Next presenting company is Energy Services of America. ticker symbol is ESOA on the NASDAQ. Company's involved in a number of different areas on the construction side, general contracting, water, gas distribution, transmission. All things being equal here, in about two weeks, they will be one of the newest additions to the Russell 2000, so a very, very nice milestone for the company to hit here in the past couple years of the success that they've experienced. Here today presenting on behalf of the company is the President, Doug Reynolds, and with him is Charles Crimmel, the company's CFO. Doug?
Thanks, John, and thank you guys for coming here today. This is our second time being here, and it's interesting kind of doing these conferences. I've done several others with the Three Part Advisors guys. We're one of their clients, and you know, learned a lot in the last year talking to our shareholders. I remember when I was a kid, there used to be this commercial. We're from West Virginia, and Long John Silver's is kind of our fine seafood dining establishment, or at least it was when I was a kid. They had this huge campaign where they said, you get the best chicken in, everyone was surprised, you get the best chicken in a seafood place.
It was, as I said, I can still remember the ads, and it was like everyone would be surprised they had chicken, and it was actually good. I would tell you that our company, over the last year talking to shareholders, the most common thing I get is, man, you have a shitty name for what you actually do. They'll say, you should change it to Utility Services or Infrastructure Services of America. They make a good point. A lot of what we do is utility services and industrial services. We're not, we don't do any gas, or we don't do much like field services. If you kind of do some of these stock screeners you see on the internet, we often kind of end up in that bucket. In this presentation today, I think there's two really important slides.
I just asked you to look at those, and those are seven, which kind of gives a breakdown of our customers. I think Charles is going to go over some of those slides, and 18, which breaks out our revenue and says, okay, here are the different things you're doing. I would tell you utility services is a really interesting business. It may be more like healthcare than energy because every community has an idea of what they think the utilities in those communities should be doing. You know, we want there to be universal access. Everybody should have clean water. Everybody should have electric. Should be able to have heat to heat your home. It should be affordable. At the same time, we also want it to be environmentally friendly. We want it to be built in certain places with union labor.
Our company tries to take all these inputs that communities want for their water, for their electric, for these different things, and then try to come up with a solution that meets those community needs. We've been incredibly blessed over the last several years. The next most, when I was here last year, the question we got two or three times is, why is your stock so cheap? What gives? What's the catch here? I said, the thing is, it used to be absurdly cheap, and now we've got up to just being cheap. I would tell you that I think we're up about 50% since then, and the stock's still cheap. You know, obviously it's not absurdly cheap. We've been, you know, we have our largest backlog that we've ever had in the history of the company.
I'd love to talk to you all about the water business. It is a great business. There's incredible needs, incredible delays in, years and years of neglected maintenance that these companies are going to do. There's privatization with the American Waters and Aquas buying these public systems, that seems to be very beneficial for medium-sized to larger contractors like ourselves. I think that business is great. Last year when I was here, I told you all the gas business has been in a real dull, coming out, I mean, real doldrums coming out of COVID. This is the first time we're really starting to see an increase in, from our customers of inquiries looking at actually trying to build new capacity versus just kind of manage what they already have.
Only, you know, the industrial and chemical side, there's a lot going on in terms of this reshoring. You know, our crews are completely booked up for this year, and we're looking to work for next year. We've had a great run. I think we got a lot of great things going. We are a stockholder-friendly company. We run the company like we own it. You know, if you look at the insiders, I own a lot of shares. I'm the largest shareholder. We pay a dividend. We bought stock every time the stock, you know, we kind of got an idea of, okay, where it fluctuates, we buy stock back every time it takes a hit. You know, I think we've done a good job of being shareholder-friendly, and I'm excited about the year we've got planned.
Charles is kind of going to go over the financials with you, and if you have any specific questions, he's probably better at taking a stab at those. Thank you, guys.
Thank you, Doug. I'd like to echo Doug's comments there. It's great to be back here. It's our second time in New York, the conference with, as a part of Three Part Staples. We really enjoy coming and talking about the company to everybody. Again, our name is Energy Services of America. We're primarily located in Huntington, West Virginia. The company's based a lot around infrastructure, whether it be the gas, water, distribution, do some gas and petroleum and transmission work. We also have industrial services and general contracting services. Let me talk a little bit about here. There we go. You can see, we got seven main subsidiary companies there. I'll talk a little bit about each one of those. Last year, for fiscal year 2024, we're a September 30 reporting company.
