Okay, good morning. Our next presenting company is Energy Services of America. Ticker on the NASDAQ is ESOA. Company's involved in some general contracting, construction, some HVAC electrical work, primarily in the Appalachian region. Here to speak on behalf, I should also mention, one, they are a client of ours, so if you have any questions after the presentation, or you'd like to set something up after today, happy to work on that with you. Secondly, the company was added to the Russell 2000 here at the end of June, so a really good accomplishment to be able to wave that flag. Here today to present on the company behalf is Charles Crimmel, the company's CFO. Charles?
Thank you, John. As John mentioned, my name's Charles Crimmel. I'm the CFO for Energy Services of America. It's always great to enjoy coming to these conferences, getting to meet people, tell people about Energy Services. Hopefully, it's not too early for some audience participation, is it? Can I get a show of hands? How many of you all are familiar with Energy Services? Okay. How many of you guys are saying, "Hey, who are these guys and what do they do?" Good. We get that a lot. People kind of look at our structure and they're kind of like, I don't, you know, Tom here is a good example. He's like, "What do you guys do? What is your vision? What is your plan?" I've kind of tried to get in that a little bit and we can maybe address some of that in the Q&A.
What we are is we are a contractor based out of Huntington, West Virginia. We're primarily in the natural gas and petroleum transmission fields. We also have work in the water and gas, natural gas distribution. We also have another sector that we identify then as more of our industrial type of work, that can be involved in the water, I'm sorry, the power, automotive, chemical, steel manufacturing work. Within that, we do electrical, mechanical, piping, HVAC, fire protection type of work. We are kind of a conglomerate of companies. It, amazingly, does all kind of work together in what we do. We have companies that do work with some of the same customers.
Then again, we also have opportunities that we can create within the companies through our general contractor and to bring, you know, Nitro into more some of the commercial space where they are working in schools and such doing electrical HVAC there too, just to give them a little more exposure and a little more variety on their work. I'll get into the presentation here a little bit. As you can see, we do have a list there of about six to eight companies. There's probably even a few on there that fit under Nitro that we don't have listed. We'll kind of go through and kind of tell you about how everything just kind of fits together. Last year we did about $352 million in revenue and $28 million, $29 million in adjusted EBITDA. As you can see there, we are September 30th filer.
We right now are working in our fourth fiscal year quarter. This is kind of our busiest peak of the construction season too, between the time between July and September, even going into October and into November some. Roughly, we have about 1,400 employees. Again, I said, you know, we work in the natural gas, petroleum, chemical, automotive, water, wastewater sectors. Some of our investment highlights here: of course, one of the biggest things for us is our relationships with our customers. That's a big driver for us in helping us get work, keeping our customers happy. Our backlog has steadily been increasing. We have about a $304 million backlog that we reported as of June. Of that, roughly about $125 million, I believe, is in water. About $100 million of it is in our industrial services group.
We are, you know, obviously been very successful picking up work, and we're very optimistic about the opportunities we're seeing for the future. We also have been very active in expanding some of our geographical reach. Within Nitro, they have a company that works up and about in Creek, Michigan, kind of right there in the heart of the automotive side, the food producer side. We think that we've kind of got that going in the right direction, and we think that's going to start to contribute well to Nitro's performance here in the future. Also, we've been active on the mergers and acquisitions side. We've added, I think we've completed about four acquisitions to add to our portfolio, starting in 2020. We added the West Virginia Pipeline, the Tri-State Paving Company. We started up our own general contractor.
In December, we bought a company called Tribute, who is in the wastewater side of things. We'll kind of go through those here in a minute. Obviously, with the capital allocation, we have a repurchase plan in place to buy roughly, got about 700,000 shares left on that. We do pay a dividend. We pay a quarterly dividend of $0.03 per share. You can see our geographical reach here, anywhere between New York down to Alabama. We are in the Carolinas, Tennessee, as far west as maybe Indiana, Illinois. We do, said we would have some operations up in Michigan. This right here is probably not as far as potentially we could go. A lot of it's going to depend on our customers or our relationships with our general contractors.
