Good morning. Welcome to the CJS Securities 26th Annual New Ideas for New York Conference. I'm Chris Moore, Senior Analyst. Very pleased to have with us management from Limbach Holdings. With us today, Mike McCann, CEO; Jayme Brooks, CFO. Real quickly, Limbach is a building systems solution firm, partners with building owners and facility managers who have mission-critical mechanical, electrical, and plumbing infrastructure. The company strives to be an indispensable partner to its customers by providing services essential to the operation of the businesses. Operates in two segments: owner-direct relationships, ODR, and general contractor relationships. A quick reminder of the presentation format. I'll hand it off to management momentarily for a roughly 15-minute high-level overview. After that, it'll be more of a fireside chat format.
As a reminder, you can submit a question via the web link at any time, and we'll do our best to weave them into the chat. With that, Mike and Jayme, why don't you get us going?
Chris, thanks very much for having us. So Chris gave a pretty good setup to the company. We view ourselves as a building systems solutions firm. Very different than a contractor. We think about this from a proactive sales approach, really focusing on revitalizing and maintaining mission-critical facilities. We'll get into some more detail working in an existing facility environment, ultimately making sure that the infrastructure is working like it needs to make sure that the building can perform ultimately when it matters most. Just so Limbach at a glance, we have about 21 locations with 1,700 team members. One thing that I think is differentiated from us is we very much work in this interconnected group of people and offerings. So all of our locations are on a standard platform that goes from systems ERP all the way to kind of a unified go-to-market strategy as well too.
So we've done a lot of work to making sure that the interconnected pieces make sense. We partner in six vertical markets you can see in the middle: healthcare, industrial manufacturing, data center, life science, higher education, and cultural entertainment. And we want to work for not only within those verticals, but also for business owners that their infrastructure is critical to the operation of their facilities, and they can't do the work that they're supposed to do without making sure that the temperature, humidity, and air quality are where they need to be. And ultimately, when we talk to our people, our staff, and our customers, we want to make sure you are making a critical difference.
Sometimes the work that we're doing can't be seen by driving down the road, but we're making sure that critical infrastructure systems are up and running again so that the buildings can perform when they need to. So we view ourselves as a building systems solutions firm. Our job is to deliver, optimize, and maintain critical MEP infrastructure. We do that very much from a combination of custom-engineered solutions along with an ability to install it and have that field knowledge and know-how. We feel like that's a unique combination of those two different skills. We look at customers very much from a long-term perspective. We're talking to a customer. We're thinking about what their 20-30 year plan is. We're not overly focused on what that next opportunity is where we can maximize revenue. We want to view ourselves as a proactive, trusted advisor to long-term customers that have scale.
So the vertical markets, I touched upon this a little bit before. From a diversification perspective, we view that as diversified amongst our locations. We want to make sure that there's constant demand. Sometimes there'll be small periods of disruption, but they have to spend. And nationally, from a national growth opportunity, customers are focused on not only local, but they have an opportunity from a national perspective as well too. We're looking for durable demand, demand that can be repeated. And kind of the four aspects that we look at, we want to make sure that the infrastructure is absolutely critical and they can't afford downtime. A building can operate fine on a Saturday or Sunday without their system being up and running. That's not the type of environment that we want to work on.
We look at fast-paced execution, our ability to use our size to be quick and nimble to make decisions properly. I think we view very much our model as very much customer-focused. We want to make sure that we have budget agility working specifically with customers. Sometimes customers are in the quick-hitting, short-term emergency repair work. At the same time, we want to make sure that they're thinking about from a long-term perspective as well. Now, you think about a competitive landscape. In any particular building, we may run across one of these different competitors, and they are OEM firms, contractors, and the contractors, whether it's public company, PE platform, or local contractors, still some of the same elements, very much a decentralized model, property managers, and engineering, and ESCO-type companies, so if we're competing against an OEM, we really lean on the fact that we're system-agnostic.
We want to make sure we're thinking about long-term. We're not just focused on a product or a brand name. We're focused on making sure that we're providing the right long-term solutions. If it's a contractor, we lean into the fact that we're a one partner. We've done all this work to integrate our locations. We want to make sure this is interconnecting system and company that can service the need consistently across the portfolio. If it's a property manager, we're really focused on the fact that we are an expert in the MEP, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing. And lastly, it's a consulting firm. We talk to customers and say, "Listen, they may be able to engineer a great system, but we're able to give you a one-stop shop. We can perform the feasibility studies, the return on investment calculations. We can design it.
