Good afternoon, everyone. We're just going to get started. Quick introduction on my part.
I'm Manish Somaiya. I cover power, tech, and infrastructure for Cantor. Super excited to have Tony Guzzi and Jason Nalbandian, CFO. Tony, of course, as you probably know, is the CEO of EMCOR. We initiated on EMCOR yesterday, price target of $848. If you haven't had a chance check out the piece. Of course, super excited to have the conversation with the team this afternoon.
Maybe I'll kick it off with you, Tony. Obviously, you had a great 2025.
Sure.
What is one aspect of your business that investors still underestimate in terms of the potential and in terms of market standing?
Yeah, I think we've been at this a long time with a long record of success, and I think. Look, we don't take that for granted either, right?
In the kind of business we're in, you keep your humility over that period of time. But we've been, I think, a very good compounder, right? I guess if you were comparing us we don't chase fads.
We execute well. You can argue we're a very broadly diversified portfolio of projects and service-based with the data, like everyone's talking about with the data center option today. It's not like we turn away data center work to do other work.
I think part of it is, if they actually looked at the numbers and realize our penetration in the data center space, they'd realize they're getting great exposure to data centers. Because of our size and breadth, you don't necessarily just see data centers, even though the business is up 100% in mechanical and 70%-80% electrical year-over-year, and the RPOs have climbed.
I think that's one aspect of it. I think the other aspect of it is we are very disciplined capital allocators. I've never been the kind of person that says, "Well, my multiple is here, and so anything that comes up to that multiple, I can just go buy." That's never been our shtick.
We've been very disciplined about where we buy, which is mechanical and electrical construction for the most part. Mechanical services, which is really HVAC services, building controls, and fire life safety within mechanical. You have to be patient.
The other thing just because a market's hot or you see concentration, just the old rules of investing still stand, right? Watch for concentration. Watch for customer concentration on an acquisition target. Watch for sectors of concentration. Watch for geographic concentration.
A little less relevant in our business because almost everything we buy is geographically concentrated because that's one of the reasons we're buying is to get into a market like we did Batchelor & Kimball years ago in 2019, and like we did with Miller this past year, a great franchise across the southeast.
That helps us fill out our portfolio, and then we can learn from each other and build a business broader than that. I think if you looked at us over a long time and you looked at the last investor deck, I would say go to page seven.
Our RPOs are about $13.2 billion at the end of the year. If you look at the end of 2019, they were about $4.1 billion. Today, our RPOs are $4.4 billion in data centers today. Underlying that's been a lot of growth in institutional, industrial, hard industrial, manufacturing, institutional, and these are all our compound annual growth rates for water and wastewater north of 10% or 15%, some as high as 25% or 30%.
In markets, in any other world, you say you've done a heck of a job growing out those markets, and we're going to continue doing all that. Diversification, data center option, disciplined operators, pretty darn good capital allocators.
Maybe I'll go to Jason. You gave your margin guidance for 2026.
I'm sure everybody wants to know what kind of gets you to the upper end versus the lower end.
Sure.
Maybe if you can just talk about that.
Yeah. To me, it all comes down to mix and execution. If you look at where we are or where we were rather for 2025, we finished the year with a record margin for EMCOR at 9.35%.
Our guidance for 2026 is 9%-9.4% on the operating margin side. Essentially what we're saying there is if you look at that high end of that guidance, that 9.4%, we believe that we can continue to execute at the levels we're executing at today.
Our mix should remain strong and our market position and the mix we have in our RPOs should also remain strong.
When you consider all those factors, what we believe is we have the potential to execute just as well as we did in 2025 when we move into 2026. The lower end of that range, the 9%-9.3%, let's say, really just reflects what we think could happen if there's a shift in mix.
Not to say that any of the underlying factors or fundamentals of our business are changing, but if we have more GMP work or more T&M work or more work in some of the other sectors where the margin profiles are just inherently different because some of the jobs carry different risk profile, that just shows what margins could do if mix shifts a little bit. For us, it really comes down to mix, timing, and execution.
Yeah. the way we think about guidance, I think if you listen to our call, we think of the low end of our range, which is where the 9% sort of encapsulates. We're pretty confident about that, and I think that's how you should give guidance.
The midpoint, fairly confident. As you get to the higher end of the range some mix needs to work our way. We got to execute well. you're always going to have some jobs that turn out less than you expected in contracting. Keep those to a minimum, and maybe we'll get there at the top end.
