Everyone, thanks for joining. I'm Tim Mulrooney, the research analyst at William Blair that covers ICF. I'm required to inform you that for a complete list of research disclosures and conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. I've memorized that. I didn't look at my notes for that. I've done it a bunch of times this week. So ICF International, they're a provider of consulting and advisory services with a focus on providing technology, health, energy, and environmental solutions to governments and commercial clients. Over the last several quarters, we've seen organic growth accelerate, and I think it really is an interesting time to take a look at the company, as many of the underlying drivers behind that growth appear to be here to stay.
So to help us understand this growth trajectory, we're pleased to have with us this afternoon, CEO John Wasson and Executive Vice President of Energy, Environment and Infrastructure, Anne Choate. So this format's a presentation. We'll probably do maybe, like, 15-minute presentation, maybe 15 minutes of fireside, and then after that, we'll have a breakout in the Jenny A room we hope you all can join us for. But with that, we'll get started. Good afternoon, John and Anne.
All right, well, thank you, Tim. It's a pleasure to be here. Really pleased to participate. We really appreciate the 15 back-to-back meetings we have today. It's been, it's been really great, and it's great to see a good turnout, so we look forward to coming for many years to come. So as Tim said, I'll do a quick run-through on ICF and give you a brief overview, and then we will be happy to take questions and participate in the fireside chat. So just as a brief overview, ICF, we are a consulting and technology services firm. We do serve a balanced roster of commercial clients, primarily in the energy arena, with utilities, renewable developers, and other commercial energy clients. And then we also serve government clients with social and environmental missions.
About 75% of our revenues are with government clients, U.S. federal, state, and local, and international. 25% are with commercial clients. We are known for our deep domain expertise in the vertical markets. Those allow us to do front-end advisory services for clients, so strategy, program design, research, policy, and economic analysis. Then, over the last 20 years, we've also built out a set of implementation skills to help our clients implement the advice. To do that, we're talking about IT, we're talking about digital engagement, complex program management, and change management. Those tend to be larger, longer-term contracts, and so that's driven significant growth for us over the last 20 years, and I will get into that.
Given the mix of our business, both with government and implementation work for energy companies, we do benefit from significant visibility each year in terms of our backlog. We start each year with about 75% of our revenues in some form of backlog. We also benefit from the 25% that's commercial. That's higher-margin work, and so if that is growing more rapidly, we'll get a margin, the margin benefit of that, and that has been a track record for us over the years. I will say that we are a growth company. We've been publicly traded for about 17, 18 years on Nasdaq. Over that period, our revenue CAGR has been about 15%. About half of that's been organic, and about half of that has been inorganic.
We typically do 1 or 2 deals a year, so we've done, you know, 25 or 30 deals in the time we've been public. And I will say, we also do have very strong cash flow. That's a strong characteristic of the company. And so this slide just shows the three broad markets we serve. About 43% of our revenues are in energy, environment, infrastructure, and disaster recovery. That's a mix of both commercial and government work. 41% is in health and social programs. That's largely our federal business and involves public health-related work with CDC, the National Institutes of Health, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency, and we also run additional social programs in areas like housing and education and international development.
And then finally, we have about 16% of the business in security and other civilian, and commercial markets. Those are smaller end-use markets, Homeland Security, a small amount of work for the Department of Defense, and some of our international work. You can see on the right-hand side, you know, across these markets, as I said, we do both the advisory, front-end, consulting work, and then we help implement the advice through technology and analytics and program management. We've been growing both in the advisory business and the implementation business. I will say, over the last decade, the growth rate in the implementation business is much higher and has driven a lot of our growth, but we have grown, quite nicely, in both of those areas.
You can also see that, in these core areas, we do a significant amount of climate and energy efficiency, disaster recovery. We address other health and social and program issues. Actually, about 85% of our revenues are work on programs that, you know, directly create a positive impact, for society and for our clients. I talked about the growth, so this is just, you know, first, the five-year revenue CAGR, which you can see is, you know, high single digit on revenues and 11.7% on EPS. Over the last three years, we've had a significant focus on five key growth drivers in our business and have really honed in on those and then and been investing. And in doing that, that is accelerating our growth. Tim mentioned this.
Our three-year CAGR is 9.2% on revenue. We're up around 15.9% on EPS, and that really is because of the focus on our five key growth drivers, which I'll get into. So, here they are. These are the five broad catalysts for growth in our business. On the commercial side, we do significant work on energy efficiency and utility consulting, program management. A lot of this is around the clean energy transition, energy efficiency, and the move towards distributed energy resources. We also have one of the most significant climate change consulting practices in North America. We've been involved in that area for 40 years and do associated environment and infrastructure consulting. That's a significant growth driver for us.
