Our next presenting company is Energy Services of America, trades under the symbol ESOA. The company's a general contractor, works within the gas, water, wastewater spaces. Just had a recent acquisition, the largest acquisition in quite a while for the company, and the stock has done very, very well. They are also a client, so if you have any questions after the presentation, and you can't find Douglas or Charles, we're happy to, happy to answer them. Here today to lead off the presentation is Douglas Reynolds, President of the company, and with him is Charles Kelley, the company's CFO. Douglas?
Thanks, Sean. Appreciate you all coming out here today. You know, when I was a kid, I used to love to go to hotels. Sure, probably you all did when you were young. And the one thing I really enjoyed about it was, I could take showers as long as I wanted to. I had a brother, and when I was growing up, like, our whole water tank would only go for like 15 minutes. And so my mom was always on my ass about, you gotta get out of the shower, you know, three-minute showers. And we go on. So it's something I still enjoy. And, you know, worse than that, I go to my grandparents' house, and they were always like, can't run in and out with the other kids, and they're like, you're gonna let all the air conditioning out.
And so, you know, one thing is, it's changed, right? Like, there's so much, we take modern life and everything for granted. We have these utilities that bring us water, and there's all this stuff that's air conditioned everywhere we go. And, that continues to grow and grow. And, you know, we have all these electrical appliances. We have 10 times as many in our houses. And we expect utilities, they're mostly our monopolies, to deliver these services. And, there's a price component, but also there's all, every different one has a different need in terms of other goals that the ratepayers or the cities wanna do, right? They have environmental things they wanna do in different places.
They have usually labor issues of, okay, we want local people to have these jobs, or we want union jobs, or we don't want union jobs in some cases, don't want a union. And so our company, Energy Services, is in that space. And I think if you look at, a lot of people that do that, they're delivering solutions to these utilities across different things, water, electric. And we all know the utility, the big, the big players, right? They're AEP or Duke Energy, TransCanada, but there's a whole sector of companies that service them. And there's obviously some really big ones, as I said, like Quanta or Primoris, as you may be familiar with. But I would say nearly every community has companies that do what we do. In many cases, they're family companies, construction companies. They work on the local water system.
They, there's a, you know, any kind of plant of any size has, you know, electrical needs, maintenance needs. And there's probably some contractor that is working in there, helping that company continue to do what they do every day, especially bigger companies, right? They wanna continue to outsource services, do, you know, have fewer people on their own payroll, have that, you know, specialist do that. So they don't have those people costs that can go up and down at different capital cycles and different things. So, you know, as investors, I think it's an incredibly great sector. There's a lot of value that's created. And we feel like that our company is doing the same thing and that we're trying to get out there and deliver value just like everyone else.
So if you kind of look at our core things about, well, okay, why now? Or what, why is today a good time to look at this? And I would start with that, you know, if you kind of look at the. I always say the year 2014 was a big year in the water business. That was the year of the Flint crisis, with the water there. And it was also kind of elevated people's attention to water at that time. It's maybe kind of underneath the radar. So when you would have other, like, cities that would have a chemical spill or something, it seemed like the attention that it got came up a lot. So, you know, American Water is probably one of our biggest customers in the water space. They have been buying systems and things like that.
Then in COVID, a significant amount of government investment was put forward, first with the COVID bills and then even with the Infrastructure Act to really address some of these 20, 30 years of neglect in that business particularly. You know, there's a lot of great things going on in the water space. If you look, we, 10 years ago, we were gonna go public SPAC. We did, I think, $14 million. We were mostly, our name was Energy Services of America. You know, that was our main business. To, you know, this year, I, we will do more water and wastewater business than we do gas business. We really feel like that's just a great, great opportunity. You know, on the energy side, there's, it's a rapidly changing landscape, you know, gas business and renewables.
But we have different divisions that try to meet those customers where they are and try to have a broad-based business that we feel like we can grow in the next several years. You know, one of the things that I think's a valuable issue, I think we're really misunderstood. We were a 2006 SPAC that blew up, and we've just basically been hitting singles and growing the business over the last 10 years. And, you know, some of our shareholders said, "Hey, you guys are doing this great thing. You need to tell people about it." A couple of our larger shareholders, that's why we got John involved. But I think it's incredibly early on. As I said, we've had great growth. I think the next few years have incredible opportunities in the business.