Maybe just related to that, what do you think the sell-side investors get wrong about how your business works and how margins work?
Yeah.
Maybe if you can just talk about it.
I'll do it at a sort of like an operating level. I think just go macro level. This is not a manufacturing company, so but been a manufacturer, right? You lock in standards at the beginning of the year. You know your market position. You have a pretty good idea of project pricing unless there's a business dislocation, and you execute in the market you're in for that year.
That's. If you have a new product, maybe you get a little bit of organic from there. maybe you get a little more price in markets because your commodity costs are up. In our business, we very rarely get to repeat something exactly. Even if we're doing the same kind of facility or building, like we're building the next building on our data center campus, well, what might have changed?
The project team might have changed on their side, probably not on our side, but on their side. The design might have been tweaked just a little bit. The mechanical contractor on the job, if it's not us, maybe it's not as good, and therefore we get held up electrically.
There might be a stacking of trades. These are lots of people with lots of variables, right? You run with a portfolio approach to that. We've always thought of our margins in bands quarter to quarter. Jason will go through that in a minute.
The point is, this is not a quarter-to-quarter business. If you look backwards over 12-18 months, it gives you a pretty good idea on average how the business is operating.
Unless there's a big mix shift or you get some big volume upside that you didn't expect, you sort of know within relative. Anybody thinks we're that accurate, like I had one investor ask me, we thought it would be 10 or 20 basis points higher on the top end. I'm looking at him like, "Wow, if you've got that level of precision, then you should come and join us, and I'll go do what you're doing, because we absolutely don't have that level of precision.
Yeah, I think Tony's point of we're not a quarter-to-quarter business is key. we always say take a look at a rolling 12- to 24-month average. I'll just give an example. Our electrical segment, for them, that average would be 12%-12.6%. In those 8 quarters, margins have been as low as 11.1%, 11.3%, and as high as 15.8%.
They'll vary quarter to quarter just based on mix, timing, and execution. You really have to look over a period of time, and I think that's the thing that maybe gets lost from time to time.
The same thing can happen with bookings. Our book-to-bill ratio.
Literally, a week could change a lot, book-to-bill. What I do know, if you think about today, whether it be margins, bookings or anything like that's quarter to quarter, the fundamentals of our business haven't changed over the last couple of years. In fact, they've got more positive. As we gave our guidance for 2026, we didn't anticipate a big change in fundamentals.
With our revenue guidance that we have out there, we obviously believe we're still in a growth market in the most important sectors that we play in.
Interesting. I just want to kind of stick to the topic of margins, because obviously it is prominent, and I want you to have the opportunity to explain yourselves. The other question I've gotten is which is I think a fair one. Tony, as you're looking at all the different projects that are going on, what are some of the things that you look at to make sure that a program is on track versus a something is letting up and it needs to be addressed?
It starts back here when we actually decide that's something we really want to do. These are things like our guys are running the sort of less than $5 million business every day. Unless there's a term or condition that's crazy in there, even they will raise their hand and say, "Look, we don't like the terms here," and our lawyers will come in and try to negotiate that. If you think macro level, right?
How do you manage risk in a business like this? How does that manifest itself in the things we watch both numerically and on the soft side?
This, whether it's a data center project, a semiconductor project, a healthcare project, or we're building a school, right?
On the aftermarket side, it's all about access and customer relationship and everything else, because there we're just trying to stay out of the way and do a great job and get them the savings or get the facility back up and running. Let's focus on the new construction side for a minute. If you're thinking about the business, and this is sort of EMCOR Operating Discipline 101, the first part of it is. What do we know about the owner?
What do we know about the general contractor, CM, we're going to be dealing with? Ultimately, most cases on the construction side, even if the owner is directing it, we're working for a general contractor, construction manager, and in our case, to a lesser extent, an EPC. Do we know who's going to be on their team? Do we know the owner?
Have we had good success with that combination? If it's new, has someone else in the business EMCOR has? Has someone else at EMCOR had success? A great example of that is it's happening every day in the data center world, but when Wynn was bringing their casino to Boston, we had built quite a bit for Wynn in Las Vegas. Actually, our Las Vegas team hadn't built a casino in a while, but we still had the people.
We actually flew to Boston, sat down, went through the numbers, brought the Boston team out to Las Vegas, said, "Let's think about how we did some of these things that are peculiar to Wynn and how they build and how the owner behaves." Then we actually coached up the general contractor because quite frankly, a Boston-based guy, these East Coast guys weren't Vegas contractors.