And ultimately, we can ensure that it gets installed properly and the outcomes are guaranteed." So it's an interesting competitive landscape across our industry. We think we have a unique set of offerings that's differentiated holistically, but also from an individual competitor landscape. So we have two different segments, as Chris alluded to. The owner-direct or owner ODR segment is really focused on existing buildings, working directly for the owner in a one-step model. We're looking for opportunities where we can develop long-term relationships. At the end of Q3, we kind of broke down the owner-direct revenue into two different sections. Approximately a third being quick-burning work, whether that's time and material maintenance or fixed-price projects less than $10,000. We also mentioned that two-thirds of our ODR revenue is project-based with an average project size of $245,000. Lots of small transactions.
GCR, on the other hand, it's a two-step model, tends to be a lot more cyclical, typically procured through a competitive bid environment. We tend to be very selective. The business has shifted very much to the maximized risk-adjusted return, which has traditionally been owner-direct for us. If we're going to do a general contractor project, we're very selective. Our average project through the first nine months was $2 million. You can see the projects are still very small from a general contractor perspective. So again, our focus is always working towards the owner, whether we do an acquisition or an organic location, but at the same time, we're still in this very much journey to shift as well too, and we drive value through that shift. Three-pillar approach from a strategic perspective: shift the revenue, expand margin through evolved offerings, and then scale through acquisitions.
The results, and I'll touch upon this in the next slide as well too. We've been really focused on quality over quantity of revenue. We want quality and quantity of gross profit purely just off revenue growth, and the numbers kind of speak for themselves over the last five or six years. Revenue, as I mentioned before, from 2020- 2024, relatively static, especially when you factor in inflation in there as well too. We are very much focused on this long-term journey from a high-quality perspective, and shifting that revenue has been the big focus, and then I think in years going forward, we're thinking about that mix kind of normalizing and then ultimately starting to see that top-line growth as well too, so from a customer penetration perspective, our objective, we think about customers two different ways.
We think about if we're talking to a local customer or we're talking to a national customer. If we're talking to a local customer, typically the relationships start when we're solving a complex problem for them. They've got a small problem typically involves some sort of engineered solution that they can't resolve, and they bring us in to solve that problem. That opens the door to an opportunity to work with this facility staff to repair and maintain from a minor upgrade perspective. We get a great customer. We add this on-site account manager. That on-site account manager is to get to know the facility and ultimately get to the point where we're gathering data that we can develop a capital program from that perspective.
So from a national perspective, we tend to start the relationship sometimes in the reverse, where we're focused on professional services first, staff augmentation, program management, engineering facility assessments. We gain competency and trust, and that leads to an opportunity for capital projects and programs or the portfolio. And that also leads to us connecting dots from a local perspective as well too. So we kind of sandwich that customer relationship from a local and a national perspective. As I pointed out before, that's why it's really important that we have the, for us to maximize that interconnected group of people and offerings, that we can ultimately produce and provide the customers a seamless experience regardless of what the headquarters or at the boiler room in a local facility. So from a customer perspective, in order to do that, on the evolved LMB offerings, that's our customer solution set.
That's how we can bundle offerings together to solve a particular issue. We think we have a kind of a unique set of customer offerings, especially if you think about even some of our competitive landscape. In the middle is a smattering of some of our customers. We like customers that have scale, multiple buildings, understand the long-term impact and value. They're looking to revitalize their infrastructure. They're looking for tailored solutions. They understand that we're there to be a long-term partner. So those types of customers with that big spend profile is really important. We still work with local facilities. It's just there's a greater chance for us to allocate capital properly for them off an 80 or 90 facility portfolio versus somebody who has two or three buildings. So as I mentioned before, we're always trying to connect the dots. This is just a couple of customers' examples.
One is in our industrial manufacturing vertical, and one is in our healthcare vertical. You can see how our footprint starts to overlay of what their footprint is. So if we're going to do an acquisition or we're thinking about salesperson allocation, we always look to see what our customer footprint looks like. Can we impact them? Where do we put our resources? There's still some geographic expansion that we want to complete. We also realize sometimes you don't have to physically be there to still service them as well too. So very focused on connecting dots with customers. And sometimes that leads us to acquisition opportunities as well too. So what do we do? What we perform really tends to cater based on the customer's needs, and there's really three categories. If we're working the OPEX spend, traditionally it's emergency repair work that needs to happen.