And as I said, you know, I think our name, if you kind of go look at our, a lot of times I'm on websites looking and we're always in kind of the oil and gas services. Like in a lot of times it's like drillers and other companies. And that's not really what we do. We build, as I said, we do build large pipelines, but I think we're into a lot more other stuff. And that's really a, as I said, it'll probably be our second big, biggest business in the next few years. So, Charles is gonna kind of give you some financial information. And if you have any questions, I'd love to take a stab at them.
All right. Thank you, Douglas. As you mentioned, my name's Charles, Charles Kelley, CFO here with Energy Services of America. It's a great honor to be here to get a chance to talk to you all about our company and share all the positives we have going for us. So if you don't care, I'll take a little time here and just kind of tell you, get into the details, tell us about some of the specific companies that we have and some of the industries that we serve. So we have right now six main subsidiaries here. I'll get into a little more detail on each of them there. For fiscal year 2023, we're September filers, so our year-end numbers won't be out for a few more weeks.
But last year we did $301 million in revenue and did $20.8 million in adjusted EBITDA. I believe our trailing 12-month numbers are about $340-$350 million in revenue. I believe it's up to about $28.8 million in adjusted EBITDA. You can see we started off pretty strong with our first nine months of the fiscal year, $247 million in revenue, $17.7 million adjusted EBITDA. And I feel like we're, we had a really strong fourth quarter and we're just excited and can't wait to get those announced once we get through our audits. At June 30th, we had about 1,200 employees in the company. And you can see here we service a lot of industries: natural gas, petroleum, chemical, automotive, water, wastewater, broadband. So we got a lot of, a lot of different, varied industries that we work in.
These first three I kind of feel like go together right here in our investment highlights. You know, we have we've shown a consistent organic growth over the past few years. A lot of that is coming from our longstanding relationships with our customers. And also we're seeing a lot of the spending has increased in the past couple of years, largely on the infrastructure projects, water projects. We're seeing an increase in electrical mechanical opportunities, some of 'em related to EV battery plants, jobs that we did in Tennessee, now going on in North Carolina. Got good opportunities coming into West Virginia right now with the new Nucor steel manufacturing plant. You can see here that we've increased our backlog over the past few years. We had a backlog at June 30th of $250 million. We've also been successful at integrating some companies.
So we've back in late 2020, we added West Virginia Pipeline. They do a lot of gas and water distribution work in southern West Virginia. We've also added Tri-State Paving, which is, people ask me, why do you have a paving company? Well, they work in the water utility business right behind the pipeline contractors. They, our company comes behind them and does the restoration paving. We also opened up a general contractor called SQP Construction, which then allows us to use some synergies there to get funnel some work from commercial projects from Nitro to do those. Those are gonna be type of courthouse projects, schools, correctional facilities. So gives Nitro another avenue of earning revenue, not just being on the industrial side, give them a chance to be on the commercial side of things too.
Obviously then we have a lot of experience, very seasoned management in our different companies. We have strong insider relation or ownership. You know, one thing we'll talk about here is, you know, our board's pretty old school. They come up from bankers. A lot of their backgrounds are, they believe in giving back to the shareholders. And so we've been doing annual dividends, and we just announced yesterday that we're going to effectively double the price of the dividend and start to pay it now on a quarterly basis. And we also have a share repurchase program out there. Been out there for, we've been actively buying shares back. I don't wanna say too actively, but we've had a plan out there for probably the past four years.
Whenever it's really kind of advantageous, when we see a dip, then we'll, you know, have our broker go out there and buy some shares back. You see here is our primary service area, covers about 13-15 different states there. We work primarily, most of our work comes from the Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia areas. We'll, you know, we'll get into it over into Virginia, over into Indiana. The other states there are more kind of one-off type of things. If a customer generally we're gonna be going there because a customer wants us to go there, particularly kind of like down to Alabama, down to Tennessee, to North Carolina, to Michigan.
You know, Toyota calls us and says, "Hey, we want you guys to, to come work on this project down there." There's a good chance if they want us to go, we're gonna find a way to make that happen. So as I mentioned before, you know, we continue to grow. We're growing, newer, bringing in newer subsidiaries and diversifying our opportunities, being the West Virginia Pipeline, SQP, Tri-State, Ryan. One thing that, also, kind of really kind of adding to our, our financial growth, is I wanna point out is Nitro. So, so Nitro Construction has gone from being mainly a, industrial maintenance contractor, doing about anywhere between $50-$55 million in just maintenance work, which is gonna be generally lower risk, but lower margin type of work.
