Okay, good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining the Fireside Chat with EMCOR. I'm Steve Fisher, UBS Machinery, Engineering Construction, and US Building Materials Analyst. We are really pleased to have the management of EMCOR with us. We have Tony Guzzi, the CEO, Jason Nalbandian, the CFO, and Andy Backman, the Vice President of Investor Relations. Before we jump into the question session, we're going to show a short video, so let's please play that video now. That was great. Well, thanks, everyone.
Thank you.
Yeah, absolutely. Great to have you guys here. Appreciate your joining. So, Tony, you've been president and/or CEO of EMCOR for more than 20 years. You've led the company through a lot of growth. You've got a lot of great businesses and great brands. Maybe you could start off with just giving us an overview of EMCOR, where we are in the evolution of the company, and what are the core strengths today and where you see the company going from here?
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to believe 20 years. You know, when I came to EMCOR, it was just a collection of companies, mainly focused in the Northeast, making most of its money in New York City. And most of that money was made in the electrical trade in New York City. Probably not a great place to anchor all of your earnings. So the first, you know, if you think about the evolution, I'm going to focus very little on the past. It has probably been three or four distinct phases. The first one is fix the company, right? We were making less than 1% margins collectively. We were bleeding heavily in Canada and the UK. We had not much of a footprint out of the Northeast, and a couple of things outside of the Northeast. And there was no unifying message, no unifying message of the company.
the first phase: just stop doing stupid things. Get it right. Start becoming a better contractor. Start measuring and doing things. Now, there was a great classic culture even back then. And you had this idea of individuals taking the best of the individual autonomy of the units, but we hadn't done anything to create the collective strength. The second phase, and it's where we've been since, and it started around 2010, is we became a values-based organization of mission-first people always. And we very much took seriously training around leadership development, developing our subsidiary CEOs and our subsidiary leadership and our segment leadership and corporate leadership, all focused on the same thing. You know, simple things like integrity, discipline, transparency. You can't run our company without transparency. Mutual respect and trust, safety, and teamwork. And once we did that, we've seen incredible growth.
And now, look, you also have to be really technically competent, and you've got to put all the enablers in to do that. We were then able to start taking advantages of scale to serve our customers better. We have the best 150 operators out there, if you go from the segment level down through the subsidiaries. They are completely invested in the success of not only their subsidiary, but our company. We are in a place now where we share best practices across nine or ten different peer groups in the company. And, you know, the next evolution is to continue to take that and make it better. And we are exposed to some terrific megatrends in the market. Now, it's not just lucky that you end up exposed to those trends.
You know, we've been on, through acquisition and organic expansion and organic growth and developing capabilities, to become more and more focused on really being able to serve the most demanding customers in the most demanding markets, whether it be data centers, whether it be all the nearshoring things you see around that, other high-tech manufacturing, healthcare and hospitals, energy efficiency and energy efficiency upgrades, and so we've been able to take all those things and put our capabilities against those trends, and like I said, but it started with you've got to get right as a contractor, you've got to get everybody rowing in the same direction, and then you've got to figure out how to build and train your team, and we are now, I think, one of the preferred places for skilled trade labor to work.
You think about what an advantage it is to have those 28,000+ people come to work for us every day. We have some of the most skilled electricians, plumbers, pipefitters , welders, HVAC technicians, millwrights, and low-voltage technicians that there are anywhere. That mix of workers for us is about 70% union, 30% non-union. On the construction side, electrically, we're 100% union with the IBEW. Mechanically, we're about 75% union. Building services, you know, we have that mechanical service business, which is a terrific business, which is more than, what, 70% of that segment now, Jason? Then we have the industrial services segment, which focuses mainly on oil and gas and chemical large process industries. We have a nice services business that we restructured back in the early teens in the U.K.
You put all that together, there's one unifying theme of the company. We can build great facilities. We then can commission those facilities, and you think about most of the things we're doing, the electrical, mechanical, or fire protection part of that building structure, manufacturing plant, data center is 50% to 70% our content, then we can commission it, then we can service that, and then we can do aftermarket work, and I think, though, go back to the point, the critical thing that we have is really highly skilled leadership that knows the work and the best tradespeople in the industry.