We had $352 million in revenue, had just under $29 million in adjusted EBITDA. Right now, at the time we did this, we had about 1,200 employees at the end of December. During the peak of our construction season, we'll probably get up around 1,600 employees -1,700 employees. Again, a lot of the industries that we serve are the natural gas, petroleum, chemical, automotive, wastewater, a little bit of broadband work. Some of our investment highlights, you know, we're looking to consistently grow the company through organic growth. We have longstanding relationships with some of the customers, leading customers in our industry. You know, we expect we got some good tailwinds with the infrastructure spending. Our backlog has grown considerably. As the slide says here, we had about $72 million in fiscal year 2021, grown to about $280 million then as of March 31, 2025.
We have successfully integrated several acquisitions into our company since 2020. We also have a startup operation. I'll talk a little bit about that. We have a lot of experience in our management teams, strong insider ownership of the stock, recently doubled our dividend, and went from an annual dividend to a quarterly dividend. We are paying $0.12 per share then, over the course of the year. We also have a repurchase agreement out there where we got about 786,000 shares left on that. Primary service areas, you can see here, I do not remember if this is 15 states or 17 states, but we can cover most of the eastern part of the United States. Now, some of this depends on what, call it, segment we do work in. Our water and our natural gas distribution services are mostly centered around West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky.
The petroleum and natural gas transmission work, we have a larger geographical area, but that's kind of dependent on where our customers want us to work. That's going to be mostly kind of like a, a TC Energy or a NiSource. Electrical, mechanical, HVAC primarily is focused in on West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio. But again, if Toyota comes calling and says, we want you guys to go to Georgetown, Kentucky, or Huntsville, Alabama, or Liberty, North Carolina, obviously we do what we need to for our customers. We happily will go into other neighboring states to work. Let's go over here. So, yeah, our, some, our strategic objectives, we want to continue to grow our newer subsidiaries that we have incorporated into the business, that being West Virginia Pipeline, which is focused on gas and water distribution in southern West Virginia.
SQP Construction is our general contractor that we use to also feed work to some of our other companies. Tribute Contracting is our newest acquisition. We bought them in December of 2024. Really, it helps us complement our water services that we currently have. We did not get too much into wastewater. We are more into water distribution. Now with Tribute Contracting, they're a little more heavily weighted to the water and wastewater side of it, which is more, generally, higher dollars on those type of projects, the wastewater projects. We also have a startup for Nitro Electric, which is a subsidiary of Nitro Construction, located up in Battle Creek, Michigan, starting to work on getting into some of the automotive plants up there, getting into the post, the Kellogg's plants.
This is one of the slides that Doug mentioned that, you know, we kind of obviously take great pride in, in working for our customers and providing them with the, you know, excellent contracting services. You can see, American Water is one of our, one of our biggest customers. Also in there is going to be like a TC Energy, NiSource, Marathon, Dow, Toyota. You can see that we kind of, not only do we have the utility work, but we have the automotive, we have the power, the chemical, still manufacturing customers. CJ Hughes, as I mentioned, is, is one of the cornerstone flagship companies. It's been around since, I believe, 1946. Last year, CJ did about $157 million in revenue. This company is primarily focused in on the gas and water distribution and the petroleum and gas transmission work.
If you're not familiar with the difference between the two, this picture here is what I call, it's a perfect picture of a transmission project. You'll see, at least from here, it looks like the sky is blue, the grass is green, there's no rain, there's no mud, and it's flat. That does not happen very often. That right there was probably a good project. That's a representation there of what a transmission project looks like. It's big pipe, it's lots of miles. Now, it doesn't always have to be. There's different things in the transmission. There's repair, replace where we could jump around and replace, you know, 500 feet at any point in time. There's launchers, receivers for pigging stations, station work.