We're not looking necessarily to just add more space, but as someone like a [Lowbridge] or somebody says, "Hey, Nitro, we want you to go with us. Come down to Tennessee. Let's go to North Carolina. Let's go whatever state you've got a project. We want you to work on with us." That's typically where we're going to expand our geographical reach, is through our working with our general contractors and then working with our customers that want us to go. A Toyota, for say, may want us to go to Georgetown, Kentucky, may want us to go down to Huntsville, Alabama, go down to [Lumberton], North Carolina. That's been very, our relationships with our customers and our general contractors are very important to us. Again, you know, we'll mention that, you know, we've had some, a lot of M&A opportunities and things that we've gotten closed in the past.
You can see here's a list of some of our customers. American Water is a big customer for us, working both in Charleston, West Virginia, and in Lexington, Kentucky. Toyota has been a longstanding customer for Nitro. Nitro started there in, I believe, 1997, helped to build the plant in Buffalo, West Virginia, and they have not left that facility since then. So roughly about 28 years, Nitro has been involved with Toyota. Mountaineer Gas is a big customer for us. Dow, you can see our exposure there is, you know, is in the, you've got TC Energy and NiSource in the transmission side of the gas distribution, Mountaineer Gas in the distribution side, you know, and then the chemical companies, Dow, Clariant type of things.
We have a broad exposure to a lot of different customers that have a lot of diversity of services that we provide within the company. CJ Hughes is one of the flagship companies. Just to give you a little bit of a background on Energy Services of America. We started in 2006 as a SPAC company. CJ Hughes is one of the companies that came in at that time that was purchased, and Nitro was a subsidiary of CJ Hughes. Those two companies came in together. There was also a third company that came in that was very, very much heavily weighted on the gas transmission side. The theory behind the SPAC was then to look at opportunities in the Marcellus and shale areas of West Virginia and Ohio.
It didn't really pan out as expected, really not just for us, but a lot of other contractors did not do well at that time either. We moved forward to about 2011 or so. We had suffered some significant losses on projects. We had gone into forbearance with our bank through our restructuring, came out of it, decided we're going to get back to basics. We went from a company that was heavily focused on the transmission side to a company that was looking to more diversify its services to try to still work in transmission, but limit our risk, to help also, you know, build and grow our water distribution services, to grow our gas distribution services, and to grow our Nitro industrial crew.
As you see here, you know, CJ's been a company that's been around for, you know, since 1946, I believe, up over 70 years they've been around. It's almost to the point where with a lot of our customers, I mean, they know ESA is the holding company, but their relationship with CJ Hughes is with Nitro, it's with West Virginia Pipeline. That's why, you know, one of the reasons people kind of said, "Why do we have all these companies and such?" I think a lot of it has to do with just the familiarity with our customers and knowing these companies that they've been dealing with for a long time. Also, part of it is that we have a lot of different labor solutions. CJ then is a union contractor. They're a signatory to the steel workers.
The steel workers are the ones who work on the gas distribution and on the water distribution side of it. CJ also has a subsidiary underneath of it called Contractors Rental that, when they get into the transmission side, they hire through the building trades and, you know, signatory to the PLCA agreements. CJ has two different options there with their labor force. They have a lower cost steel worker side, and they have a building trade side where you need more skill type of work on some of the transmission work. What also that allows you to do then is being on that side is you get a little bit further away from home. It's easier to beef up your workforce when you're coming through the union halls. That's kind of the way that CJ is structured and how they suit their customers' needs.
Nitro Construction, as I said, that was one of the team into ESA underneath the CJ Hughes back in 2008. Nitro again is a company that has been around since 1959. I've been around Nitro well before I started with ESA. I've been around Nitro for almost 30 years now. They have grown tremendously back when I kind of started there. They were strictly an electrical contractor, subcontractor that worked for their parent company, Union Boiler. They had anywhere, I don't know, maybe $15 million in revenue a year. Over the years, CJ, I'm sorry, Nitro has branched out, become much more than just an electrical contractor. They've added mechanical piping services, HVAC, fire protection services. A lot of growth there.