We try to build proactive maintenance programs in as well too. Capital projects a lot of times are an outcome of that operating expense where they realize they want to think about it from a long-term perspective. Whether it's a lot of our projects involve some sort of energy savings, could be a decarbonization type opportunity. It depends on the customer, but ultimately, we want to think about things from a long-term planning perspective, and then professional services really make that happen. We don't have a separate engineering company. Engineering's embedded in locations and embedded into the offerings, and that gives us a competitive advantage as well too. Moving on from an acquisition perspective, we've done really two different types of acquisitions. One has been tuck-ins, and one has been from a new geographic standpoint. We really look at a few different things when we're searching for these acquisitions.
Is it a fit? Are they interested in the long term? Do they have a particular niche? And who are their building customers? We follow a value creation process. The first year typically for these acquisitions comes down to our ability to put them on our systems or structure. That goes anywhere from benefits to the ERP system. Our goal is to think about this from the diligence perspective: how can we drive value? How can we take somebody that we purchased at five or six times Adjusted EBITDA and drive tremendous value? After a three or four-year period, look like we purchased them even less than we did. We have kind of this value creation process.
Ultimately, after a three or four-year period of time, we want them to be achieving close to our organic branch locations from a margin and quality perspective. Just to cover two acquisitions really quickly. The last acquisition we closed was with Pioneer Power Group on July 1st, our largest acquisition. We're really excited about that, but they really checked the boxes. And one thing I think about, they have a great brand. And we feel like that great brand, that great customer list gives us tremendous opportunity to increase margins and really kind of help transform that business. There's tons of opportunity from that perspective. Opens up a new geography, new capabilities, helps us in the industrial manufacturing for the market. The other one that we did previously on December 2nd of 2024 was also a geographic footprint expansion of Consolidated Mechanical out of Owensboro.
They do work in the Kentucky, Illinois, Michigan market, but it also helps us from industrial manufacturing as well too. So our whole goal has been that we generate cash, and that allows us to give options, and primary use of our capital has been from an M&A perspective, and I'm sure that will be going forward, so just to kind of wrap up, when I think about our model, I would think about it being a very differentiated model. Think about this in terms of we're in the early stages. We're making tremendous investments from a sales perspective, and there's lots of opportunity. Just to kind of touch upon a few of the opportunities that we have is we've invested about 40 salespeople the last three years. I think the success continued. Opportunity for them is tremendous. From an acquisition perspective, we still have a lot of white space.
I think it allows us to be selective. And because we're not in that mature state from a geographic or even a service and offering, there's tremendous opportunity. And I touched upon this as well before. We got a lot of opportunity to connect dots from a national customer perspective. So we still feel like our story is very much in the early innings, and there's tons of opportunity. Chris, turn it back over to you.
Terrific. Thank you, Mike. Very helpful. So as you talked about, the business model has evolved from GCR to ODR. Is this a trend in the overall market or buildings in general moving towards the ODR model?
Yeah, so it's an interesting space right now. I think the data center spend certainly has been a big push in the industry. And I think a lot of, I think a lot of people naturally have gone to that opportunity as well too. I think that's where we've seen there's large dollars, there's large projects to be had from that. And I think, quite frankly, it's pushed people more towards the traditional contractor model, which is where we came from, which is a heavy emphasis on new construction, general contractor work. And then there's still some traditional service and owner direct jobs, but if anything, it's pushed us more towards competitors towards that. When we're talking to business owners, they still allocate capital in both directions. So that necessarily hasn't changed.
It's our job to use this interconnected platform to become a trusted partner where they rely on us to make long-term business decisions. So our focus is working on the existing building environment and really trying to leverage our sales staff, leverage our team to get them to think long term.
Got it. How do you think about the cyclicality of the business? I would assume that the GCR portion, just because of the kind of nature of the big build, etc., is more cyclical than the ODR business sits there?
Yeah, I would say, especially over the long term. Sometimes you'll get pockets that there's just tremendous spend over a four or five-year period of time, and I've seen that in different cycles, but I think we've seen with the owner direct work, it's tougher to enter, but it's also tougher to exit as well too, and it just tends to take time. These relationships build on each other year over year. With construction, yes, you can pick up a, you can pick up a bunch of work, and as long as it's not, as long as you don't enter a period of cyclical, it may be easier to sell, but from a long-term perspective, the reason we've gone to the owner direct model is we're thinking we want to create these 20, 30-year relationships.
We appreciate the fact that it's tough to get into these customers because we've realized that traditionally they tend to expand year over year and they start to trust you with more dollars and they view you more as a partner.
Got it. That makes perfect sense. The six verticals, it looks like healthcare and industrial manufacturing are the two with the most penetration so far. Any specific reason behind that?