We're a leader in designing and implementing disaster management programs for state and local clients, so responding to hurricanes, wildfires, floods, other types of natural disasters. The frequency and severity of those have been increasing over time. And then the last two areas are our key growth drivers in our U.S. federal markets. We do significant public health-related work, which I'll get into, and we're doing a significant amount of work to help the U.S. federal government modernize their backbone IT and digital transformation systems, and there's a lot of work to do there. Taken collectively in these five areas, we've been growing north of 10% organically over the last several years, and we believe, given the underlying trends, we can maintain that growth for the next several years as we look forward.
The underlying trends in these five growth areas are long-term trends. These will be growth markets for the next five to 10 years, and I'll talk about that in a moment. I do wanna say that, as I mentioned, we've really brought a focus in the company to these five growth drivers in the last several years. So this slide just, I think demonstrates the benefits and the outcomes of that focus. We are seeing higher win rates. We're achieving margin expansion, and we have a robust business development pipeline. So, you know, first, since 2020, when we really began focusing on these growth drivers, at that time, about 55% of our revenues were in these five key growth driver areas.
At the end of 2023, end of last year, we were up to 80%. So, you know, we've obviously enjoyed significant growth over the three-year period. In that time, our commercial energy contract wins have increased about 45%. We've seen very significant increase in our federal markets with our work for the Department of Health and Human Services. That's our largest client, about 26% of our revenues. We've doubled our revenues in that client set. And our adjusted EBITDA margins have expanded by about 140 basis points over the last three years. That's because, primarily in these five key growth drivers, the margins we get are at the high end of what we generally achieve in these markets.
So the mix of these growth drivers, growing as they are, has really helped expand our growth margin, gross margins and our EBITDA margins over the last several years. And again, I think that's a trend that we can continue as we look forward. Lastly, I just note the new business development pipeline; we're up at $9.7 billion. That's pretty much very close to a record for us in the last year. We've had terrific forward-looking metrics in terms of our book-to-bill ratio has been in the range of 1.15-1.3 for the last several years, which is, you know, quite strong and where we need it to be to deliver, you know, high single-digit organic growth. You can see, as I say, the pipeline's been very strong.
We've had very strong backlog, and so all the forward-looking metrics to drive the business are in a good place for us. I get asked a lot about, you know, why we win and what drives our ability to compete, and I think this slide just tries to hit the key points. You know, first, we are known for our deep domain expertise in our vertical markets. You know, we really do have very interdisciplinary, industry-leading capabilities around the science, the technology, the policy, human behavior, which really allow us to provide first-rate front-end advisory capabilities, you know, which really are the tip of the spear for much of our efforts.
We also, as I say, have a track record of taking that advisory work into doing the full-scale implementation, and implementing devices for our clients, so we can support them throughout their entire life cycle. And I mentioned the multidisciplinary expertise. We really are known for having very interdisciplinary staffs of which we can bring together to solve complex problems. You know, across the key issues we work on, we have engineers, we have scientists, we have policy and economics, business, you know, technologists, creatives. I like to say every ologist known to mankind: toxicologist, epidemiologist, psychologist. A real strength of the firm, bringing a multidisciplinary capabilities. All of our work is underpinned by strong technology and analytics. We're known for our analytical skills.
We have models, we have data sets, that, you know, that we own, that drive a lot of our work. And we have a strong track record of delivering results for our clients and, you know, many of our clients we've been working with for 30 or 40 years, and so we have tremendous institutional knowledge about those clients, and our turnover rates are very low. So we actually know more about the institutional history of many of our clients than they do because their staff turns over much more quickly, particularly on the government side. So if a government client's gonna tell us that, you know, they're gonna move on, they're also gonna lose a lot of institutional knowledge, which is a form of stickiness for us. And, you know, again, I think it's a strength of the firm.
So I just wanted to touch on each of the key growth drivers in a little more detail, and then I'll be happy to get into questions and talk about them further. But first, in terms of the energy efficiency, utility consulting, and decarbonization programs, so this is the 25% of our business that's commercial, where we're doing largely commercial energy work. And a couple points here. First is we're a market leader in designing and implementing energy efficiency programs for utilities around the country. These are long-term contracts that are mandated by PUC mandates, under which the Public Utility Commissions, I think about 35 states, have mandated a small tax on electricity delivery, and that funding is set aside to implement energy efficiency programs in these states.
