Our next presenting company is Energy Services of America, trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol ESOA. ESOA is a client of Three Part Advisors, have been for about a little bit over two years, I think. Since that time, the stock has gone from roughly $6, and I think yesterday it closed around $15 and change. It's been a nice run. The company's done a lot of good things in the market, focusing on wastewater, gas transmission, heating, vent and HVAC work through their Nitro subsidiary. If anyone is interested in learning more about the company after the presentation, please feel free to reach out to us. Here today to present on behalf of the company is Doug Reynolds, the CEO, and with him, Charles Crimmel, company CFO. Doug?
Great. Thanks, John. Appreciate that introduction. Great to be here again. This is our third time here in New York for the Three Part conference. I'm not sure if you saw any of our other presentations, but been an exciting two years. The last two years, as John told you, have had some good stock performance, and the stock performance has been driven by our execution. Real quick, we're about a $400 million last year company. We're on a run rate to do considerably better this year. Since we were here last year, we've had probably the best year in the history of the company, again, both from a revenue, EBITDA, stock market performance. Last year, we joined the Russell 2000, and we have 1,400 employees based in Huntington, West Virginia.
When I go through this, I'll be talking about the three main business models that we divide our business into, and we call that water and natural gas distribution. That's utility-based, both for the private and public water, wastewater systems across mostly Appalachia. The natural gas transmission's big pipeline. Work for the largest players, Marathon, NiSource, TransCanada, those type of deals. We have our electrical, mechanical, our services business, industrial services business. I'll go to that one first, kind of give you an idea of who our main customers are. In that business, we work a lot for Toyota, Dow, Ford. We worked on a plant that we helped build a couple years ago. Nucor's one of our biggest customers. Nucor's building a plant in Mason County, West Virginia, right up the road from us.
I think that plant's supposed to open at the end of the year. I believe it's going to be Nucor's largest production facility. Just going back, also in the last year, we did a $20 million capital raise. Lake Street and Roth did that. If we look at it, strong. It put our balance sheet, really strengthened it up, so we had the capital to grow our business over the next several years. Real quick, I always like to look at the revenue by end market. You look at the growth. The waters went from $20 million- $150 million, wastewater and gas distribution, which, as I said, regulated utilities. It's more like water in terms of the labor force and the contract structure. Most of that's three-year type business, three-year contracts, unit-based, and blanket-type pricing.
Again, very predictable, very stable, mostly small singles and dollar amounts. The gas transmission business, again, the blue, if you look on that, if you would taken that back to, say, 2016, that would've been like $100 million. That business has really been crappy for a long time. I was going to these conferences even last year saying, "Man, it's been a terrible run in that business." Our customers, going back to 2016, 2017, price of natural gas got down below $2. Capital budgets got cut. The Biden administration came in, you had all the litigation around the Mountain Valley Pipeline. In our area of the world, our customer base really had six, seven years of really having their heads down, just trying to get by, trying not to get on the wrong side of the administration.
What we've really seen in that business, it appears to me that we're at the early signs of a turn up in that business. When I'm saying I'm excited, I think we got a cyclical upturn in that business that, frankly, even our good growth in the past hasn't really put that into our stock price. If that happens, I think you'll see considerable growth over the next several years, and across our whole platform. I think that could drive some real incremental change in the next couple years. Again, look at it, the results are driven by the backlog. We have record backlog for this time, $325 million. Feel like that most of our businesses are pretty booked up for this year. Obviously we got the work now, got it under contract. We just got to get out there and make it happen.
One thing I've talked about in several of these meetings is improving our EBITDA and EBITDA margins. Over the long term, if you say, "Okay, guys, Doug, you guys are trading at a discount to some of your bigger peers who are the Quantas of the world, the Primorises. What do you need to do to get to trade like they do?" Well, one thing they do is they pretty consistently, our peers, get into that 10%+ EBITDA margins. That's really what we're shooting for. I've said on several things, as we grow the business and as we can re-rationalize some of our costs, we should be able to get there the next couple years. That's one of my goals by next September is to get to 10% EBITDA margins. Again, we've done acquisitions in nearly every year. Most of them small type tuck-in acquisitions.