Okay, that's one thing. Next thing we look at the engineer and the architect. Have we worked with them before? In most cases, we've worked with everybody in both those cases, GCCMs, engineer. What are their designs like? Are they good designs? Are they designs we're going to have to do a lot of design assists to get at the constructability?
Are they responsive to requests for information as we validate the design?
Are they responsive to value engineering that we may recommend as time goes on?
If there's a change in the job, are they quick on the turn with the drawings back to us so we can get back to work and not have a lot of dead time?
We get to the simple question, have we built one before?
Take those first two, try to get as much intelligence as we can. These are bigger jobs, like $10 million plus. Have we built one before? If we haven't built one in that geography or with that subsidiary, have we built one somewhere at EMCOR?
Can we take that learning and bring it to bear? Have we built something similar? is there similar lessons we can apply? A lot of the learning that comes today in the data center world came from our manufacturing jobs and from our data center we did.
There's only 2 or 3 subsidiaries versus 17. Manufacturing jobs or healthcare, hospital. What are the economics of this project? If it's a big enough project, it almost looks like an acquisition to us. What's the cash flow going to look like on it?
What are the terms and conditions? what are we actually signing up for on liquidated damages with consequential damages? Are we going to be able to cap them? How do we frame that? It gets to the final stage of, okay, once we build this, if you're a construction guy, the first thing you want to do is get off the job, right? I mean, you want to be gone. If we have an aftermarket team, they'll come in, and they're very different people.
How do you commission this building? How hard is it going to be commissioning? If we're on the mechanical side, did we do the building controls as a part of our contract, or did we hire the sub there? How are we 'cause these are the kinds of things.
If you're doing a data center, what's the flushing look like? Are we going to be able to get the system flushed, especially on the AI data centers, and get it up and running? We take a full-scale view of it, make sure we protect ourselves as best we can in the contract, and then we go into planning if we get the job. If we're going to do all that work on a large job, we have an idea that we have a pretty good chance of winning the job.
Nothing's 100%. We're not wasting our time on something significant to ask all those questions. Jason has some very hard metrics that tells him once this gets going, whether the job's going well versus the WIP and whether it's not.
Yeah. There's a number of ways you can do that. I think the most simplistic is looking at the cash position of the projects, right? Jobs that are overbilled tend to be performing well. The jobs that are underbilled, we tend to say have risk.
Sometimes, the risk could just be on timing. Other times it ends up being potential overruns in the estimates. If you look at EMCOR overall, we are in a significant net overbilled position, and I think that is a testament to our execution.
Over the next year then, where do you see the greatest margin benefit potential, and where do you see margin dilution risk?
Yeah. I think that's a hard question to answer. everybody gets excited and says data center work is driving the margin. I'd say that's fair because it's a big part of what people are doing. It's only driving the margins in some ways because you're executing well in a really demanding job. you really have to know what you're doing to sign up and do it, and you really have to be able to scale up and get there.
You better have a great prefab. Maybe there's margin opportunity there, but we do well in other sectors, right? we do well in basically replacing a chiller room, design-build. We do very well there. It really does go back to answering those first six questions well, seven questions well.
Once you answer those questions well, the one I forgot to add is, who are we going to put on the job? Do we have the resources to be successful from a leadership and supervision standpoint? We start there.
That's why I probably didn't mention it. That's a given. If we get those right, it almost doesn't matter where we're working. We have a good chance. I always tell people one of the ways you do well in our kind of business is the absence of bad news. It means we pegged the margin right with the right contingency, didn't have a lot of writedowns, and didn't have a lost job that was significant. Jason's point about the cash is important, right?
Sometimes there's an image in people when we are net overbilled like that a, we're collecting all the cash. A portion of it, we are. Also, you just don't send someone a bill in our business. You negotiated that you're going to send them the bill, and here's what the bill is going to say. You've hit prearranged milestones.
You're not you don't get net overbilled unless you're performing well on the job in most cases. That's why it's such an important word. I think the other thing they watch very carefully, like these guys have great analytics that they've developed and around ours, and this is probably one of the areas that AI will be. I think a fair amount of quasi AI now on our WIP. The one thing we manage and control is labor.
We spend a lot of time focusing on what the manpower loading look like on a job versus what we expected, how do the hours track versus where we thought we'd be, how we're doing against the labor contingency we build into the job. We don't miss materials very often, right? Unless there's a big change in commodity prices, even then, we don't miss it very often.