But this, that's an example there of what a transmission project would look like. On the flip side, a distribution project would be more in-town work. It's going to be your smaller pipe, lower pressure, taking gas and water then to people's homes, to the businesses is more than what the distribution is. Nitro Construction, again, is one of the cornerstone companies of Energy Services. Both CJ and Nitro came in, in 2008 as part of the SPAC acquisitions. Nitro is a company that has been around since 1959, primarily working in the industrial space. As I mentioned before, they've got mechanical, electrical, HVAC, fire protection services, working in all types of industrial industries, anywhere from automotive, power, chemical, steel manufacturing. SQP Construction, as I mentioned, is our kind of our general contractor.
They do work in maybe building new schools, doing rehabs on courthouses, county courthouses, maybe working out at some of the state correctional facilities or doing some civil work such as at the state capital in Charleston. What this helped to do then also was to, whereas we talked about Nitro being kind of more of an industrial player, they also had the ability to do commercial work too. What we were finding was it was hard for Nitro to really get into the commercial spaces because they were so much bigger than a lot of the general contractors in our area, and they did not really want to use Nitro as much as we thought, you know, we should be able to get to that commercial space.
We started up then a general contractor to help get into the commercial work and feed that, some portions of that work to Nitro and to CJ Hughes. Tri-State Paving, this is one people always ask is, why do you have a paving company? It makes perfect sense. Tri-State Paving does all the utility restoration work for American Water in Charleston, West Virginia, Lexington, Kentucky, and a little bit down in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It just really made great sense then for us to acquire them and to add them to what we are doing so we, CJ Hughes, can go put the water line in the ground. Then Tri-State Paving could come back behind CJ Hughes or any other contractor and do the restoration paving on that.
West Virginia Pipeline was actually our first acquisition, and I would venture to say this is probably, probably our, I hate to say our favorite acquisition, but, really, you know, we love what they do down there. This was a company that was ran by two brothers that was actually started by their father, and we bought it from them. They were looking to get out of the business. Each one of them had a child in the business. You'll see one of them there, Amy, who is the Vice President, and her cousin, Michael, is the President of the company. They've been very successful in, essentially doubling the size of that business from doing about $6 million a year to around $12 plus million a year in the course of about four, over four years.
They just have a tremendous workforce, incredibly productive in what they do. We really, really, you know, feel like that was kind of the model of what we're looking for when we do an acquisition. Ryan Construction is one of our companies. This is still a work in process. We bought Ryan out of bankruptcy and basically paid the amount of what the equipment was worth, but still gives us a little bit, a couple, a few sideline businesses that we had not been in before, do some broadband, telecommunication work, which has kind of developed into also doing directional drilling work then, for water and gas distribution too.
Also providing corrosion, they call them CP, corrosion preventative services to our natural gas customers, you know, corrosion, rust resistance, all that type of stuff is very important, the integrity maintenance. That is one piece of it that we are also looking to grow. As I mentioned, Tribute Contracting is our newest acquisition. I expect this is probably going to be a $40-$45 million annual year type of business, more in the wastewater, wastewater sewer. How this differs from the work that CJ does, CJ Hughes, CJ is more focused or had been more focused in the past on the private side of the work, meaning, you know, the kind of the American Water Works type of thing, whereas Tribute works primarily on the public side, working for the municipalities.
This case on that side is more lowest bid type of win works, whereas on the private side, you're dealing more of a situation where they have their preferred contractors and they come to you and say, "Hey, this is what we're planning to do this year." You may provide budgets and such, but you're not necessarily bidding the work. This is a kind of a lowest bid type of win here with Tribute. One thing I do want to focus in on this is, and you'll probably see this in our slides a lot, our values, primarily safety, quality, production.
You know, safety is something that is very important to us, not just making sure that people get home, you know, unscathed every night, but also because, as we were talking to one of our meetings this morning, that, you know, someone asked us, you know, what, what could, you know, cause you to lose this work that you're doing? Safety. Safety is the number one fastest thing that if we do not work safely, if we put people in danger, then, you know, we lose, we potentially lose those customers, lose that work. That is why we always, we always say safety is, is our main goal in this, in the company. Environmental highlights here, you know, as we mentioned, you know, providing the integrity maintenance, the corrosion type of work, doing slip repairs. You know, we've done some work in the electrical vehicle battery plants here.