They've all been businesses that we're pretty familiar with, people we compete with or use as a vendor. If you look at our acquisition we did last year on Rigney, it was the controls in the HVAC business. It was only a $4 million company. Did about $1 million of EBITDA. Again, we'd worked for them, knew them. If this business would've been in that sector, it would've been of any size or scale, instead of being a 4 or 4.5 times EBITDA multiple, that business would've clearly been a double-digit 10 or 12 times EBITDA business to purchase it. We feel like got a good deal and have a good place for the Rigney family to work, pretty excited. One thing, unlike a lot of small caps, we pay a dividend.
We have a board of directors that feels like that when we make money, we pay a dividend. Every year we've made money, we've paid a dividend over the last seven, eight years. Just recently, we used to pay an annual dividend of $0.05, went to $0.06, and last year, we went to a quarterly dividend of $0.03, so we doubled the dividend. We're pretty good capital allocators. We have a share buyback program in place. We like to buy businesses in kind of that 5x EBITDA multiple. The only thing better than buying other businesses that we have to integrate is buying ourself when we're below 5x where we see our multiple being over the next year or so. Over the last several years, when the stocks got beat up, we've been in there buying it.
Funny story is in December, market kind of took a downturn, and our stock was trading below $8 a share, and we were buying shares back. We bought 100,000 shares in December. We did our offering at $11.50 a few months later when the opportunity presented itself. I think we're pretty strategic in how we do our buyback program. In these different businesses, one thing we talk about is the service area. If you look at that shows you where we work, and the distribution business is a little smaller, probably more like Louisville, east to West Virginia, and into D.C. I'll skip the individual business lines, maybe you have any questions. Charlie, do you want to go over the balance sheet and the income statement?
Yeah. On our income statement, we finished the six months. We're a September 30 filer. We just had our six-month filing for the six months ended March 31st. We filed that in early May. Finished that six-month period with $207 million in revenue. Actually, we're really happy with how we started the fiscal year. We traditionally do not make money in the months of January through March. If you can imagine trying to work in the winter months, working outside, working in plants, trying to dig, put pipe in the ground, it's just not really cost-effective to work during those months. I think it's pretty impressive that we did finish the three months ended March on the positive side of things. I think it really is going to be a really good springboard for us to finish out this fiscal year.
As Doug had mentioned, we got a backlog of $325 million. Traditionally, what we see is about 75% of that backlog getting burned off in the next 12 months, and the remaining 12% kind of following in months 13 through 24. Our trailing 12 on our revenue is right around $441 million. Trailing 12 on our EBITDA is about $31 million. Right now, we feel good with what we've got booked for the remaining year. We think we're going to finish this fiscal year strong. Whereas last year was a record year on revenue, I think we're going to better that, and I think the profitability is definitely going to be coming back. We had a rough year last year, partially due to kind of an extraordinary type of winter weather. Went from rain to freezing to snow, back to rain and freezing. Lost a lot of workdays.
Coming out of the winter, our customers delayed their spending last year. Where traditionally we would start to see projects starting in maybe mid-March, last year, we did not see them starting until maybe mid-June. We feel like we've got about a three-month jump on this fiscal year, where we started work in our more traditional manner. We really think we're going to improve upon where we finished last year. Balance sheet. I got to apologize, even I'm having trouble seeing this, but we feel like we've got a really strong balance sheet. As Doug mentioned, we did a capital raise back in February. Before commissions and everything, and with the over allotment, we brought in $23 million. I think we netted somewhere like $21.5 million. With that, we were able to go in and we paid off our line of credit.
We paid off our financing on three of the acquisitions that we've done in the past and put down a nice chunk towards our last bigger acquisition. We feel like we've really strengthened our balance sheet, even to the point that we met with our bonding company last month, and they raised our bonding program from $250 million up to $400 million program. We are really happy with where we are on our balance sheet right now. As far as our line of credit for operating capital, we have a $30 million operating capital with our primary lender. It's based off of eligible receivables and such. Let's just say here we've got, I believe that looks like $62 million, $63 million in accounts receivable here.