Especially in the past couple of years, they've gone from being primarily a maintenance contractor doing in the neighborhood of $50 million, $55 million in maintenance work a year to being a company now that's pushing +$100 million . I'm sorry.
Can I get you closer to the mic?
Yeah, okay.
They're pushing more than $100 million in revenue, and added a layer of construction services on top of it. Obviously, it makes them more, the potential for more profit margin than adding the new construction on top of the general maintenance stuff. SQP Construction Group is the general contractor that we started up back in, I can't remember, maybe it's 2001. What we saw there was a need in the marketplace because the right to work laws were changing in West Virginia and Kentucky. It made it more advantageous for the non-union contractors and general contractors in the area. It kind of stifled some of the ability for Nitro to get into commercial work.
They're much, much bigger than the local GCs in the area. It made it harder for Nitro to get their foot in the door with some of them, you know, obviously not wanting to deal with a bigger gorilla, someone they really couldn't push around. We saw a need for us to start up, spin up our own general contractor there. SQP does a lot of work in school work, correctional facility work, civil work, getting into some small bridge work, but also what it allows us to do then is to feed commercial opportunities to Nitro . Whether that be on the electrical side, the piping side, HVAC, the fire protection, then that, you know, Nitro could possibly do somewhere about $8 million - $10 million worth of work a year through SQP Construction .
It also helps filter some work down to CJ Hughes , and CJ Hughes can help SQP on doing civil work, on doing foundations, concrete work also. This is one we get asked about a lot, in the sense of this was an acquisition we did back in the spring of 2022. People always want to know, why do you have a paving company? It doesn't seem to fit, but it makes perfect sense. What Tri-State Paving does is they work about 90% of their work with American Water in Charleston, West Virginia, and Lexington, Kentucky. What they do then is come back behind the water crews that are putting in the new water lines, and they do the paving restoration and the curbs back behind those crews. As the water company says, what they get the most complaints on is the finished product.
It's the paving. That's what people see. They see the finished product. They don't see what's been put under the ground. What they decided to do is the water company wanted to have a dedicated contractor that just did the paving services behind all the contractors. What we found then was that paving work was pretty valuable to CJ Hughes, and now they were losing out on it. We had the opportunity, through some of our connections, reached out to Tri-State Paving, and their owner was looking to get out of the business. It just made perfect sense for us to acquire them and to bring them into our fold and add to our water services that we provide. West Virginia Pipeline, I think this is a great story right here. This is a company located in southern West Virginia.
It was two brothers, ran it, and before them, their dad had owned it. They were looking to get out of the business. They both had a child in the business too, but they really didn't want to saddle them with having to deal with everything it takes to run a business, right? Having to worry about having money for payroll and equipment and all that. The water company came to us and said, "Hey, you know, we really like these guys. They fit in perfectly with you all. We want Energy Services to buy them." We looked at them and saw, "Yeah, this makes perfect sense." We bought them in, this was our first acquisition. We bought them in December of 2020. I'll say that the two main owners at the time spent a year there. Then we kind of turned it over to the two children.
Michael and Amy, his cousin Amy, run West Virginia Pipeline for us. They are tremendous in what they do. Went from, the two brothers had a theory that nothing good happens when you get over 50 employees. They ran it at a level not to exceed 50 employees for years. Michael and Amy have come in and they have grown that business to roughly about $6 million a year, up to about $12 million a year. They've maintained their margins. Just a tremendous case study for us and, you know, kind of a perfect opportunity of an acquisition. Bryan Construction Services is one of our companies. We bought this company out of bankruptcy about three years ago. It's been a struggle for us.