That's fantastic. That's a great evolution and a lot of exciting things to look forward to with these megatrends . I should have mentioned that this is fireside chat. If anyone does have any questions, you can use the QR code at your table, and I'll get it on this iPad here, or we can just raise your hand and we can take your questions as we go along. So maybe shifting to the concept of services versus construction, you do have some really strong core services business that, as you've said, really enables all of us to do our work. What do you think is the right mix of services versus construction for the long term for your business?
You know, I don't think about it that way. Because if I'd have thought about it that way, right, we wouldn't have taken advantage of some of these megatrends . We would have been working to a false mix of, well, it can be 60% construction and 40% service, or it could be 65% new construction and 35%. I think the way we think about it is, where are the best margin opportunities with the market set we have in front of us? Now, our service business, if you look at our mechanical service businesses, they've grown high single digits to low teens for the last eight years. It's in building services and some of the big contracts on the site-based side come in and out of there. But, you know, okay, that's grown great. We continue to do acquisitions there. We've had great organic expansion.
But you'd never say, well, you know, in the way we think about it, you'd say the entire industrial services, 90% of it is in the aftermarket, right? 10% of it may be new construction. 90% of it's in the aftermarket, right? Because by definition, they're servicing the refineries and the chemical plants. The way I think about it is we should be building all those platforms to be as successful as they can, to have the capabilities they need to be successful. All of those platforms for us are investable platforms, whether it be electrical, mechanical, and within mechanical, you know, there's all kinds of, there's HVAC, there's big process piping, there's high-purity piping, there's fire life safety.
And then mechanical services. Really what that business looks like is building controls, and it's usually, you know, in our local service companies, we have building controls, we have service agreements, we have repair service, and then we do retrofit projects. Average size of those are somewhere around $500,000 to $1 million, but they can go up to $7 to $8 million because we've been taking care of that facility. You go to industrial services, we'll do a turnaround, they're called spot, that may be $3 to $5 million, but we'll also do a $20 million turnaround for these customers. We also there work in the upstream space with our electrical platform, and now with compressor stations, we've done that for a while.
And we also have, you know, one of the acquisitions we've made this year. We have the ability to help monitor, put the control systems into monitor for methane. And the U.K. is a full-service aftermarket site-based services company. So you put all that together, you say, is there anything in there that you would call a non-investable platform? In my mind, no. Why? Because each one of those things we're doing are all good cash-generating businesses. Each one of them have pretty good return on net assets, and each one of them have growth in front of them, either through acquisition or organic expansion.
Fantastic. You've built up a really strong customer base over the years. What are your customers asking of you today, and how is that different from a few years ago?
Yeah, and I think where you see that the most is in the electrical business. You know, we have gone from serving, you know, two and a half to four, depending on where you've snapped the line, data center markets, to today we're servicing over 13 or 14. We've done most of that through organic expansion. And how do you do that through organic expansion? You either open up, like we did in Arizona, at the request of not only our semiconductor customers, but also our data center customers, and you open up shop. Now, that was unusual for EMCOR. That's not something we would have done prior to 2021.
Or you take one of your existing companies who may have not been in the data center business, and then what you do is our folks, because go through that peer group network we talked about, they work together, and what you do is they teach them how to do it, all the way from estimating and concept of design, all the way through showing them how to estimate, maybe put a couple of frontline supervision and project managers down into that subsidiary for the first job, and then they know how to do it. And then our folks come back and check to see how that progress was. And of course, then we'll make acquisitions too, and most of that for us is to fill in white space or, quite frankly, to serve our customers. They'll ask us to. That's electrical.
Electrical, Jason Nalbandian, has become much more of a national business like that.
