Say a few words.
Okay, good afternoon. Our next presenting company is Energy Services of America, trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol ESOA. Energy Services is a client of Three Part Advisors, so if any of you would like to schedule a follow-up with Doug or Charles, please feel free to reach out to us. Here today to lead off the presentation is Doug Reynolds, the CEO, and with him is Charles Crimmel, the company's Chief Financial Officer. Doug?
Great, thanks John, thank you for the introduction. Great to be back here with you guys again here in Dallas. I was here last year. It was our first time being in Dallas. Last year when I came here, the stock, since I've been involved with Three Part and been going to their conferences, every time I'd go to a conference, the stock would be up. We would come and I would talk to people and like, "Gosh, it was like four bucks when we started." Every time I'd go to the conference, it was like six bucks, nine bucks. I think last year it was about $10 or $11, and then I looked today and we're down to $8.60. We were $12 three weeks ago, so we've lost $3.
It's the first time I've come back and said, "Hey, our stock's down." If you missed it the first time, you've got a chance to buy now. Now's the time to buy. Just real quick, you know, our business, we may have the worst name in terms of describing what we do, because when I go on like a Yahoo search or Seeking Alpha search, we pop up in the oil, gas, field services business. That's distinctly what we really don't do. We're in the infrastructure business, and kind of three basic end models that we service are water and natural gas distribution. That's been our biggest growing business. I think it's sort of the bedrock of the business, and that is regulated utilities, mostly small pipes, going to people's houses, subdivisions, pump stations, that sector.
The other two businesses are natural gas transmission, which is big pipes, I think of Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a lot of miles, capital intensive business that traditionally has, originally was what the company was founded on around 2006, 2008, was 80% of the business. When we got in trouble during that time, got delisted, that was way too much of the business and had a lot of challenges. We're in the electrical, mechanical, general, that's electric, inside plants, that type of thing. We've had an incredible run the last ten years if you take a look at it. Been growing the business. Last year we did $350 million of revenue, $28 million EBITDA. The last twelve months have been a little more challenging. We had a spring quarter of some very unusual weather and some other challenges.
Still, you know, we've had a really exciting year. In the last year, we've had two small acquisitions, or one medium size, about $40 million water and wastewater contractor, and then a small one in the last quarter. It's called Rigney Digital, which is HVAC controls, which is a great business, engineering, high gross margins, great business we're excited to be in. We also last year joined the Russell 2000, so that's been another, having another buyer there, another, you know, proud to join that. I said, our company, I used to get the, "Gosh, why are you all so cheap?" And if you look at us and you compare us to our part, you know, our competitors who we're competing in the marketplace with different divisions of Primoris, MasTec, our stock is significantly less.
We win plenty of times in the marketplace, and I feel like we're going to continue to win in the stock market too. Some other investment highlights I wanted to bring up, if you kind of look at it over the last four years, we went from having a backlog of $70 million to $300 million as of June 30th of this year. We've been integrating acquisitions. Our Board of Directors and our management run the business like we own it, and we treat our shareholders that way. If you look at it, the insiders own 26% of the shares. We pay $0.03 a quarter in dividends. Every year we've made money, we pay dividends, and we're going to continue to do that.
We try to opportunistically buy stock back, and now we're down below $9. It's probably a good time to be opportunistic. When I was saying at the beginning, we're kind of in the wrong bucket. If you look at our customers, for the most part, they're the regulated utilities. We work in plants. Toyota, most years, is one of our biggest customers. We're working a lot in the Nucor plant. It's being built in Buffalo, West Virginia. Those are our end markets. We're not really out there. I get asked all the time, "Are you guys in," they say, or an AMC, "Are you guys in Houston or are you guys doing oil field work?" No, no, that's not really what we do.
Here's kind of, I think, kind of the most important slide in the deck because it kind of shows you what we're doing and where we've been. If you look at it on the gas and petroleum transmission side, you know, we're doing less business now than we were doing, you know, eight, nine years ago. But we've really grown our water business. We've really grown our electrical, mechanical, been an incredible amount of things going on in that sector in terms of reindustrialization and had, you know, significant growth. Again, backlog, you know, record backlogs and continued growth should set up, you know, to continue to have the success that we've enjoyed the last several years. Again, EBITDA margins, we've grown the business, have continued to improve.
Obviously, as I said, we had that winter issues during the quarter, which really has made the twenty-five look weaker, but I'm confident that we'll continue to get that back up. Our goal is to get that business above 10%, which is where some of our highest trading or where some of our strongest competitors who we want to beat in the marketplace are. We're going to get our EBITDA margins into double digits in the next couple of years. Again, we've used our capital to buy companies and continue to grow. There's almost every year we've done one or two small acquisitions. We pay, as I said, I said earlier, $0.03 a quarter dividends. We bought stock back in April whenever the market has its dislocations, and we've kind of got an opportunistic buyback program in place.