What we've decided to do on that is we are going to, the work they do in the gas distribution, cathodic protection, works right with what CJ Hughes does. We are going to take those crews and blend them over to CJ Hughes. We're going to right-size this company and get them down to about a 25-man, boring company. About four to five crews just doing a little bit of fiber broadband work, but primarily we're going to focus on the boring work, you know, going underneath roads and such with water pipes, with gas distribution stuff. So far we've been successful marketing to outside customers on that. We've got a project we're working at a titanium plant in West Virginia where we're taking, drilling under the road so they can take electric out to a solar farm.
Also, along with that, we're going to be able to market that, not market, but we're going to be using that within our own organization when CJ Hughes, Tribute, West Virginia Pipeline need a bore done on the job. Instead of open cutting a road, they may go underneath of it and pop back up. We've got an in-house solution at a lower cost, and we can keep the margin dollars from going outside the company and use Ryan to do that. Tribute Contracting then is the latest acquisition that we have. We completed that deal in December of 2024. We expect that they're probably going to be about a $40 million- $45 million a year revenue type company. Why this made sense for us was CJ Hughes for years had struggled on the wastewater side of things.
They just found that they were more geared, more successful in doing water distribution services. CJ had kind of abandoned doing sewer work, sanitary, stormwater type of work. This is an opportunity that came for us. Tribute is located in Ohio, but it's really only about 10 minutes away from our corporate office in West Virginia. Our guys knew them. They knew their workforce. A lot of their guys had worked for us, and their guys, some of their guys, you know, or the guys that we had worked for them. We knew who they were in the area. Todd Hare was known as a very skilled engineer, very knowledgeable. We thought it would just make great sense then to bring them into our organization to help fill a need that we have on the wastewater side of things.
One important thing I will mention here are our core values, and you'll see that a lot throughout our slides is safety. Safety is one of the most important things that we need to consider in what we're doing. Someone asked me one time, you know, what is, you know, what's one thing that could cause you to lose work from a customer? It's safety. You know, it's not just about not getting people hurt, but it's also about making sure we're setting up the right conditions, instilling the right culture within the companies that we want to make sure that we work to keep our employees safe, the surrounding citizens in the areas that we're working safe. We're dealing with some hazardous stuff, especially on the gas distribution side. Our customers take that very seriously. Safety is a very important factor for us.
Again, what we feel like is, safety, quality, production is kind of our hallmark of our company. When we marry all of those things together, that's where we're going to have the best shareholder return. If we get in and start talking about some of our revenue here, I know I talked a little bit about our disaggregation. You see down here at the bottom as we break it down into gas and petroleum transmission work. That's represented by the blue things in the bar chart. Then we have our electrical, mechanical, and general services. Then we have our gas and water services. You can see what we have done here below is kind of break it out so you can see the company logo underneath which ones help make up those dollars. You can see then around the time of 2020, 2021, we've had significant growth since then.
We attribute part of that to organic growth within the companies, particularly within Nitro , but also with the acquisitions that we've done, acquisitions and the spin-up and startups with SQP . As I said, Nitro has gone from a $50 million maintenance contractor to a company that we expect to be a $100 million company. SQP , we think we're going to have good things there, about a $50 million general contractor with room to grow on top of that. We feel really good right now about where we've been, the way we've been able to grow our revenue. If we have a goal within these segments, let's say, it is that we want to try to keep the gas transmission work about a third of our business. It is a little riskier, especially when you're dealing with weather conditions, you're dealing with labor.
We don't want to get overextended on our gas transmission side. It's important to us, but we want to keep it at a reasonable level. We've kind of targeted about 1/3 of our work is where we want our gas transmission to be. The water distribution services is kind of what we target as that's the area where we want to grow the most at. We feel like there is a need. Water is not a political animal. People aren't not going to be protesting against better, cleaner water. Especially with the infrastructure that we have in our area that's been aging 50, 60+ years behind, both on the water side and the sanitary and stormwater side, we feel like that is going to be a strong opportunity for us in the future is on the water side.