I think that's the key to me as well, right? It's our customers asking us how we can assist them in geographies we're not in today. And to Tony's point, we've done more organic expansion. We moved mechanically into Columbus, Ohio as well, and these are things we hadn't done before, but if we can make the economics work, if we have strong demand there, we have an anchor customer, and our customers are working with us on contract terms that help mitigate risk of an uncertain labor pool, it's something we're now getting really good at doing.
Yeah. And we'll always be careful that, you know, so we start with, technically, can we do a job? Always. And then we say, okay, can we marshal the right team? And then can we build a labor force in that market to be successful for our customers? It does us no good to go just chase growth. We start with, can we execute? I mean, at its heart, EMCOR is an execution company, right? We don't even think of, even though we've had great growth, we don't think about ourselves in terms of a growth company. We think of ourselves, and you brought up the point of blue-chip customers. We think of ourselves in terms of how are we going to take care of our customers so that we don't disappoint them? Because we have a fairly unforgiving customer base too.
There's a lot at stake when they bring us on to do the job.
Yeah, that's a great point, and I want to talk to you about some of your points of differentiation and probably a lot of what you've just talked about and being able to set up shop in these places and do it successfully, but I'm curious, you know, what do you think more broadly are some of the biggest points of differentiation that EMCOR brings to these opportunities?
I'll go back to what I opened with. A lot of people talk about developing their people and staying with it and having a comprehensive leadership development program. We actually live it. We train over 500 people, senior leaders, through the Thayer Leader Development Group. And Jason and I, I go to everyone, as does Jason, and we stay the whole time. That's our chance to really make sure folks know, hey, here are the white lines. Here's our expectations for you as a leader. Now, before that, a lot of them have come to some of our business classes, right? Where we have an intermediate course where we teach them on, as they're moving up, hey, these are the economics that drive your business, and these are the things that matter. And then we have a frontline supervisor for someone that's just starting to come in.
And look, the frontline supervisor course, we started about three years ago. I was a bit of a cynic. How are you going to bring union superintendents and union foremen and first-time project managers together in a room and be able to teach them together when it's the first time they've all been together as part of EMCOR on the things we think are important, not only from execution, but also from leadership? And one of the things I love to do is be proven wrong, and it's been a fantastic success. I think the other point of differentiation is the way our teams work together. So they start with the customer, right? And they say, okay, that customer wants us to serve them better. But how are we going to do that either through our peer groups or through small teams we put together to tackle an opportunity?
And no one at EMCOR is saying, hey, what's my cut if I do that? Now, do they do that together and figure out how they share resources? Sure, they do. We have to referee once in a blue moon short, but very, very rarely. And it's because go to the primary point. We're all rowing in the same direction. That's a huge point of differentiation versus other contractors. And also the technical resources we've, Jason, but maybe talk about some of the things we've done on the capital side to expand our network and how we work with the field to develop capital planning and growth.
Sure. So Tony's point on, you know, our scale allowing us to do more investing in organic growth, whether that's through prefabrication or some of the initiatives around construction technology, whether it's Virtual Design and Construction or Building Information Modeling , it's something that we've really started to invest in over the last several years, and we're not a CapEx-intensive company. You know, if you looked at our CapEx, it's probably 0.5% of revenues. But if you look over the last several years, from 2021 into 2022, our CapEx grew around 35%, 36%, and then from 2022 into 2023, it grew another 60%. And that's really these investments that we're making in our shops, in our facilities, to help make our people more efficient, to help share our resources around prefabrication and BIM. And, you know, we're a company that manages around RONA.
and so when we make these investments, we work with our local operating companies so that we can find a way to help them or co-invest with them in these so that they're seeing the returns, but we're also helping them with the capital side of it.
Yeah. That's great. Makes a lot of sense, and I was going to ask you about where scale is important in your business, but you pretty much just addressed that, so we can maybe shift gears to.
I think on the scale topic, right? I think the one other that I would always say is our financial position, right? Our balance sheet, our bonding capacity, right? Not only does it allow us to invest in our business organically and inorganically, but it also gives our customers the confidence that we can perform these large megaprojects , right? When they look to our balance sheet and they know we have the bonding capacity that we need for any of these megaprojects , it gives them confidence in our execution.