You talked about maybe just shifting to backlog. You talked about record backlog, RPOs, which of course is very supportive for visibility.
Sure.
How do you assess quality of the?
That's what I was going to say.
RPO backlog?
Yeah.
I think some of it goes to what Tony was talking about when we're assessing projects, right?
It's asking ourselves those same questions about the nature of the job, our ability to execute on that job, and that will give us a sense of where we think those projects can perform. I think some of it is just looking at the margin and the backlog at bid, the amount of contingency in projects when we're beginning projects, and all of those things paint a picture for us about the potential of those jobs and how they compare to similar jobs that we started a year ago or two years ago.
It's very much a benchmarking exercise when we're looking at our backlog to say, how does this stack up against historical periods?
I think what we believe right now is our backlog at the end of 2025 going into 2026 is just as good as our backlog was a year ago. We still think we have some really good quality projects ahead of us, and I think it gives us opportunity.
It supports our guidance range with as much visibility as we've had in a long time, and we've had pretty good visibility over the last two or three years. What I think people don't appreciate what's happening is how actively we're managing the mix. Maybe less so on the upside, 'cause go back to where we think about qualifying things.
That's agnostic no matter what sector it is in. Then we as a management team, down through the segment level, we make sector calls sometimes and geography calls. Now, you don't see it, but we've done a fair amount of restructuring in our portfolio. Where you do see it, if you looked at page seven, is we've taken transportation work down quite significantly.
Now, some of that is because the work can be lumpy, but most of it is because we have one more year to do one place. We basically have exited the road transportation lighting market, and we were pretty good at it at one time. Dynamics change in local markets, contracts changed, and the risks change. It's not worth it anymore, and so we've moved away from that.
These are from the guys that did the Tappan Zee Bridge electrically and did quite well. The dynamics here, especially in New York and some other big cities, just not worth it anymore on some of that work. we decided to de-emphasize that part of our business.
It's not that we weren't executing well; it's that when you do an analysis of you know the mission and what you're going to do and the terrain and everything you're dealing with, you sit there and say, "Not where we should be putting our capital right now." If you think about that, we probably over a couple years, growing like we are organically, if you would snap the thing at 2021, and we got out of some commercial markets in some of a place like San Francisco. We're no longer there in a significant way mechanically.
If you snap that line and look at it today, we've probably taken $300 million-$400 million out of this business on a run rate that wasn't very profitable. That's the other way you help build up margins.
Also, it's not like we made a short-term decision when we did that. we took a 5-7-year look at the market and said, "Fundamentals aren't going to change here. The risk-reward ratio for that line of work puts us in the wrong box." Much like we look at acquisitions, right? We're very disciplined acquirers, and that hasn't changed because there's a couple hot markets right now.
Right. I guess, maybe just, last one on backlog. How should we think about shadow backlog that you might have, and what is one sector that you're most bullish about over the next 12-18 months?
Oh, that's pretty straightforward. That's like making a two-inch putt, right? Obviously, we're all excited about what's happening in the data center market and some of the reshoring opportunities we see. And really, semiconductors is both a growth story and a reshoring story. And it's beyond semiconductor. Anything high tech manufacturing and data centers, I think you'd have to be excited about if you're a highly skilled specialty contractor right now.
Right. We keep hearing about the power availability, which is a big gating factor for everybody. How do you sort of adjust the sequencing, timing in terms of the workflow because of that challenge and geographically.
Yeah.
How do you position yourself?
That's very rarely a challenge for us 'cause of where we are in the food chain. Most times before we come on a job where they let us loose with a contract, they've already done all that. It might be a little slower getting the substation hooked up, but they know they're going to happen within a very short period of time.
Now, we may know they want to build in a year or two years, and they haven't figured all that out yet, but to be honest, we haven't committed any resources other than some pricing up front to just get them in the ballpark. Fair to say that?
I think that's fair. The other thing for us, too, is by the time we're, as Tony said, by the time we have a contract in hand, we know that contract's going to go. For us, we're usually on site within 1-3 months, and that work begins. The majority of our work is done in 12 months plus.
Go back, one of the things you asked earlier. I think what you just said, that's important for people to understand. Our RPOs are the accounting definition of RPO, remaining performance obligation. Other people report backlog, which then piles a bunch of other stuff on top of that. We may know that we're going to do other work on a site, or we may know that it's going to happen, but they haven't committed to us yet formally. You could look at our RPOs as there's a formal commitment, a contract, that we're going to do the work.