But they have been able to go to being more of a well-rounded contractor, keeping that base of the maintenance work, but adding on about $30-$40+ million worth of new construction opportunities on top of that. So they were already built for being that size. So a lot of increases in our gross margin percentages and our EBITDA percentages are due to the acquisitions and then also being able to capitalize on more opportunities and growth within the company. You see here are some of our customers. Of course, you know, TransCanada is a big one. Toyota's a big one. NiSource is a big company. So you know, as I said, you know, automotive, power, chemical, steel manufacturing, water, wastewater, a lot of the industries that we work in, natural gas.
So C.J. Hughes here, C.J. Hughes is based out of Huntington, West Virginia, has about 600 employees. A lot of C.J.'s work is gonna be centered around two different things. One of 'em is gonna be natural gas. We break that into transmission work and distribution work. So you can see here on this slide, this is transmission. This is taking. This is gonna be your big pipe, a lot of miles, covering a lot of country. So this is a pretty much a picture-perfect display of a transmission project, right? It is the sky's blue. There's no streams, there's no mats on the ground, there's no rain. So this probably happens, you know, maybe 50% of the time you get.
So, transmission is the area where it has probably the greatest potential for profit and also the greatest potential for loss, for risk. So that's why we've tried to take this company from being a transmission-based company, natural gas transmission-based, to more having that to be a part of what we do. Try to keep it to be about a quarter percent. I'm gonna say, you know, a quarter of our business and not to be all of our business. Now along with the transmission type work, there's a lot of ancillary work that comes along with it. You've got lateral lines. You may be working doing 8- to 10-inch pipes, putting doubling 'em up and stacking 'em into the same thing. There's launchers or receivers for pig stations. There's station work.
So not all the transmission work is these big, long lines there. Also, C.J. Hughes talked about the distribution work. The distribution natural gas distribution is gonna be more of your in-town work. It's gonna be taking the natural gas from bigger pipes down to smaller pipes, lower pressure, and getting into people's houses and in the cities. Also C.J. Hughes does a lot of the same type of distribution on the water where we're taking the water, getting it from you know into the towns, getting it into people's houses. So Nitro Construction Services then, as I mentioned, you know, a few years ago they were about a $45-$55 million maintenance contractor. So fiscal year 2023, they did about $93 million in revenue.
As I mentioned then, they've been able to capitalize on more capital projects and add that to their base of the maintenance work. So they're primarily gonna be an industrial-based company working electrical, mechanical, HVAC, have some solar capabilities, and, you know, working in the petrochemical, chemical power, automotive industry, steel manufacturing. SQP is one of our startups that we did. I may have mentioned it already, but we found a need to be able to get Nitro into some other markets. The atmosphere was changing in West Virginia. We went to more right-to-work type of laws. The bigger union general contractors were now a lot of the work was going to the non-union contractors then. If I failed to mention, the C.J. Hughes and Nitro are two union flagship companies.
SQP being a non-union general contractor then is able to go out there and bid anything from school projects, correctional facilities, courthouse maintenance to do civil type projects. This is kind of an area here in downtown Charleston where they redid a little closet there. So we did that out of necessity then to be able to use that to get Nitro a little more into commercial type of work. Tri-State Paving is a company that we acquired in May of 2022. You know, they were known to us through our work with the water company. The water company took the approach of taking the paving out of the contractor's hands and giving it to a specialty paving company. And so the opportunity arose with us to say, "Hey, that's, you know, we like that business. We wanna be in the water business.
We wanna grow that water business." This just gives us another avenue then to be involved with particularly American Water. So you can see here, you know, they're not necessarily doing parking lots. They're not doing roads. They're coming in behind the contractors and paving small sections, just kind of restoring the road back to what it was after the contractors come in, dig it all up, put the pipe in the ground and cover it up. These guys come back in and fix it and make it look nice. So they did, I think it looks like about $11 million is what they contributed to the revenue number last year. West Virginia Pipeline was the first of our acquisitions. We bought them back in December of 2020. Very successful, family-owned business for many years.
Two brothers had taken it over from their father and had ran it. They were looking to get out of the business. Wasn't sure if their kids wanted to stay, you know, wanted to own it, so the water company kind of arranged this deal for us, so the two brothers, you know, stuck around for about a year, went to retirement, and the two kids, cousins, Michael and Amy took over for us. They do a fantastic job down there in southern West Virginia. They do both water distribution and gas distribution type of work. What's kind of unique about them is that their crews kind of can flip-flop back and forth.