Again, our industrial services is something that we are extremely happy about too. That would be what we're talking about there with the electrical, mechanical, and general contracting. Backlog, you can see here we have a steady increase in our backlog. What we reported as of June 30th was a $304 million backlog. Of that, about $125 million was in the water side of it, about $100 million in the industrial side, about another $40 million more of our general contracting. We feel really good about what we're looking towards in the future. As far as this year goes, it has been a little bit less than what we expected. Some things have not come around, particularly on the gas transmission side.
It has been a lot less work than what we expected coming into the year, but we do think that will turn around and I feel like we're hearing about good opportunities going into the construction season on 2026. This is our adjusted EBITDA here. At the end of September 2024, we had an EBITDA around the $28 million, $29 million mark. Our trailing 12 right now is at $17 million. Our target goal on the margin percentage or our EBITDA percentage is 10%. Obviously, you all have seen the queues in our filings. You know, we had a really rough second quarter to the fiscal year ending December. Actually, December wasn't that bad. The rough one was really the March one. We just had an ordinary amount of inclement weather in our area pretty much from December through most of March.
Our companies that worked outside during that period of time had lost about 50% of their available working days due to the weather issues and such and customer spending. Really, we did not see some things bounce back, particularly on the transmission side, as fast as we expected to. We were expecting we would be starting transmission work in late March. Some of it did not come about until late June. You combine the weather with the customer spending and about a three-month delay in projects. Obviously, that's hindering our profitability this year and also our margin, our EBITDA margin. Our capital allocation, we're still very active in looking at potential acquisitions. We both look at things to maybe companies that could supplement things that we already do, maybe build them into bringing them in directly into our companies.
There are also some other opportunities out there, maybe bringing in other companies and then folding them under the ESA umbrella, directly under ESA. As I mentioned before, we do pay a dividend, a $0.03 per share quarterly dividend. We do have a stock repurchase plan out there. There are roughly about 786,000 shares remaining on that. We look to be very opportunistic. Our philosophy is that probably once or twice a year, there's going to be a dip in the stock price, just buy during that time. We're not actively every day out there trying to buy stock, but if it comes the right time, right price, we've got a 10b5-1 plan out there that our broker has control of that program for us. I will open it up to any questions anyone may have.
I had a three-part question about your acquisitions. Are you using cash or are you using stock, or are you using some combination of both?
Yes. In several of our acquisitions, we have kind of done one or all three of them. Yes, cash is a part of it. The Tribute, both of the guys, the main people in that one took $1 million worth of stock. That was about the $2 million. I think it came out to be about 67,000 shares each. Our Tri-State Paving acquisition, the owner on that took $1 million of stock. We also took a seller's note involved in that acquisition. On the West Virginia Pipeline, that involved cash, about half cash financed through the bank. The other half was actually a seller's note, which we're going to pay off this December. We look at all three. Doug's philosophy on the acquisition is he wants to keep people engaged. He wants to make them obviously feel like they are an owner and get some skin in the game too.
We find that if we can do some portion cash, some portion stock, some portion maybe a seller's note, it's kind of like the model that we want to try to use.
The second part was, do you have earnout provisions on these acquisitions? Do they get to pay a certain amount if revenue hits a certain target or at least at a certain target?
No, we discussed that briefly, but we have not done any type of earnout provisions on them.
The third part was, are you...
Okay. Any other questions? Yes, sir.
Do you see a lower credit rate environment? We'll see substantial update for the new construction projects that are going to be asked here for potential revenue.
I'm sorry, can you repeat that?
If we have like a lower interest rate environment, do you think we'll see greater spending?
I don't know if it will have a big effect. I think there's already some dollars out there that they obviously have been yet to spend, either from the JOBS Act or from the Inflation Reduction Act. I don't, you know, there's a lot of things that could dictate customer spending. We've heard a lot about tariffs recently. We've heard that some of our customers have come back and asked our guys, "Hey, can you all take a look at this and maybe reprice this under a different set of circumstances?" Obviously, we are at the mercy of what our customers, their spending decisions, how they want to allocate their capital. There's a lot of things that could go into their decision making. Certainly, that could be part of it, lower interest rates. There's probably a lot of things that kind of dictate their spending decisions. Thank you.