We finished up a job down in Tennessee. Went very well. We got another job over in Liberty, North Carolina right now, working for Toyota. You know, we've found that to be a good business to be in. Again, you know, it's kind of the way we feel right here: safety, quality, production. We put those three things together, and that's going to make our customers happy. If we can do all that, that's where we think that we're going to provide a return to the shareholders. This is the other Doug, or I'm so sorry, that Doug mentioned here. This is kind of a disaggregation of our revenue. You can see kind of right around 2020, we got into a little bit of a dip there. Partly was COVID related.
and then we started to grow out of that. 2020 is where we did our first acquisition. 2021 is when we brought on SQP. 2022 there is when we brought on Tri-State Paving. Of course, at the end of 2024, well, I'm sorry, that's fiscal 2024. On calendar 2024 is when we brought in Tribute. So we've had a mix then of organic growth and inorganic growth, through the years. what we're primarily focused on is growing our water distribution services. That's, that's the place where we, what we tell everybody, that's really where we want to grow. we feel it's a, it's a low risk place to be, but it's also a profitable venture, and it doesn't have the, all the political drawbacks that say natural gas and, and other types of, you know, coal and stuff have.
Water is going to be a main focus of us growing either organically or through mergers and acquisitions. We've also seen a lot of growth there in our electrical, mechanical in general. Now, part of that is Nitro going from being a, say, $50-$55 million a year mechanical contractor to putting on about $40-$50 million worth of new construction work on top of that. It is kind of a cycle. You get in there doing that new construction work, and then that leads to more reoccurring maintenance after you get done with the portion of the plant you're working in. Just say, for instance, Toyota put in the Buffalo, West Virginia plant, I believe back in 1996, and Nitro has never left that plant since then.
Almost 30 years that they have been working in that plant, to the point that they are the preferred contractor, both on the maintenance side, but also when work comes out, big packages, they're right there to do the capital work also. That is kind of the model we try to use in that industrial space, is be there every day performing for our customers so that when they've got something else coming up big, we're there to handle it too. It also leads to the word of mouth when a new core comes into West Virginia and is building a new plant, they know that, hey, Nitro is the people we need to go talk to because they hear good things about what we're doing there.
Talk a little bit of backlog, I believe before, but, as you can see then, we have a record backlog at the end of March, $280 million. We also had, some things, you know, primarily maybe on the gas transmission side, things were a little bit slowing out, coming out the gate this year. So feel like that, we're in pretty good shape, not just with that backlog at the end of March, but also adding new projects subsequent to March. This is our, our EBITDA here. You can see, we talked last year, we had a, a record EBITDA of, adjusted EBITDA of, of $28.5 million. Kind of looking at about the 8.2% there. The trailing 12 months, you can see is dipped down to about 21.
I'm sure if you all, if you've seen our, our latest filing on our queue, we had a tough quarter two, January through March. You know, attribute that to, we had awful weather in our area of the woods, January, December, January, February, part of March. Really couldn't get out there and work. We lost more than 50% of our days. You know, we'll have a lot of anticipating a lot of growth for the year. It was kind of hard to just send everybody home and risk losing people. We feel like it was a little bit of a blip, a little bit of a, let's say a shift. Maybe we've got about a three-four month shift in what we're, what we think we're going to be able to accomplish.
You know, we feel good about where we are right now. Our capital allocation, obviously, you know, we're always, Doug's always got his ear to the ground looking for new opportunities. You know, we, as we mentioned, we have successfully integrated West Virginia Pipeline, Tri-State, Heritage Painting, which is a little small tuck-in thing to Nitro, which fits fantastically with Nitro space in what they're doing. And also Tribute. We talked a little bit about the dividend. Yeah, we've had an annual dividend the past two years. We have effectively doubled the rate and turned it into a quarterly dividend. And we have our stock repurchase program. We've got just under 800,000 shares left on that. I think we bought about 107,000 in May.
We're, you know, if the price falls to where we think it's attractive for us, we will buy back shares. I'll ask if anybody has any questions they would like to address to Doug or I.
You referenced the focus on water and the fine print was horizontal or directional drilling with water. Would you talk to us about what that entails and how meaningful that ultimately could be? Because in my mind, I'm envisioning not tearing up roads and vehicles in the front yards, et cetera. I'm trying to get that wrapped around.