Yeah. And from a national approach, we're thinking about healthcare, industrial manufacturing, and data centers. That's where we feel like we've got not only local and national. So there's a couple of things that we look for kind of from a focus perspective. We want to find in critical environments that can't afford deviations in temperature, humidity, and a lot of times air quality as well too. So the reason that we focus on healthcare, quite frankly, is we want to take advantage of this common platform, and every one of our locations has healthcare. So that to me was the easiest one for us. We've got a lot of institutional knowledge from a healthcare perspective. We can solve their technical issues. We can look at it locally. We can look at it nationally.
And I think we've seen enough success there, not only to try to, we think we see there's tremendous opportunity, but we also think we can expand that model to some of the other verticals as well too. But I think the biggest thing from a healthcare perspective is that's just available in every market, and it's easy to connect dots.
Got it. And the data center side, that's less new build. Is that fair?
Our focus is really about the existing building environment. Now, as you know, most of the spend has been pushed towards new build. I think over a period of time, that spend will level set. As people are thinking about efficiency of space and energy and power, I think the large players are going to continue to look from an efficiency perspective. So we see it as an opportunity in the next few years to position ourselves. But right now, for us, for that space, it's specialty work or it's day two efficiency work that we look for. Not taking on huge contracts. That's not the position we want to be in.
Got it. Got it. All right. You walk through the competitive dynamics a little bit in the opening remarks, but specifically on the ODR side, just how do you see it? Is it getting more and more competitive, less competitive? As you talked about, it's very difficult to get in there. Once you get in there, it's sticky. Are you seeing more players there, or what are you seeing in that market versus maybe a couple of years ago?
Not more players. I don't think it's been tremendously different. And quite frankly, I don't know if it's been different the last five years since we've looked at it. There are always, it's traditionally, there's OEMs, there's engineers, or there's contractors, one of the three types. And when I think about our ability to pick up market share and gain traction, really it comes down to our ability to influence customers to make different decisions. We're more focused on that than anything. When we don't differentiate ourselves and use all the things that I talked about, then we can end up in a situation where it's more price-driven. So it really comes down to training our staff to be thinking about, we've got a kind of a unique set of customer offerings. And I kind of went through this before.
If it's an OEM, we lean into the fact that we're system agnostic and we're trying to solve their problems, not try to sell a specific product. But it really comes down to, it's much internal training, internal influence, and their ability to then pass that into packages and solutions back to the customer. That's the conversation we have as much as anything. We don't do our job properly. We're not perfect. We'll end up in a situation where there's still a competitive environment.
Got it. Got it. That makes sense. Maybe we could talk a little bit about geographic expansion. Operating 21 MSAs, I think you've identified 50 that would be attractive. How difficult is it to meaningfully penetrate a new MSA? Is it done primarily through M&A? Is there a crossover where Limbach is considered to be a true national provider in one vertical, but not others? Just trying to understand what it means to be kind of a true national provider.
Sure. So traditionally, and I think in the last, the four of the deals that we've done have been geographic expansion. So it's always quicker if we buy a company. We have done some greenfield startups. For us, we need the right person. We need to make sure it's the right environment. We got to make sure there's customers. So I would say the majority of them are going to come from M&A, but there may be an occasional one where the customer is really looking for us to be there combined with the right talent and team. It's interesting. We've learned a lot from healthcare, I would say, in the last couple of years, and if we're there geographically, it's actually an opportunity for an added benefit, but it doesn't always preclude us from being a provider. We've seen opportunities with national healthcare where we're in the headquarters.
They want to allocate capital to us. They're not overly focused if we're at that location or not. They think their view is, you need to just deliver what you're supposed to deliver. I don't care if you subcontract or partner or self-perform it. When we perform it, though, we get an opportunity for potentially more margin, or we have the potential to tap into to take advantage of the OPEX work that is a little bit tougher from a national perspective. So we want to be in these geographic locations, but we've learned some interesting things from healthcare that I think we can apply that allows us to be more of an enterprise player without having to automatically just be in the 50 states. It's almost like the national footprint or national approach from a customer perspective. I think we realize we can do that.
And then sometimes we can partner with these companies, and they become potential acquisition opportunities as well too. So it can work both ways. It's really about delivering consistency of services and offerings and solutions to those customers. And that comes with training. That's as important as having a pin in every single location. The pin just gives us access to additional services we can offer.