Where we work primarily in these different businesses are our industrial services businesses. We go down into Alabama. We work in auto plants and facilities like that. Our gas transmission business will go in most of where that blue is on the map. We go into New York, as far west as kind of the suburbs of Chicago, and then obviously mid-southeast. Our distribution businesses are a lot more headquartered in, we work over in probably as far west as Louisville, up to Dayton, and then kind of over into West Virginia, rest of Kentucky, a little bit in Tennessee. Our different divisions are our CJ Hughes business. That's our primary contractor, both our natural gas transmission work as well as we do distribution services with that. It's our biggest division.
As I said, it does about a little less than half of the revenue of the whole company. Our Nitro Construction Services business, it's a union business that is our industrial, does HVAC, pretty much anything that would be inside a plant. Also does some commercial work on larger type projects. This is our new acquisition we did this year and kind of typical of what we were really looking for, a family type business that we purchased that are in the HVAC controls. You know, this is a business that's very sticky. Oftentimes the architects and the engineers on these projects are speccing them into projects. We feel like we can kind of leverage our Nitro Construction Services business and our, with this Rigney, as I said, $4 million, 20% plus EBITDA margins should be a great addition to our Nitro Construction Services business.
SQP was a general contracting business we spun up a few years ago. After West Virginia and Kentucky changed some of their laws, we decided we wanted to get in the general contracting business to basically feed our electrical and other industrial services businesses. That is how we started that. Again, it has been a nice addition. Did about, as I said, about $60 million, a little less than $60 million last year. Again, it helps in terms of coordinating the different businesses on our union side. One of the questions we get often is, "Hey, what is the deal with the paving business? What are you guys doing?" Our Tri-State Paving business, 90% of their work is with American Water, either Tennessee, Kentucky, or West Virginia. A few years ago, had an opportunity to purchase this business.
They generally do what they call utility restoration paving. They do not only go behind CJ Hughes crews, but they also, all the pipeline crews, they get like a market area where they do all the restoration. We generally found good business. Our gross margins in that business are north of 30% and fairly, you know, small ticket, low, you know, low risk type business. Been very successful. Our West Virginia Pipeline business was something we acquired a few years ago in 2021. It is $11 million, probably our best business in terms of gross margins. They just do water and gas distribution for, in West Virginia and a little bit in Virginia. Ryan was a bankruptcy, a company we bought in bankruptcy. We have kind of changed that business around. We pulled out last year the distribution crews, put them into CJ Hughes.
They originally had gas, they worked from out near gas into gas distribution. They also do drilling, and now they've got into right-of-way clearing, that type of thing. We really feel like that business has taken a while to get kind of properly aligned. We've closed some of the divisions, but really picked up some synergies by taking the gas distribution crews from Ryan and moving them over to CJ Hughes. Tribute was our acquisition last December. It's one of the largest water and wastewater contractors in our region. Again, it's been, since we did it, they did, I guess in the first six months, they did $18 million in revenue. Kind of a leader in that, in our area. Very strong water and increases our water and they have really good expertise in the wastewater business. Again, you know, infrastructure has been a great play.
If you look at all the, some of our competitors, their stocks have had incredible runs. We're continuing to grow and have a lot of really great things going on in our company. That concludes the formal part of my presentation. Do you all have any questions?
Is your back order currently that far out or is that actually going to be?
What do you mean?
You have a huge backlog.
Backlog.
Backlog, I'm sorry.
That's work that we have, most of that backlog is work that we're going to do in the next year. That's contracts that we have in place for the next year, not like back order. Does that make sense? We like book a contract to build a pipeline, we put it in a backlog to do in the next year. About 90% of that backlog is twelve months.
You want to have a large?
Large backlog is good.
What about finding skilled labor? I mean, I went to the college trying to find a welder that had backlogs across the gallon, but that kind of problem you would say too as far as talent out there?
Yes, I would say that is our biggest challenge. Every day is to put teams together and get, in each of our different businesses there are some different intricacies, but finding quality people. Almost all of our managers say they could double their business if they had the people to do it.
A couple of questions. On the backlog, can you talk about what's been driving that? It looks like it's at a record high in numbers, so that's great. Just in terms of business lines. I wonder on the latest acquisition of Rigney does that have certain applications within HVAC, certain end markets where that's used or is it really across, you know, all areas of end markets? Because that space is obviously quite a bit here.