The only person that's in that RPO is if it's a service agreement, even if it's a five-year service agreement is the noncancelable portion, which could be anywhere from 90 to 120 days. Usually on a service agreement, those go both ways.
We can cancel them too. I think that's a really distinct difference with us. I think the reason I'm building off of that is that's the reason our work usually doesn't get canceled.
Yeah. Our RPOs are firm, and cancellations have historically not had an impact on us. For that exact reason.
Yeah, I can count on less than two hands over 15 years, any project of size that's got canceled. You can guess when they got canceled. 2008, 2009, and 2020.
Just going back maybe turning to capital allocation, because we have about five minutes. You've said that you've been very balanced. What is your framework for allocating the next dollar between organic, inorganic, or returning it to shareholders?
Yeah.
How do you guys think about that?
We have a dividend, right? $0.44 a quarter?
$0.60.
$0.60 a quarter. I always screw that up.
$0.40. It's $0.40, Tony. It's $0.60 increase. It's $0.40 a quarter.
Sorry. $0.60 increase. I always get the-- that's me that always screw that up. That's why you gotta screw up. Forty cents a quarter, that's a given, right? Put that aside. Clearly our priority is organic growth. With the amount of cash we generate, we can't invest enough in organic growth because we're a capital light business.
Even though we doubled, and Jason will go through these in a little bit, the amount of capital expenditure we have, mainly 'cause we increased our fabrication space and we've increased our software spend. We still can't spend enough, right? We try to keep our cost structure as variable as we can, so we tend to lease buildings even when we build a fab shop. Outfitting them, we're pretty good buyers of equipment and process.
You get to the next one, which given our druthers, right now, we would love to be able to repeat 2025 and 2026. Are we going to be able to do that? Deals happen when they happen. We've talked to people over long periods of time, 'cause the people that are selling us their business, typically, even like last year, we did a bunch of small ones. Jason Nalbandian will go through that.
The bigger ones, they're selling us their family's life's work and their reputation. These aren't simple decisions. These aren't people that are looking to multiples with a private equity firm. Typically if PE's involved, we're out. Then we go to share buyback. I don't think we're trying to be hedge fund managers typically, although we've been pretty good buyers of our stock.
That is there where we end up with excess cash. We don't try to buy when the thing's rapidly accelerating. The flip side is after that, it pretty much looks like dollar cost averaging, I think, unless there's a big dislocation like there was last year after DeepSeek panic.
Yeah. We tend to do share purchases both programmatically and then.
Opportunistically.
Opportunistically, depending on the market.
Yeah.
Yeah, to Tony's point, when you look at the organic growth, it's how do we make our existing operating companies as productive and efficient as possible. So for us, in recent years, it's been looking at ways to expand our prefab capabilities or our use of VDC and BIM, and I think Tony referenced some numbers before. And really what we've seen is it's still a capital light business for us.
Our CapEx is like 0.6%-0.7% of revenues. But we've expanded our CapEx in recent years to the point that if revenue is growing, let's say, over a 3-year period at a 15% CAGR, CapEx is growing at a 30% CAGR, and that's those investments.
You look to the acquisitions, and there's a number of different ways we look to acquire. Some of it is looking to buy a platform like we did with Miller in 2025. Some of it is looking to fill in a geography like we did with Danforth in 2025. We did eight other acquisitions, which were all really bolt-ons or plug-ins to existing operating companies, to enhance their capabilities and further their position.
Maybe over to you, Tony, as sort of to maybe recap everything that we have talked about. If you have to sum up EMCOR strategy for the next 2-3 years, how would you do that?
We're going to continue to grind it out, pick it up, take advantage of great growth opportunities. Play the best team that I think is in the industry in the field, 'cause that is our core product, right? Our core product is the best field leadership in the industry. We just happen to be in this industry. We have the best field leaders. We spend a lot of time training.
We spend a lot of time learning from each other, and we're committed to the things we talked about, disciplined capital allocation, mission first, people always with our people, transparency, a lot of respect for each other. That's been a long-term recipe for success. We're not going to alter out of that one bit. We're not going to be someone we're not. We're not going to chase fads. Data centers are not a fad to us.
It's a great sector to operate and build projects and do great things for our customers. That's what it is for us.
Well, thank you so much. Just in time. Thank you, Tony.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jason. We appreciate your participation and enjoy the conference.
Thank you.
Thank you, everybody.
Thank you for coming.