When the PUC mandates that be done, typically, a utility will, will do the contracting, but they'll outsource it. So we're one of the leading providers of helping utilities implement these programs around the country, funded by this dedicated, essentially small tax on electricity delivery in these states. So we're seeing a lot of opportunity there. And then with the whole shift to distributed energy, we're seeing very significant opportunities in additional areas around electrification, flexible load management, distributed energy, grid resilience, and electrification. That's driving further growth to us, and I think is a trend that will drive growth for the next decade, if not longer. The majority of this work is long-term contracts, and again, that helps provide the visibility and the backlog for us.
And so you can see a few of the statistics here at the bottom of the screen, but this is an area of significant change and significant opportunity for us in the commercial energy space. I mentioned we have one of the largest full-service climate change consulting practices in the U.S. You know, we've been working on this issue for 40 years. We did some early work on sea level rise and climate, you know, in the early 1980s. And so we've been involved. We work at scale here. We have created the ICF Climate Center in the last three or four years, which presents our intellectual property and our viewpoints on this issue.
You know, right now, certainly there is unprecedented funding around climate change and clean energy, and part of that is certainly the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, which I'll get into. But we're seeing a quite significant, you know, opportunities here, both across the government and also in the private sector with the utility sector, from regulated utilities to renewable and wind developers, to other players in that market. One of our strengths, as I said, is we bring a very interdisciplinary approach here. So with this work, we're also able to connect dots. We can connect climate change to adjacent services, to decarbonization or the health impacts of climate or environmental justice, disaster mitigation. You know, and then there's also a lot of intersection here with infrastructure-related investments: energy, environment, water, transportation.
We can connect all those dots. So this is another area of significant long-term growth for us. Disaster management, we're a leader in designing and implementing disaster management programs. These are federally funded programs where the funding passes down to state and local governments to support disaster recovery efforts, which can include both housing disaster recovery efforts, that's funded through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and public infrastructure disaster recovery funded by FEMA, that flows down to state and local governments. We're currently running about 20 disaster recovery programs in the United States. We've run several of the largest disaster recovery programs in the history of the United States, so that's been a key business for us.
In the last five years, there's also been a real focus in Congress to, in addition to providing money to repair damage that occurs from, well, hurricanes, wildfires, floods, tornadoes, there's also a recent focus on providing funding to mitigate the impacts of, to try to mitigate the impacts from natural disasters in advance of them happening. This is about providing money to build sea walls, or to change drainage patterns, or to improve building materials to make them more resistant to these kinds of storms. We're seeing a lot of opportunity there, and what that's done is help smooth out the ups and downs of our disaster recovery.
Because it used to be episodic, based on when these events occurred, but now the mitigation funding is in advance, and it's a kinda long-term funding stream that's kinda helped levelize it, and so it's been a positive development for us over the years. And I mentioned that, you know, all those three growth drivers I just mentioned have and are benefiting significantly from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, both which are providing significant funding, obviously IIJA, to improve infrastructure around the country. We do a lot of the front-end environmental planning and permitting, and construction monitoring around those types of activities.
Then the IRA is the bill that the Biden administration has used to really try to put money behind addressing climate and the clean energy transition. We're seeing an enormous amount of opportunity with federal, state, and local, and utility, and power developer clients in response to the Inflation Reduction Act. And both of these will contribute to significant spending over the next 5-10 years. So these are long-term, additional tailwinds for us. The fourth area, and this is in U.S. federal government, is public health. About 28%, 26% of our revenues are in this area. You know, we do have a broad array of capabilities to address critical health issues across federal agencies.
We work on a broad array of issues, from opioid abuse, to obesity, to cancer, to HIV/AIDS, you know, anti-smoking, anti-vaping. And so, just a broad array of capabilities. We'll help them modernize their IT systems, we'll design and implement their public health campaigns, and we do research, we do training and technical assistance, we run centers to share information, websites to share information on leading approaches to combat diseases, and latest research on, for doctors and researchers on the treatment approaches. And so, this has been a strong growth market in the federal arena. Public health agencies are really viewed as bipartisan, and so they've enjoyed bipartisan support. The budgets have been strong here, you know, from Obama to Trump, to Biden.
And we've seen, you know, strong growth here over the last several years, and we think that will continue as we look forward. And then lastly, we have IT modernization, digital transformation. This is all about the federal government upgrading their backbone IT systems. Many federal agencies are running systems that are 40 years old. They're running on COBOL, Fortran, C++. They can't find people to maintain these. And so there's been a real effort and a significant spend over the last 10 years to begin the process of upgrading these systems. I'd say we're in the third or fourth inning of that. The federal government's spending $50 billion-$100 billion a year to upgrade these, and they're doing it in two ways.