So you think about the trends that have been growing in our business and you think about who we're working for. These are very well-capitalized companies that operate on low leverage, by and large, right? And so their expectation of us is the same thing, right? So I think they start with, technically, can you all do the job?
Do you have the resource to scale, technical know-how? Can you fund the job as you're building it, and are you going to make sure the job gets done? They point back to us. These large customers who we work with across multiple sites point back to our balance sheet quite often, and, you know, the way we think about that, our balance sheet, like Jason talked about the bonding, that's not all jobs, but there's a fair amount. We have great partnerships on the bonding side. They also expect us to be responsible stewards of our balance sheet. So we've always been low leverage. We don't have to be no leverage, but we can never be high leverage.
Yeah, makes sense. We've seen challenges with that, others in history over time. Maybe shifting gears to talk about some of the recent trends. You're coming off a great quarter. Remaining performance obligations are essentially your backlog at a record level, beating the consensus handily for the last 10 quarters. Maybe can you frame these results in terms of how you view the cyclical and structural dynamics playing out in your business?
Yeah. I mean, if you think about, you know, we've had over a couple of years a lot of beats and raises, right? And it really hasn't been on the revenue side. We pretty much, maybe a little bit in the beginning of the year, we were getting more quick return large projects than we thought we were going to get. But the thing we consistently miss, I don't want to say miss because, you know, it's a good miss, was the strength in the underlying margins in our business. And that's especially true in our electrical and mechanical segments. And, you know, we're operating at levels we haven't operated at before, but we've been doing it on a fairly sustained basis on our electrical and mechanical segment.
I'm going to let Jason jump into this as we talk about the fourth quarter and what we think the mix looks like in RPOs right now, but the reality is there are some structural differences, you know, versus five years ago. One of them is the speed of these projects. The speed alone allows us to not only absorb our overhead faster, but also puts us and the customer on the same footing when you get into contract negotiations and risk sharing, so size and speed say, okay, we have to think about this more as partners versus just upfront in contractual terms, making ourselves adversaries. I think the second thing is we've gotten really good on some of these things because as they become more repetitive, we get a much better handle on our costs and what kind of contingencies we need to build into a project.
And I think the third thing driving our margins is just excellent execution driven by some of the investments that Jason talked about and I've talked about, whether it be training at the highest level, but also training down here on means and methods down in the field, but also capital we've applied to make ourselves more efficient, whether that be through software and technology tools or whether it be through equipment and machinery. And I think you put all those things together, the margin base is pretty good right now. But you always need to remember in a project-based company, the margins operate within bands, right? They're never, you know, this isn't a manufacturing company that we locked in the standards at the beginning of the year, and if we get the volume, everything's going to turn out this way. So they operate on bands.
Like Jason said, we really focus our company on cash, which return on net assets at the field level is a proxy for. We focus on cash, and if you focus on cash in a services business, everything else turns out to be okay if you're growing cash.
Yeah. I think Tony's right on the margin point, right? You can't look at margins at a point in time, and I certainly wouldn't look at them quarter to quarter. I think it's over a period of time. Now, historically, we would have probably said a 36-month window is a good look for kind of normalized margins by segment. I think the operating environment today is a lot different, and I think that window is shorter. It's probably a 12 to 18-month window. Maybe as we pass the fourth quarter and we have another quarter behind us, it's a 12 to 24-month window. But certainly, right, margins move in bands. It depends on the nature of the projects we're performing, the timing of the projects, and really the type or the sector in any given quarter.
But when we look to just the fourth quarter and we say, you know, if you look at the mix in our backlog or our RPO and you say, what are our expectations for the near term, in the fourth quarter, we're expecting margins somewhere in the 9%-9.8% range. And if you just step back and say, how does that compare to where we are year to date? We're essentially saying at the low end that 9%, our fourth quarter margins will be in line with what we've done year to date. So when we look at the mix of work we have ahead of us, it won't be dilutive to what we've done to date. It's at least equal in quality, and our expectations for execution are equal year to date.