They'll go through, take out all the ineligibles, which is going to be your bonded receivables, your retention, anything over 90 days, anything that's crossed aged, and do an eligible receivable calculation on that. Take 70% of that number and gets us to what we can have for our operating line of credit. As mentioned, we did pay that down. At the end of March, we had that down to zero. We feel like we have enough capital right now to really be able to hit this fiscal year hard. The remaining parts of our debts then are right now mostly for equipment. We've really got two things that make this company run. One of them is our people, and the other one is our equipment. We traditionally spend about $8 million-$10 million a year on our equipment.
We're big buyers of pickup trucks, skid steers, mini excavators, most of our stuff to focus in on our water gas distribution work. On our transmission side, we generally try to rent there and buy when it's advantageous to us. We've got good relationships with our equipment suppliers. If we got a piece of equipment on rent for, let's just say, nine months, and we are going to find out we're going to need it for another year, that big yellow iron, what we can do then is go to our equipment supplier, say, "Hey, we want to buy this." What they'll do is they'll go back, and they will give us credit off of the price for all the rent that we had paid for that.
Again, our CapEx is generally around $8 million- $10 million, but then when we do buy the bigger stuff when we need it. You see here, and it's probably hard to read, but our debt schedule. We went from having at September 30, 2025, we had $72 million in debt, and by the end of March, we had brought that down to $35 million in debt. You see here the big thing that we did then was the top line item, roughly about $25 million on the line of credit, and we completely paid that off. Most of the remaining debt then is, as I mentioned, is on equipment. We still have about $8 million of debt related to our Tribute acquisition, which was a wastewater water contractor over just across the river from us in Ohio.
One of the leading wastewater contractors in the area, and then we bought them in December 2024. We also have on our balance sheet here, we get asked a lot about, there's a PPP loan there. Obviously, with the lookback period, it was forgiven, but out of abundance and caution due to getting a letter from the SBA back in the spring of 2023, we did put that loan back on our books, and it's been sitting there. We're expecting then that the six-year lookback period then on the forgiveness decision would expire in June 2027. You see here we got historical shareholder value is kind of a look back here and, if you would've bought the shares here, let's just say over the five and three years of 2021.
We feel like we have really done a good job of increasing the shareholder value over the past three to five years. Of course, it's going to be our main focus is to work to grow this company and to grow the shareholder value. You can see here some of these other schedules. Book value March 2026, first time that we've hit over $4. Again, here you can see on this that we brought down our debt net of cash. We feel like we got a lot of good things going right now. We got a lot of tailwinds in the industry. Really think that on the industrial side, that there's going to be a lot of good things coming. Data centers are one thing that we get asked about all the time. We really haven't dabbled our toes too much into data centers.
We do have about $7 million worth of work right now on the fire protection side on a data center project. We're hearing more and more about data centers being put in, probably maybe three to four within 45 minutes from our facilities in Huntington, West Virginia. Feel like we're going to have a lot of opportunities there. Gas transmission side, we really feel like we're on an upcycle on that. As Doug mentioned, it's been a tough road to hoe, probably since 2016 on that. I feel really strong on gas transmission that we're going to be having some really good opportunities there. Just to go back here a little bit. Geographical area, I'm not sure maybe you guys saw this or not, but where we work pretty much go anywhere on the East Coast, particularly if our customers needed us to go somewhere.
Some of these locations, such as going down into North Carolina, going down to Alabama, going to Michigan, is because we have long-term customers that when they need our services in one of their plants, maybe we work for Toyota traditionally out of the Buffalo, West Virginia plant, but they may say that, "We've got a project in Liberty, North Carolina, and we want you guys to go down there." We will go down to North Carolina for Toyota, we'll go down to Alabama for Toyota. Our geographic region is primarily based around the Mid-Atlantic, but we're very strategic about when we branch out further than that. We're not going out there chasing work when we expand our geography. It's because our customers trust us and want us to go there and do that project for them.