One is about half the federal government's using what are known as the low-code, no-code platform, Salesforce, Appian, ServiceNow. To upgrade these, we have capabilities across all those. Or they're doing it on open source cloud native, and we have those capabilities. We've built those out over the last 5 years through a series of acquisitions on top of our legacy business. And so we're now seen as a leader in this, and I think given we're in the third or fourth inning, this is gonna be another 5- to 10-year effort. You can see the budgets for this have been up 8%- 12%, 14% . And so, tremendous opportunity. We're seeing, you know, north of 10 percent growth here, and, this is certainly a terrific opportunity for us.
So I do just wanna shift gears real quickly, just spend a moment on culture. We pay a lot of attention to culture. We manage it carefully. It is the glue that binds us. You know, we are a purpose-driven company. It's all about the impact for our people and for our clients. And so we have a culture that's highly aligned with that. We get the passion of our people for what they do, and we get their emotional energy. You know, we're a very collaborative bunch. As I said, we can bring very interdisciplinary capabilities to clients. And so, you know, that culture, I think, is a key aspect of why we succeed in the market. We have some of the lowest turnover rates in the industry. We can benchmark ourselves on that.
We are able to attract top talent, given the portfolio work and this culture. Our average officer, the top 400 or 500 people in the company, have been at the firm, I think it's 14 or 15 years on average. So, you know, culture does make a difference, and we do manage it carefully. So I'll just say a few words on financial performance, and then I'm gonna open it up for question. We talked about the CAGRs here. This just again shows the CAGR on revenue and EPS. We have guided this year to high single-digit revenue growth and double-digit EBITDA growth for 2024. I mentioned strong cash flow. We've had very strong cash flow. We turn 100% of our net payment into cash flow.
You know, and therefore, we, we have a strong balance sheet. This is the guidance. I said a few words about that. And again, I'll just. I'll end here, where I started with the summary. I mean, in terms of long-term value creation, I mean, I think we think we can capture and deliver a high single-digit organic growth as we look forward in these key growth markets. You know, we have. As we go on this journey, we are winning larger, longer-term contracts, particularly on the implementation side in technology and digital engagement. We have done strategic acquisitions over the years, and that's been a key part of our strategy. I think we've done that well. We are improving the margins. We're doing that through the mix.
We're also carefully managing our real estate footprint, even we're operating in a hybrid environment. Previous to the pandemic, we worked... Everybody was in the office, that they weren't traveling. And so that's providing, you know, avenues for additional margin improvement. I talked about the people and the culture. We're investing a lot in that. And, you know, it is about the positive impact, and, you know, that really is the heartbeat of ICF. And so with that, Tim, I think I'll stop and let you take questions or-
Yeah, that's great. Thanks so much, John. That was a great overview of the business. You know, one of the areas, I mean, you highlighted it, right? The five key growth areas, you put those together, growing 10%+. Combine that with the other 20% of the business, and you have high confidence around high single-digit growth for the business over the next several years. Just reiterating what you said. Is that correct?
Yeah, that's correct.
Okay. So with that in mind, you know, one of the key growth areas, as I think about it, is the commercial energy business, which is part of Anne's business that she runs. Anne, can you talk about what kind of growth that you're seeing there and what's helping drive that growth? Is it that you're adding more utility, you know, commercial clients, or are you growing revenue per client? Are you doing work for those folks today that's different than it was five years ago? Just curious, what's driving that strong growth in that market? Thank you.
Okay, so can I say all of the above? So we are definitely adding clients. We have, you know, so gaining market share in areas where we've been strong in the past. We've been successful doing that. We are also trying to extend the suite of services we provide to those clients. So, as you all are reading in the news, you know, there's a lot of pressure on utilities for a lot of different reasons. So affordability is one, decarbonization is another, resiliency to extreme weather is another, and an emphasis on reliability at sort of a level that's unprecedented.
And on top of that, you have this increase in demand, which we knew we'd have an increase in demand from the standpoint of electrification, but they also now, with the data centers and AI-related needs, they have that much more pressure on: How do we deliver, or how do we meet this increase in demand but also achieve all those other things I just said?