If we go to that midpoint, we're somewhere around where we did on average in the second and third quarter. And then at that high end, that's the record margins that we achieved in this past third quarter. And a lot needs to go right to get there. It's really, it's not a pricing game, it really is execution.
Yeah. If people ask that, you know, and you'll hear other competitors in the space say, customers are throwing work at us or, you know, man, what a, I've never looked at the world that way. We're only as good as our last job we did, difficult job for a customer. We're only as good as the commissioning of that facility the last time we did it. And what we're doing is very difficult. I got to tell you, when I go out to a site, especially on a large job, and I think of the logistical challenges that are on that job and the expertise our folks are using to do that and the planning that went on. And I would say that's to think about other things that have changed, right? We are much better planners than we've ever been. And again, that comes from repetition, right?
You know, we used to do maybe eight, 10 years ago, if we had five jobs in RPOs that were over $50 million, that would have been a lot. We have multiples of that today. And when you start to execute more and more of that, you get better at it. And we've gotten better at it, right? And that goes across not only what we're doing on the construction side, but if you go to the mechanical service business, we're better at it. Some of the hardest work we do is doing a chiller changeout or an air handler changeout in built space, especially something like a hospital or a lab. That's being done after hours. You have to take it, you have to not interrupt what's going on. And you're trying there less on productivity and more to minimize the disruption to keep your maybe 20-year customer operational.
And then if you go to our technician workforce and you think about what do you do to build margin there or sustain operational excellence, it starts with, you know, utilization and having the right information and the right tools and the right parts and all those things in that technician's hand or the ability to get it quickly so that they can successfully go complete the repair. And then to complete the cash generation cycle, you know, to verify what you did so that the customer agrees to pay. And we're applying technology there through cameras and everything else to get it up and say, here's what we did, here's what that invoice looks like. And if you agree to it, you probably should pay us sooner rather than later.
And so all these things are focused on increasing the asset velocity in the business, but also the sign of a very healthy business like ours is the cash generation, but also our ability to our billings and net billings and excess of costs because that tells you the project's usually going pretty well. It's not a guarantee. You just can't send in bills, right? The customer has to agree to accept the bill, another key metric that we watch. So again, you put all that together. And then one of the other questions you'll probably get to is like, how do you think about our business long term? And I'm going to flip it to Jason here in a minute. You know, what do you guys think about when you're doing planning for the future on the revenue side?
We've said this before, but we actually went back and did some analytics on this over a three and five-year period. I think you'd have got the same answer over a 10-year period. What does EMCOR overall grow with its mix of new construction and aftermarket business? Because remember, non-res is primarily a new construction metric. What does EMCOR overall grow with respect to non-res? How much of a premium do we get there? What does our electrical segment grow with respect to versus non-res? What does our mechanical segment grow versus non-res? We could take the mechanical for a proxy for the 70% of building services that are tied to the same cycles because half that business is projects. Maybe Jason, maybe walk through those numbers because
I think if you just this will help you build your model when you cover us someday.
I think if you just look over a five-year window, we have a history or we have a track record beyond the five years of outpacing non-res, and if you look over a five-year window, what we've found is that organically we grow about 200 bp s on average greater than non-res, and if you throw in acquisitions, it's about 250 bp s greater than non-res. That's consolidated EMCOR, which includes our services businesses and our industrial services business, but if you just focus in on the construction businesses, electrical and mechanical construction, that number is closer to about 500 bp s in excess of non-res, and I think that's a good way to think about long-term growth for EMCOR in comparison to non-res growth.
Yeah. That was a great transition from margins to the growth algorithm.
So maybe now digging into some of the growth areas a little bit more. Data center is a very popular topic. You touched upon it a little bit earlier in our conversation. Maybe building on that. EMCOR is not new to data centers. You've been working on them for a very long time, decades, I think in fact. So how has your data center opportunity evolved actually? What kind of projects were you or what were projects like 10 years ago, five years ago, even the last couple of years? And what do you think they're going to look like over the next couple of years?