One of the newest technologies is they call it, where they go back in and redo the pipes inside.
I'm not sure that was the exact slide that referenced that, but that is kind of a new technology that our customers are using now. We have been doing some work for Louisville Water and I think it's our first time really using that for an extensively large size project. It's relatively new that that's been used.
Yeah.
To address your specific question on the HDD, typically what we'll do is, as you mentioned, we'll go under roads, you know, maybe go under railroads or go under if there's a lake or something there, go under there. Yeah, it doesn't disturb the environment. You're not open cutting a road. Typically when we're doing it, it could be anywhere from 200-500 feet up to maybe 3,500 feet type of pulls that we're doing.
So, you know, we don't have huge HDD machines, but we do have the ability to do the, you know, hundreds of feet at a time of, you know, of the 8, 10, 12 inch pipe. Go ahead.
I'm just curious. You mentioned weather impacting the first, second quarter. When it's stormy out or tornadoes or rain and your workers can't show up, do they get paid?
On the gas transmission work, it's mainly done with union trades. And so they have a, and sometimes different trades have different contracts. You know, maybe the rules might be different with welders than they are for laborers. But generally speaking, we lose a day, we have to pay them for half a day whenever we call off before a certain time.
If they show up there and let's say we start working and then they get called off in an hour, we have to pay them for the whole day. Go ahead.
Excuse me. What percentage of the projects are fixed, fixed contracts and what percentage of time doing?
Most of our, when you go back to that slide 17, you want to hit that slide or? Yeah. The businesses kind of have different cadences. The gas and water distribution contracts are almost always multi-year, blanket unit-based pricing. It'll say, okay, you go to American Water and say, this is our prices for this year. They say, okay, we want you to do all these projects for this year. In March, we're going to have you working in this area.
We're going to move you to do this, this, this, and this. Most of that is kind of unit-based pricing. Okay, here's your, and we get that every three years. We turn in a price list and they say, okay, we'll negotiate this and we agree to it for three years. On the gas and petroleum, that's much more hard bid. Like, you know, this is a $30 million large contract with, say, NiSource or TC Energy. On the electrical and mechanical, it's probably about 50-50. We have a lot of maintenance contracts. They're kind of MSAs with, say, Toyota, which is our biggest customer, in the Buffalo, West Virginia plant. That'll be, okay, you know, it's an MSA with all these different prices. It's negotiated every couple of years. Same as kind of like the water.
On the other hand, let's say we're building a new plant for them, it will be mostly kind of a hard bid price. Although even in that, there's usually a lot of like unit-based because so many things change when you start. Okay, well, if you do this extra or this extra, here's what the pricing is for that. I'd say those different businesses are different in that respect.
You're welcome.
Another good reason why we like gas and water distribution better. Curious about your balance sheet. Sure. You want to know what happens too? I think you have a slide in there about that, right?
Let me see if I had anything in here. I don't think, and maybe I'll have to do that. I don't think I have a balance sheet slide in here, but I'll talk a little bit about our debt.
That's one thing a lot of people like to look at. We had about $50 million in debt at the end of March. We had about $6 million of that related to our operating line of credit. I think I added up earlier. We had about $20 million related to the financing of acquisitions. The Tribute was about a $16 million deal that we financed. It was a $20 million-plus deal, but we financed $16 million of it. We've probably got about another $4 million of the Tri-State, West Virginia Pipeline, and Ryan acquisitions that we're financing. I believe our equipment, we got about $15 million financing on our equipment.
The balance, I believe, is about, we got about $10 million of PPP loans that we applied for in good faith in, I guess that was, spring of 2020. In June of 2021, we got noticed that we were forgiven on our PPP loans. About two years later, we got one of those letters that basically said, hey, we're looking at the size standards and affiliation rules and all that type of stuff. We have not heard anything back from the SBA in about two years. Out of abundance of caution, we did put that back on the books. Other than that, we feel like we are in a good cash position. As I mentioned, we got a $30 million line of credit that we have for operating.
Now, it doesn't mean we can go get $30 million at any point in time. It's based off of a borrowing-based calculation. They take a look at our receivables and discount for any retention, any bonded work, anything over 90 days, get down to an eligible receivable and multiply that by 70. And that's what we have available for us to borrow for operations.