I know we've thrown out some terms here, transmission and distribution, and kind of just wanted to show you all some of the pictures here. This right here, this is a transmission job that you will probably never see in real life. This is a job where the geography, the topography is flat. There's no steep hills. The sky is blue, the grass is green, there's no mud. This is kind of an example of what a transmission project looks like. We're talking about big pipes, lots of miles that takes product over a, in some cases, 20, 30-mile stretch. When we talk about Nitro, our Nitro division is obviously industrial based. We provide electrical, mechanical, HVAC, fire protection, controls on HVAC.
Nitro is a company that went from about $50 million worth of strictly just maintenance work and being able to add a construction layer on top of that. Nitro is a company that has more than doubled, almost tripled its size within the past three years. As we mentioned there, Nitro is the ones that work for Toyota, work in the power, steel manufacturing, chemical. Really strong industrial base there. One thing I do want to point out is what we have in these companies is a lot of history. We go back to C.J. Hughes here. C.J. Hughes is celebrating their 80th year, started in 1946. Nitro was a company that started in 1959. SQP, on the other hand, this is our general contractor. This is fairly new to us.
What we found in the states we were working, primarily West Virginia, Kentucky, was that some of the attitudes were changing on some of the labor laws, some of the right to work laws. We found it necessary then to go ahead and start up our own general contractor, which would help us be able to compete more on commercial, not necessarily commercial, but more state-ran projects, and also be able to bring in our other companies in to help with that. Not only is SQP working as a general contractor, then Nitro could come in and do HVAC, electrical, fire protection. C.J. Hughes could come in and do civil and concrete work on that.
We always get asked, "Why do you do paving work?" The beautiful thing about this is that Tri-State Paving paves behind the utility pipeline companies. As the guys put the pipeline down in the ground, Tri-State Paving comes back behind them and does the restoration work, does the paving, does all the curbs, makes it look beautiful afterwards. What we typically hear is that most of the complaints come about after the project is done. People driving down the road and the road's bumpy, or they hit a pothole, or the manhole was a little bit lower than this. This really fits in well to what we're doing on our water distribution side, is just another sideline stream of revenue there to focus primarily on our private water work with American Water.
West Virginia Pipeline is a company that this was actually our first acquisition. We bought them back in December of 2020. It was two brothers ran the company. I believe maybe even their father had started the company back in 1963. They stayed on with us for a year after that. They both had a child in the company. After that, their children took over. Michael and Amy took over after that. It's a tremendous company. They work primarily for West Virginia American Water, for Mountaineer Gas, Cardinal Gas. They're more in what we talk about are distribution services. Whereas we talked about transmission being big pipe over big miles, this is the smaller pipe that is within a city. This is taking gas to people's houses, to businesses. That's what we call the distribution side of the business.
We're obviously just elated how West Virginia Pipeline has performed in the nearly five and a half years since we bought them. Ryan Construction Services is one that we're still working on, where we are a very active company in looking at acquisitions. This is probably one that's been a little more of a challenge than what we ever would've hoped for. We feel like we've got a lot of good things there. We've taken some of the things that they have done and that really did not work well in the sense of the scale of the business that they had. Moved some of their distribution services over to C.J. Hughes. Right now, Ryan is mostly focused in on what we call HDD drilling, horizontal directional drilling.
Basically taking, instead of let's say open cutting roads, what we'll do is we'll go in and we'll bore under roads, put water pipes in, put gas pipes in. Maybe it's going under a railroad track. We found that this really works well with our other businesses, so we can keep a lot of services in-house now. Instead of going out to another subcontractor to do the boring work, we can use Ryan to do boring work on a C.J. Hughes project, on a Tribute project, on a West Virginia Pipeline project. As I said, this has been an ongoing love affair with Ryan. We're bound and determined we're going to make it work. This has been a little bit more of a problem child than what we had hoped for. As I mentioned, Tribute was not our last acquisition, but our last bigger acquisition.
They focus more on wastewater and municipal jobs, whereas our C.J. Hughes and our West Virginia Pipeline focus more on the private side of the water and water distribution. We found that this Tribute acquisition filled a hole that we were missing there, more of a wastewater contractor that does more prevailing wage, Davis-Bacon, or municipal type of projects. With that, let's go ahead and open it up. Does anybody have any questions?
No questions? Well, appreciate you guys. Appreciate your time.