Yeah. So there's been a, you know, I remember the first data centers when I was at Carrier getting built by AOL and Equinix and other people. They were something like 10 MW to 15 MW. So let's just start sizing 10 MW to 15 MW versus where we are today. 10 MW to 15 MW maybe is 500 homes. 10 MW to 15 MW, if you go and put two big hospital centers together, maybe that's 15 MW. So about seven, eight years ago, we were building data centers. We thought they were large. They were 25 MW. So think about 25 MW, right? You know, 1,000 homes, 800 homes, depending on where you live. All right. So today, so until a couple of years ago, we were typically building things 50 MW to 70 MW, 1,800 homes, 1,500 homes, depending on where you live.
Today we're building 50 MW to 100 MW, 100 MW, 2,500 homes. I toured a data center last week that's geared towards AI, 300 MW. So what does that mean for EMCOR? So there's still a lot of cloud building going on, right? This will be stored. This webcast will be stored forever, right? You know, my grandkids can go listen to someday when they're taking their business school class and probably won't be here, but anyway. And you know, it'll be stored somewhere. It'll Google my name and it'll pop up. Why that would happen, I have no idea, but it'll be out there and to infinity and. So we're still building a lot of cloud storage. And my gut, I mean, there's all kinds of studies out there is that's growing high single digits right now.
The AI-enabled data centers, we're just at the front end, so what are they growing? 15% to 20%. There's really no number that tells you what AI data centers are growing. So 300 MW, let's put that into perspective. And 300 MW is bigger than any manufacturing plant that's ever existed to include a steel mill. Steel mill is about 25 MW to 40 MW. Think about that. 300 MW, I visited one down in Georgia that think about we just built three nuclear reactors in Georgia, the first ones that have been built in forever. They're somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 MW. So let's take the 1,200 MW one. 300 MW data centers using one quarter of one of those reactors. So let's operationalize that for EMCOR with that 300 MW means versus a cloud storage. Mechanically, there can be anywhere from 1.3 to 1.5 more content.
Electrically, about 1.1 to 1.2. And so you think about where we are in the evolution of data centers and say, okay, what could go wrong? And what we see today is one of the reasons we're serving 14 data center markets electrically and four or five mechanically and fire life safety. We can serve every data center market in the country. One of the things that could be, and so why that happened is the data center builders and owners are in the search for stranded power right now, places that have pockets of power that they can take advantage of. So what's going to, and I think they're good for the next three or four years doing that. But somewhere around years four or five, there's going to have to be new generation brought on. Right now we're extending the life of facilities.
We're doing all kinds of things. What do I think's really going to happen there? I think we'll continue some of the renewable builds. That'll be part of it, but that's not going to power data centers and semiconductor plants. Be part of the solution. So what's going to happen is you're going to start adding more gas plants. And if you talk to, if you listen to what these people are talking about, they're talking now about gas plants. Three years ago, all they talked about is they were going to power them by renewables. They never really believed that, right? But now they're talking about gas plants and they're talking about modular nuclear. Well, modular nuclear is going to look like big nuclear because they're going to put them all in the same place. They're not going to spread nuclear plants all over the country.
Maybe they'll just be easier to build. And so, you know, we do Balance of Plant work, especially on the gas plants, but that will mop up even more labor as we go through the infrastructure build for the first load growth we've seen in the country really in 20 years, 25 years, maybe 30 years. And so you're going to see this next wave of building that will happen in conjunction with everything else that's going on to power what is really between the reshoring coupled with upgrading just basic facilities coupled with, and at the same time, you're going to be trying to drive down your energy usage on existing space through more energy efficiency projects. So the data center market, I think, has legs for a while. You know, we're contractors. We sort of think of the world in two to three-year increments.
We think we're pretty good for a while, and we'll continue to build capabilities to build them to serve our customers across all those three disciplines, whether it be mechanical, electrical, or fire life safety, which is part of mechanical.