You know, if they got more gas work this month instead of next, they'll go over and they'll do more gas or the guys will flip back over to water. There's a lot of different training. Gas work is a lot more intensive on qualification, on safety type of things, trainings. It's kind of unique that they're able to flip-flop their crews like that and take advantage of opportunities when they come up. West Virginia Pipeline did about $10 million in revenue last year. They continued year over year to add more crews and increase the revenue. I think when we bought them, they were doing about $6.5 million in revenue, very profitably.
But the brothers kind of said, "Hey, you know, bad things happen when we get over 50 people." So they always tried to stay below 50 people and just kind of go along. And since Michael and Amy have taken over, they've kind of built and grew the company. They've got, I think, they're up to 75 people now. And but very, very impressive what they do. So Ryan Construction then is a company we bought out of bankruptcy about a little over two years ago. We basically paid for the equipment. Value of the equipment is what we paid for it. Along with that, we got some good people, some services there we provide.
We do some broadband work. Doing the guys have had people come into your neighborhood and put in the fiber optic cable, the casings where they kind of drill down and pop back up and someone else comes and runs the fiber. We do that type of work. Also, there's some cathodic protection work in there, which relates to the natural gas coatings and stuff on the natural gas industry. And they also do some gas distribution work. As I said, this is still a work in process for us, something that we're bound and determined to take this from a company that was in bad sorts and develop them into something that's a lot more profitable for us.
Tribute is a company that we announced at the end of October that we were going to be acquiring them. The deal looks to be going to close in probably a couple of weeks. But this is an interesting opportunity for us. This is gonna be our only, right now, our only company that's not based out of West Virginia. This is gonna be an Ohio-based company. But what they bring to the table for us is they're obviously a non-union company. They're more focused on public works, whereas CJ is more on the private side with a little bit of public work. These guys are all public type of work.
But they also focus a lot more on the wastewater type of work, which we do a little bit at C.J. Hughes, but we've just never found the right way to make money at it. So C.J. Hughes focuses more on the water type of projects. This will be the company then that comes in and gives us more opportunities in the wastewater side of the business. It says here, you know, this is, so this one's gonna be our largest acquisition to date. The price for this one is roughly about $24 million. I think that this company's gonna show. I think they had like a trailing 12 month of about $40 million. It looks like they've got a very good backlog right now. So we're excited to bring them into the fold.
Let's get a little bit of this stuff here. One thing that you'll notice probably a lot of on our slides then is our companies are very safety focused. A lot of our customers, that's the number one most important thing to them is they need people working safely. So this kind of illustrates what we believe that within our company then is that if we work safely and we give our company our customers quality work and the production that just leads to customer satisfaction, which then again just comes right back to being the benefit of shareholders. You see here is kind of a comparison of our business lines right here. So you can see down here at the bottom, the blue area is our gas and petroleum transmission work, and that's gonna be mostly C.J. Hughes.
So that was the trailing 12-month on that was about $90 million in revenue. The electrical, mechanical, and engineering construction group is gonna be largely comprised of Nitro and SQP. C.J. Hughes does some type of projects that would kind of fit into this. They'll do some civil work, some concrete work. And as I mentioned, Ryan has, you know, the broadband stuff that kind of fits under that type of thing. So this is where we have seen tremendous growth in the past few years. And that's particularly gonna be on the backs of Nitro and then also bringing in SQP, as we did back in the spring of 2022. I think that says that we had about a trailing 12-month revenue on that of about $181 million.
And then, our gas and water distribution is gonna be primarily comprised of C.J. Hughes, West Virginia Pipeline, and Tri-State Paving. We had trailing 12-month revenue on that of just under $74 million. Kind of wanna go back and flip between a few of these, you know, 'cause I know some very astute people have asked us today, well, what, what, what is, why is there such a big jump? You get to '22 now, everything's increasing significantly. Here on the backlog, as of September 30th, 2022, we had our $142 million. 2023 backlog was $230 million. And then as of June 30th of 2024, we had a backlog of about $251 million. So kind of ties into the same thing as we're seeing here on our EBITDA. It keeps on increasing our adjusted EBITDA, I should say, and our adjusted EBITDA percentage.
What I kind of tie all that into is that everything started to increase about the time that we started bringing in the new acquisitions into the fold, started bringing in West Virginia Pipeline, bringing Tri-State Paving in, setting up SQP, which came off the ground running at a tremendous pace, really been really good for us. And also kind of the growth at Nitro as becoming more of a just a maintenance contractor to becoming more of a maintenance and a new construction type of contractor. And then also C.J. Hughes has had a lot of growth then, particularly in the water industry too.