So, because they're our clients, and as I think John was mentioning, we've worked with many of them for a very long time, we have an opportunity to start with them sort of very far upstream in an advisory capacity, do analyses and support strategy, which they—we can then help them implement. And so we've done that successfully in other areas, for instance, the energy efficiency program design and delivery, but we also have done it in some new areas like electrification, working a lot with utilities on resiliency and resiliency planning, and flexible load management or, you know, demand response programs.
Thank you. Yeah, this issue of resiliency keeps coming up more and more. I don't know. I mean, it's hard to think about how they get paid for that, 'cause you can't necessarily... We were talking about this a little bit last night. They can't necessarily, you know, wrap that up into what they charge the customer, even though the customer needs more resiliency. It's hard to get paid for. So this is—they're coming to you to try to figure out solutions to what sounds like very complex issues, all while there's more demand, right? So it seems like... And you guys, would you say you have the largest practice in the United States? Or are there, are there other large competitors in this business?
I wouldn't say we have competition that does that full spectrum. And I didn't even mention the environmental work that we do. So we do environmental, like permitting, compliance work. If you're—for instance, some utilities are now undergrounding wires because of, you know, storms and things like that, and so wildfires in the west. And so the environmental that goes along with that, we also do that. So this ability to sort of work across that full continuum, that's special. I mean, I'm obviously biased, I've been here a long time, but I think it's special, and it seems to be working. And so, so I think there aren't any competitors that I can know—that I know of who do that full spectrum. We have different competition along each slice.
Gotcha. Maybe one for you, John. Something I didn't appreciate as well when I first picked up coverage last year, but as I've gotten to know the company a little bit better, is your positioning within the IT modernization space. 'Cause I asked myself, I know that there are large competitors in that space, and I'm thinking to myself: Why is ICF making bigger bets in a place where there are 800-pound gorillas? But what I really started to understand is that you actually do have a niche or an edge here. And it. I can't think of anyone better to explain it than you. So could you say it better than I could? Like, basically, what is your niche in this market? Why are you well-positioned here to continue to grow really strongly?
Okay, sure. So, you know, I think for us in IT modernization, you know, first, as we've talked about, we have a deep subject matter expertise on the advisory side. And so for, you know, so, for example, in public health, we have toxicologists and epidemiologists and public health experts and, you know, health informatics experts who are working side by side with clients in CDC and NIH and CMS. So government employees who are the programmatic people, who are the ones who are, you know, understanding what are the key questions or areas these agencies are trying to address in the future, today and in the future, and how are they going about doing that? What are the data sets? What is the information? How are they... You know, what's the analysis that needs to be done?
So we have that advisory and those relationships on the program side, let's say, at CDC. When they go to modernize their systems, typically, it's the CIO shop in these agencies that leads it. So they're very focused on: Well, what's the technology and what's the requirements? And, and we also have a top-notch IT modernization and digital engagement capability inside of ICF's. We have 2,000 technologists who are experts, who can work side by side with the CIO shop. And what's happening, we're finding, is historically, when the government modernized, the CIO shop would do it, and they'd do it in a vacuum. They wouldn't talk to the program side. They: "You know, I'm not going to talk to these people. I'm just going to go modernize. I'm going to..." You know.
But what's increasingly happening is the federal government has figured out, as the private sector, you know, when you're modernizing these systems in these agencies, you really want the program people at the table, and you want the technology people. And the program people should be there because they know the answers, the questions that are being asked, they really understand the data, and they know how the historical analysis and all the support for that. So they can bring that insight, and then the technologists can decide: Well, is it Appian? Is it Salesforce? What's the requirements? You know, how am I going to... And there's a lot of value. And so we have. So our technology capability is strong, but certainly, Accenture and Booz and Deloitte have terrific, you know...
But what they don't have is the depth and breadth of the advisory at that side of the table. And when we're there, we have demonstrated, and I think our clients are learning, there's a lot of value by connecting that wide space. You'll get better solutions, better systems, you'll use the data better, you'll get a better and more efficient spend. And so when clients have both sides of the house, we win more, our win rates are higher. So that's primarily that's. And then what we're also trying to do now is push our clients to get both sides of the house at the table as they're thinking about planning for their modernization, 'cause that plays to our strengths. That's not to say we've won work. We can win against Accenture on a pure technology shootout.
We just don't win as often, 'cause we don't have as much differentiation, you know. Then it comes down to relationships and your solution. But if you can get both sides of the house, we found an enormous leverage with that advisory.
You've seen a nice growth rate in your contract wins over the last several quarters. That's correct, right? All right. Well, I wish we could talk more, but time's up. I hope to see you all at the breakout. Thank you very much, John and Anne.