So if you look at the diversification of our business, and the key word is diversification, we did over forty thousand projects for thirty-seven hundred customers. So we try to anticipate where those markets are gonna be so we could exceed our EBITDA margins, and of course, on our revenue. So you wanna take the other part of that?
Yeah, I mean, you know, listen, we're not gonna provide 2025 guidance today, and if I give you an answer, then you're gonna assume something. So, the reality is we're trying to give you long-term opportunities here, right? And I think there's, you know, to Jeff's point, to your point, there's markets that are growing faster and markets that aren't growing faster. I think we have the ability to capture some of these great megatrends with a portion of our business and the metrics that we flashed up. And other parts might not grow as fast, but I think they're really good markets still. We have really good customer relationships in those markets. And we have, you know, great margin and great customer contracts in those markets.
So I think some of those that aren't growing as fast still help us maybe win the next job that is growing faster in a different market, so they're still important to us.
Yeah, thanks. Davidson again. You know, just in terms of how these contracts lapse and the ability to renegotiate and hopefully renegotiate better terms and improve margins, I think the T&D segment may take a little longer. I think you alluded to that. Maybe just give us some sense of the duration of some of these agreements that are out there and ultimately, how long it takes you to sort of get through that in terms of seeing some margin expansion in that business group.
Yeah, so on the T&D side of the MSAs is a great revenue driver for us, consistency, and we have dozens of MSAs with utilities. So, we're in the process of always renewing and anticipating what those costs are. One of the key things with our relationship with the unions is that we're able to be involved in labor management committees, so we're involved in negotiations, so we can anticipate and go to our customer and to be able to project what those labor increases are going to be. Also fuel, also equipment as well. So we are working with our customers. We've restructured some of our MSAs, where we had the huge increase on the fuel cost, and we've not only caught up, but we got ahead of that.
But the post-COVID pandemic period, it was a little bit of a challenge there for us and some pressure on margins. So the key is communicating with our customers, which we have long-term relationships with, earning their respect, and coming to them with data that they can make good decisions. Because they want us on their projects, because, as Tom gave the example with one of our utility customers, we work safe. You know, we work and do what we say we're going to do. So, MSAs are a very important part of our business. We have a lot of success stories there. We focus on those customers that we've got decades-long experience. In the meantime, by expanding to look at some of the other utilities and independent utilities that we're looking to build and grow.
What's the average duration of those agreements?
Three to five years, and a couple of cases, we've been working for utilities for 18, 20, 30 years on some of these agreements.
Thank you.
Thanks for the presentations. If we were to double-click into the T&D segment, could you walk through how you differentiate yourself versus other T&D companies? Are there any particular geos or types of projects that you tend to be overweight within T&D? Thank you.
We're very diversified with our utility customers, and we provide overhead transmission and distribution in addition to our underground power, gas, and communication services. So if you think about the ability of our people to be able to deliver safely and on time and on budget, now we get KPIs from some of our customers, as Tom had mentioned, and our values and our business aligns. We're synchronous with what our customers value as well. So you wanna expand on that?
Yeah, I think Jeff really touched on it, but there, it's really the partnerships that we do have with those customers and working together with them on a very daily basis to understand what each other's needs are, what each other's requirements are. And even when I think about safety, Jeff, I think about, you know, we've done safety training seminars for our teams, and we've invited some of those utility customers in to those meetings with us as well. And so it's really that collaboration across those customers.
Hi, John Barr with Needham Mutual Funds .
John.
Geographically, you put the map up that shows, like, 45 states that you're licensed in. It looked like New England was missing there. How do you view geographic expansion, and how much business do you do in the Northeast? Is the Northeast important?
Northeast is important. We don't do a lot of work currently there. We don't have an operating company there. But we're licensed, and we want to be licensed in most of the states across the country because we get an opportunity to go and do work like we did with one of our satellite offices in Arizona. We've had an operating company, that operating brand, that had a request from a customer to will you come down and help be a part of this big project. So that's why it's really important for us to keep those licensings updated for our companies.
The Northeast is certainly a strategic geographic expansion area for us as we look in the future for a complementary company that has got a great reputation on the safety side and has exceptional leadership including the field and relationship with the customer, so it is an important part of our business, and we look to expand in more places to serve our customers and grow our business.
Great. And then I had a quick second one. So mostly IBEW, what unions are represented?
Yeah, for the electrical workers, mostly IBEW, and of course, for our mechanical companies, we have the plumbers and the sheet metal union as well, and then the pipefitters for our fire protection.
Thank you.
Any other questions? Brian's got another one.
Thanks, Brian Brophy, Stifel again. Can you talk about your capabilities on the large transmission projects and how you're thinking about those opportunities going forward?