So, you know, all three of these, the backlog, the revenue numbers, and the EBITDA margins, we've seen significant increase really over the past. I know, I guess now going on really two years, two plus years. Talking about capital allocations, of course, you know, we've talked about acquisitions a few times here today, but so, you know, that is a focus for us if something that feels right comes along. You know, Douglas's got a pretty good eye for it, kind of looking for people that we know that work in similar type of industries that have the same type of values that we do. And so I think we've been really successful with bringing in new companies to help grow energy services. We do have a stock repurchase plan out there.
We got about, it was a million dollars, I'm sorry, a million shares that were authorized by the board of directors. We still have a little less than 900,000 out there on that plan available to repurchase. Talked a little bit about dividends, but we had been paying annual dividends. Then yesterday we announced that we were gonna effectively double the amount of the dividend to about $0.12 per share and then start to pay it on a quarterly basis now. So with that being said, does anybody have any questions that they'd like to address to Douglas or I? Yes, sir.
Acquire a new company, what are the primary steps that you do to integrate it? And then also all the acquisitions you've made, are they now on a common IT or ERP stack?
So yeah, whenever we bring in a new acquisition, we bring them into our accounting system. We fully integrate them that way. You know, we're going through SOX compliance testing right now. So, you know, we're gonna be bringing them into everything we do as an accounting function. They're from day one, they're gonna be treated like everybody else and brought into it. Douglas, do you wanna address the first part of the question?
Yeah, I'm sorry. Can we get a repeat on that?
Just the primary thing, when you acquire a company, what are the major things that you feel like you need to integrate? You know, what's the checklist?
So I would say that the first thing we have to integrate is a lot. Most of our acquisitions have been in the non-union sector.
So the most important thing is that we've gotta get them up to our safety standards. We have a captive insurance program that's pretty demanding. So, you know, both our customers and our captive insurance program really need very well-documented safety programs. So I'd say that's the most, and almost sometimes the hardest thing to kind of, everybody says, gosh, everybody says they're safe, right? So, that I would say that's the most challenging thing and the most important thing.
So do you allow acquisitions or subsidiaries to basically manage their own business? Or what happens at the corporate level on behalf of the subsidiaries?
Well, most of the time the finance, accounting, safety, for the most part, they have the relationships with the customer, the person out there in the field.
So, you know, we don't wanna put mandates on them that's gonna, you know, they could damage that relationship. In the case, you know, there's sort of, I guess, two tracks. We've had acquisitions where they were very successful companies and we don't wanna screw up their success. And then we've had, we bought Ryan in bankruptcy and that's needed a lot more corporate, you know, integration and corporate change 'cause they obviously were in bankruptcy and it needed a lot more. Anybody else have any questions?
You know, public, SPAC, what year was that?
2006. Yes. Anybody else have any questions? Yes, sir.
Double check, make sure that you spent there. So was part of that all these acquisitions and, you know, the uplift from the acquisitions or part of it was industry coming back, the oil and gas industry making a rebound? How do you see those stock buyers coming back?
So it's pretty interesting. This company went ahead of its original SPAC at $5 a share back in 2006, 2008, and then had just horrendous results in the gas transmission business. So I think the low-water mark was $0.16 in February of 2013. So we went really, really low. So there's a lot of room to come up, start with that. I would say a couple of things. What's interesting is when I was been doing this for a while, the first several years, the business was doing okay and the stock just wouldn't go anywhere. And I'd talk to people and they'd say, man, your business is doing well, but stock never seems to trade, never didn't go anywhere. So just years of just, I think, completely being ignored.
The results start to get better. We were pretty capital constrained during that time. So we had our, you know, kind of had to go through and close a division and so we couldn't grow too much with our capital base. So I think as we've kind of got that legacy debts paid down, we've had more money to invest in the businesses, invest in growth, do acquisitions, and I think the stock price is reflective of the operations.
Also, I'm sorry, I'd like to chime in a little bit. I also think that getting on Nasdaq really, really helped us. You know, we were down, we were so far buried in, in whatever you wanna call 'em, Pink Sheets, gray sheets, black sheets.
Getting onto Nasdaq, roughly, I think it was in March, April of 2022 really helped start to. I think maybe it took a little while for people to start to notice after that, but it's really been over the past year. You look at where we were about a year ago, we went from about 350 to 15 within the past 12 months.