Fantastic. Maybe I'll ask one more and then we'll open it up to questions. So you know, we just talked a lot about data centers and touched a little bit, made reference to kind of manufacturing and reshoring. At some point, maybe these markets are going to slow down a little bit. How should we think about maybe the balance that you have with other markets? What are some of the other markets that have some interesting opportunities for you? I've heard you mention make reference to water and wastewater. Are there any other markets you're even close to as excited about as maybe data centers?
I think we're, and you're right. We've talked a lot about data centers and we talk a lot about high-tech manufacturing as well. And I think those are two of our strongest growth markets right now. But if you take those two, what I'll call high-growth markets out of our business and you just look at the core of what we do, the institutional work, the healthcare work, the water and wastewater, the traditional manufacturing, we still have growth in our construction business in every sector we play in other than commercial. And if you just strip out those two high-growth sectors, again, data centers and high-tech manufacturing, and you look at the rest of the business, we're still growing at 7%, which I think speaks volumes to the fundamentals of the business. You mentioned manufacturing. Traditional manufacturing remains strong for us.
It's broad-based, whether it's traditional automotive, computer electronics, consumer goods, building products. It really is broad-based, and the thing that we're starting to see a little bit more of now is the food processing work. If you look from Q2 to Q3 sequentially, our RPOs or backlog in that space is up 18%, and food processing is in part driving that new demand in manufacturing.
That 7% number, Jason was over how long?
That's for the year-to-date.
Year-to-date. So you wouldn't, like, intuitively, you wouldn't have thought that. You'd say they're getting outside growth in these two markets and there's really nothing going on outside of that. But 7% growth outside of those two big markets, pretty good growth.
Yeah, and you mentioned water and waste.
Especially at the size we're at now.
For sure.
You mentioned water and wastewater as well. That's another space where we're up nearly 15%. If you look at our RPOs there, again, some significant growth at 18%. And that's a unique market for us. Those projects, one of the only places where they tend to be multi-year. So a typical project for EMCOR is done in 12 months or less. And our typical RPO burns within 85% of it would burn within 12 months. These water and wastewater projects, about $730 million in RPO, a little bit longer term for us. So I think a solid base there as well.
Great. We'll just pause and see if anyone has any questions. If anyone wants to raise their hand, if you have a question, we'll just pause for a second here. And if not, we can just keep rolling along. Couple of minutes left here.
RPOs, I would say, always seems to be a focus of investors. And I think as you've said, you know, it makes sense that people kind of look at that. It's an important metric, but you know, you really can't control the pace at which your customers make their decisions, and you can't look at these things on a one-quarter to one-quarter basis. There's ebbs and flows. So what can you do to manage those ebbs and flows? Do you operate the business as a portfolio? Can you move your talent base around to kind of optimize the utilization?
We move it for a short period of time, right? We talked about what we did to get more people in the data center-based market. I'll break your question up into two parts. We don't control the pace and timing of how I always say I don't control when my customer wants to put ink on the paper, much like I don't control when we can finally convince somebody that EMCOR is the right home for their company after their life's work. I can't do either one of those other than to say, keep working at it. RPOs quarter to quarter, you think about it from first to second quarter, RPOs went down, right? You know, people have their hair on fire, and I'm like, all right. We have the big spike second to third quarter, and there's joy in the hallways, right?
And I'm like, that's not how the business really works. Much like that doesn't work that way on an RPO basis, and it doesn't work that way. Now, if you have three, four, five quarters where it starts to look either with that increasing or it's been sequentially down, then you start to have a trend that may be, okay, we're resetting. The other thing I'd remind people is there's nobody in this industry, and I would argue in just about any business that knows how to resize their business up or down better than we do. And that goes back to the skill of our folks in the field. They are world-class at this. And with trade, skilled trade labor, they know the bargain, right? There's no severance costs. There's none of that, right? They go back either to the union hall or they go home.
There's no hard feelings, and everybody goes back to work when we have work again.
Okay. Well, we have just hit time. That's great discussion. Really appreciate it. Thanks very much for being here and keep up the good work.
Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having us.
For sure.