So, we have extensive experience, 500 kV on down, to do transmission projects, but we are very selective for that type of work. So we've got a track record of success. We have the skill set, the equipment, and the people. But those type of long-term projects, we have to make sure that we go through the contract, and make sure that we could be successful. We, of course, look at all the rights of way and the permitting processes that have to be in place. So, we've got the success, we've got the experience with those type of jobs. We're looking at many of those jobs that we're all tracking, and, we're gonna pick the ones that are gonna fit our business, so we could be successful on the safety side and on the margin side, of course.
And then, Ryan Levine with Citi, just to follow up, in terms of your margin outlook, do you see an opportunity to expand your margin profile? And in terms of your operating leverage, is there an embedded operating leverage given some of your fixed costs? Thanks.
Yeah. We're always looking to improve upon our margins. We're not a one-and-done contractor. We're not gonna get a project and just change order our customer to death and to lift the margins. We have margin uplift. We focus on. We look in the mirror, and we focus on operational excellence initiatives, as Tom described, whether it's prefab or bidding discipline, making sure we're using job cost data, so we're picking the right labor units, and then we're going out and planning those jobs. That is why we found so much success in getting selected for added value by our employees. And that added value, our customers, they have complex projects to build. They want to build them fast, and they, they value safety as well. So they want a contractor who's gonna be safe.
They want to procure their key subcontractors on these complex projects on price, which is always important, but also non-price items. They want to look at the skill set of who are we going to put on the job. And sometimes they write in our contract key people, management, and field. Are they gonna be a part of the job? If they're gonna be a part of that job, that's the added value part in our Forever Strategy. Then we've got to go execute it. And once we go and execute it and we build that job, we strengthen those relationships with the customers. You know, that R in Forever Strategy could also mean repeat business, and it also means respect from our customers, so we can go through that whole cycle again.
So we're always looking for margin uplift, and we want to balance that with a long-term relationship with our customers and repeat business.
Just to round that out, Ryan, some of the dyssynergies are more fixed in nature, and there's an opportunity to, you know, thin those out as a percentage of revenue as well going forward, as we grow.
Good point. All right.
Somebody here?
Any other questions? Or, oh, okay.
Sneak one in. Hi, Tim from Cooper Creek Partners.
Sure.
Data center work, largest contributor backlog, but it's a lower margin business. How do you balance that growth opportunity with your, you know, with it potentially being dilutive to margins and hitting that margin expansion target?
Yeah. Balance in our businesses and diversification is really important. Over 40,000 jobs that we worked on last year, some of the smaller jobs, they may have higher margins. It's a good business mix for us. It's also a way that we get into our customers' facilities, build those relationships, hear about when they're going to add to their current facility or build a new facility. The key with these large mega data center projects is getting selected early, as I mentioned, for our team. Our fees are always important, our ability to execute and working with the design team and being involved before we even break ground, and as the designs are being developed, we are an extension of the design, providing those constructability reviews for those customers to be able to-...
Make sure that those margins are very stabilized, and we have a lot of opportunity for uplift. Do you wanna add to that?
Yeah, and I think the other piece of that is really that disciplined process. And so, Jeff talked about the discipline in our bidding process. Well, that's one thing, but our teams are also very competitive, too, right? And our project managers that are running this work, we know what we bid it at, right? That's our baseline. But they wanna win. Everybody wants to win, and so there's a challenge to them, too, to say: Okay, now let's get some uplift in that job and bring that job in to completion higher than we actually did that. That's part of that competitive side of our team of wanting to win that and get that margin up a little bit higher as well.
Can you talk about compensation philosophy and structure, both for senior management but also the craftsmen and line managers?
The last part of that clip?
Just across your organization, between senior management, line managers, you know, on the construction site, how are they compensated?
How they're compensated?
Yeah.
We have an overall... Without getting into specifics, because I'm not able to do that today, but we have a pay-for-performance. And so people perform, they trust that we are going to treat them fairly as far as how they contributed to a particular project. We spend a lot of time on measuring that and working with the operating brand presidents on making sure that we are paying competitively the industry, so we can retain our people. We don't have many cases where people leave our company. Not because we're overpaying them, it's because they think they trust that they're gonna be rewarded when they do a good job. And when they do a great job, they should get rewarded a little better. And I think we do a good job.
We put a lot of time into that, and I think that is one of the benefits, and then also the opportunities as we grow our company. We have with our Vice President of Human Resources, Brittany, and her team and the operating companies, we spend a lot of time on identifying high-potential people, key performers, and we invest in their future by a custom-designed Building Leaders training that we developed, and so I think people feel that they can be successful in their career at our company, and I think with the attention and focus we've provided on that, I think that has been a contributor to our success and the retention of our people.