Yeah, that's. The backlog has been primarily driven by water and our general services. Like West Virginia American Water, Mountaineer Gas have strong programs next year in terms of their construction budgets. I would say that one area that's been weak over the last several years has been gas transmission, and that does look like for next year, and these aren't, obviously you got to get the job, but in terms of our quotes, and it looks like that there's going to be in the next two or three years a significant improvement in that business, in the gas transmission business, and having big pipes. That's, I'd say, is sort of the, maybe the next thing that kind of moves the stock up. If you get the gas transmission business going again, I mean, we could do, we did close to $100 million a few years ago.
If you go from doing, you know, thirty or forty to eighty or a hundred, that could make a huge difference in the next couple of years. As for the Rigney, it's in that HVAC, it's called controls, but, you know, a lot of time that gets specced in, so it's the engineering and the control systems that Nitro is often installing. We really like the business. As I said, it should be a 20%+ EBITDA margin business that's very sticky, and assuming that we don't screw it up, it should be a great acquisition.
Can you go back a slide?
Sure. Which one? Sure.
Can you just generally talk about capital allocation? How you think about it? What are your options and your buckets and what?
Yeah, so I mean, obviously there's a lot of, we have Board members that kind of have different philosophies on it. One thing our Board believes is if the company makes money, it should pay its shareholders dividend. It's kind of old school, and sometimes we have shareholders that are like, well, it's not tax efficient, but that's the Board's prerogative of what they believe in. Obviously, the best use of capital is to grow the business. You know, if you double the size of your business and we need that working capital, that's the best thing to do, and that's what we'll continue to focus on. Obviously, if we felt like that we weren't capable of growing the business, we'd focus on cutting costs and trying to return more cash to shareholders.
You know, when our stock gets beat up, we've been kind of strategic buyers of it and get good opportunities, and it seems like that's pretty successful if you can. I'd much rather buy my own business at under five times EBITDA than buy somebody else's that I have to integrate and figure out. So if I can, you know, I know my business better. If I can buy it cheaper than I can buy someone else, I'd rather buy my own stock.
I apologize. I may have missed it.
That was okay.
All the companies that you're showing, like, was it all through acquisition? I think some of you mentioned you started off with that business, right? Like, what was the last acquisition that you made?
Rigney was the last acquisition we made. That was a company that we had dealt with, worked for, knew them very well. Most of it's been, most of our growth has been through organic growth. A lot of the acquisitions we made have been small, kind of fit into a certain bucket of, okay, we want to, like the Tri-State. We weren't able to get that, the paving work from American Water because, you know, paving generally has less skilled workers than pipelining. As we're in more rural areas, we do the pipelining, but like in the kind of Lexington to Huntington, Charleston corridor, American Water wanted to have Tri-State do all the paving. All they do is paving. They just go behind the pipeline contractors and they have a, you know, that's the only person they use.
They have a, you know, a blanket agreement with them. What we found is, hey, we want to control the paving also. Obviously, you have the relationship with the customer, you control the paving, you control the pipelining, and you can generally make better margins. The paving system was non-union also, so their wage rates were lower than what we could do at CJ Hughes.
How do you source your acquisitions? Do you go through makers or?
If we can't beat them in the marketplace, we buy them. I mean, we know the people that, obviously we'd much rather just beat them, right, and win. It's like, okay, you know, those guys are awful good. If we have an opportunity to have them play on our team, it's kind of like a, you know, Lakers getting, they get a chance to get Dončić, they get him, right? Like you get a chance to get a good player, you want to get him on your team, have him wear your jersey.
Just another thought on the transmission business that you talked about. I think one of the reasons why that's declined a bit was your guys' discipline on margin. Are you seeing margin opportunities in jobs you're bidding at that are hitting the hurdle rates different? And if you are, you know, why? What's the changing dynamic there? Or maybe just your experience.
Yeah, so I would say the gas transmission business kind of, you go into kind of 2017, 2018, when gas prices got so low, natural gas prices, our customers started pulling back, their capital budgets went down. I mean, it really started then. I mean, we went in, going into COVID, it never really came back. There was obviously a lot of political, it wasn't very favorable. The gas business wasn't seen favorably during the last administration. You know, you'd pick up and read about California getting rid of gas appliances. I think that the, it was kind of a bunker mentality in that industry for several years. I would say that, you know, we've had people exit the business.
Over the last couple of years also, as we started to go out there and bid, it almost seems like there was somebody in the business that was very aggressive price-wise and just like, hey, as I said, there's risk in every one of these jobs, especially on gas transmission. You say, okay, is this, are we getting paid for this risk? What we just found was on a lot of the medium to large-sized projects that had significant risk, we were not getting paid for the risk. We had a job with Louisville that I think we were low on, went back and forth with them for a month, and basically we were dealing with what they call rock pricing.
If we get into rock, what we get paid, $60 million work that we kind of had budgeted in for the year and we thought we were going to get, but we didn't get. Now, it was never in our backlog, but that kind of, we kind of went through that process quite a few times. Somebody else was willing to take that risk, take more risk on the project than we were. You got to kind of price that, we try to have to price that risk. What we're seeing is if there's not very many projects, somebody will take that to keep their guys working or whatever. You generally will find that in that type of environment, there's somebody that'll undercut price-wise. We're seeing this year, we haven't seen that this year. It seems like the market's better.
are more projects of good size. I think this year, obviously we have to win the bids and then get the job done and do a good job on them. It does seem like there is more opportunity in that area than any of these conferences that I have been to over the last year and a half.
If you believe what you read, all these data centers are going to be fueled by natural gas. Is that the kind of infrastructure you put in, like putting the transmission lines into these data centers?
Yes, that's what we would do.
Are you anticipating huge business coming from that?
We think there's going to be more demand for the natural gas and yeah, I mean, we think that there's going to be something in that area and that there's going to be more demand and obviously better pricing. Any more questions?
Longer term, five-year outlook, what does this company look like?
I think we'll be well north of $500 million and over $500 million in revenue, over 10% EBITDA margins and $31 a share.
You're being more specific.
Huh?
How many shares out there?
$16 million. $16.7 million.
How much of your growth do you expect to be organic versus organic?
I think we will grow our core businesses double digits, low double digits. If we have the right acquisition opportunities, we can grow faster than that. If we do not have the right ones, we will go out there and win in the marketplace.
Have you been approached by the bigger EMC firms to be acquired?
No, I was approached by a lot of these people that wanted to take the company private back before we were on Nasdaq. Stock was really low, and the Board really was not interested. They felt like we went years the stock was one and two dollars and the insiders were buying shares back in the market all the time. It's like, that's, we think we could close the company for four or five bucks. You know, during that time it was, we're not going to sell the company for four or five dollars. Some of us said, you guys should just take it private yourselves during that time. The Board was never going to do it below five dollars because that's what the IPO or SPAC was done in 2008. They did not feel like that was fair to our shareholders.
That was sort of the philosophy then. Yes, sir.
What is the solution to the shortage of skilled and trained labor? Their average ages, mid-forties now, it's got to be mid-fifties ten years from now, right?
Yeah. No, I mean, it's probably our biggest challenge. I do think that there is probably more emphasis now on trades programs and you see more people, I think, that went into construction management. Like one of my sons is in construction management in college. Like I think that I think there's probably, people see like, okay, these are great jobs and it's going to be better than, you know, working at a bank or something more interesting. I do think it's changed, the mentality around it's changing. It's just going to take a long time before you have enough people that do this in these jobs and see the quality and have a good life experience and people see people doing it to catch up.
Does it make sense for your business to acquire small companies just to acquire the labor and skill to blend into your overall organization?
That's been, I mean, frankly, part of the strategy of, okay, these guys, I mean, part of when you buy it is, hey, they've got good crews. I mean, we bought Tribute. We had a lot of guys that went in this sector, you know, kind of people bounce around from different companies over the years. Sometimes they leave for, you know, good reasons. They're getting a leadership opportunity we don't have at the time. We buy companies. That's frankly one of the things we look at. Hey, that guy was great here. He used to work here. His brother-in-law brought in those crews, came over and worked for them. I mean, that's part of the strategy.
Kelly, I'll ask you one last one. Just on the mix of the business, what's your average job? I know there's a lot of variability to it, but do you measure that by metric or is that just not even really a KPI? You know, just when I think about that backlog, I think about that revenue. How many jobs are in that?
I mean, if you look at it in the water and gas distribution, those contracts are mostly like what they call blanket. The average job would have all kinds of little things in it. Like today you're going to be doing, you know, four inches of replacement for American Water. Tomorrow you're going to work at a pump station. The day after you're going to build something new and dig it out and have to have flaggers. You know, the tickets on that are relatively small per week. Like every day they're basically getting invoiced. It is very small tickets. The gas transmission business, obviously $10 million-$15 million-$20 million. They can be big.
The public water, public water and wastewater systems, those, we generally find our sweet spot in kind of over $5 million because what you'll find is when you get like $1 million, $2 million, there's usually very small mom-and-pop contractors that are very competitive. If they really want that work, like they'll get it. The guy that owns the company, you know, he'll be out there doing it himself in order to kind of keep things going. We've generally found the most success in that area, kind of over $5 million, where they might not have the bonding capacity. You're welcome.