Got it. In conjunction with that, I mean, is there an optimal mix between ODR and GCR? Is 100% ODR the best, or does it help to have some GCR from a geographical standpoint or just from an overall kind of big picture standpoint?
We always desire to work for the owner as much as possible. And we want to be in a one-step model for a number of different reasons. I think we think about, we really talk about even in the deck that I went through, kind of the 80/20 mix. I think we really haven't gone beyond that in the short term. I think there's a couple of reasons. GCR still fuels our ability to shift to owner direct in those relationships. Sometimes customers may have, we have a great relationship, and they have a general contractor infrastructure job that makes sense for us to do. The other thing is, I think in the short term, as we continue to do geographic expansions, a lot of these contractors that we buy will have GCR work that we will work off over a period of time.
So I think leveling out to that 80/20, but long term, we'd like to work for the owner. So I think it's kind of like short term versus long term type thinking, but short term, that GCR is still, I think, going to be a part of our business.
Got it. Jumping around a little bit, but maybe we just talk numbers for a little understanding. You can't talk about Q4 or 2026, but so gross margins ODR in 2024 were 31.2%. It's about 1,000 basis points higher than GCR. The spread tightened to about 410 basis points year to date as ODR came down a little bit. GCR went up a little bit for the first nine months of fiscal 2025. Was that primarily a Pioneer acquisition impact? What else was happening there? And maybe we could talk about some of the key drivers that could get ODR margins back up to that historical range.
Yeah. The main driver is Pioneer Power. Their margins were significantly less. And it's interesting. We've had discussions with investors, great discussions, I would say, since we've purchased Pioneer Power. All the acquisitions that we've purchased, and I think this is typical of contractors, not necessarily all of them, but they tend to have less margins than we're going to have. Pioneer Power was a much bigger deal and ended up being more impactful to our overall revenue just due to the size of Pioneer Power. So that doesn't mean that the other deals didn't have margins that were less than ours they did. And we looked at that as opportunity. For us, when I think about Pioneer, and this is what happens a lot of times with these larger contractors, they're thinking about quantity of gross profit, cash flow. They're thinking about continuous work.
They're thinking, and Pioneer Power in this case was doing $120 million of revenue and $10 million in Adjusted EBITDA. They were focused on the quantity of dollars, not the quality. But that doesn't mean that the work they're doing is structurally different or not capable of margin expansion. So quite frankly, in this case, there's probably more opportunity here than there would be if we bought a company with margins more in line or close to in line with the margins that we have. So our goal over the next three- or four-year period of time is to get Pioneer Power's margins up to where the rest of the business is. And again, you think about it, we bought Pioneer Power for six times. If we can do that, there is tremendous, tremendous ability for this to be a super accretive deal.
I think in short term, it's just tough because it looks like that margin, obviously from a total gross profit quality perspective, is diluted for the rest of the business. And we get that, but we look at that as opportunity. So the other thing too that helps Pioneer in some sense, but also kind of led to maybe their complacency regarding the margin perspective is they have a great brand and great people, and the work just started to flow in. So there's no real reason to do anything different than what we've done before. They've been tremendously successful. At the same time, they haven't leveraged that brand like they should. So we're going to follow our value creation process. There's like five, six, eight steps that need to follow.
We always try to get the system integration done as soon as possible because when we get the system integration done, they're on the platform, and we can kind of see where the opportunities are. We're going to look for opportunities. I think even their staff has come to us looking for opportunities as well too. Eventually, we're going to have to add a proactive sales team as well too. So I think even kind of going forward as we look for future deals, Jayme and I are going to do the best that we can to kind of communicate where it is now, where the deal is now, how it folds into the company and the future opportunity. But we're excited about the outlook. And just because those margins are lower, quite frankly, there's more opportunity than if the margins were higher.
Got it. That makes sense. I mean, my understanding is a significant portion, 50% maybe better of their revenue is ODRs already. Are they doing similar type of ODR work to Limbach at this stage?
They are. I think the only difference is they're not selling it per se. They are kind of responding to calls. They're not proactively having meetings with customers and all the stuff that I talked about kind of instilling that sales team. That's still going to come, and naturally, that comes with the ability to say, "Hey, I'm going to show value, and that value needs to be priced accordingly," so they had such good relationships that they didn't even have to actively go visit the customers, and quite frankly, that may be kind of a head-scratcher or puzzling, but that speaks to how strong their brand was, but we've been out there kind of doing our initial visits with customers, some they haven't seen in years, so you can think about, there's so much opportunity from a care perspective.
Now, somebody asked me this earlier, which was a good question. Is it easier if you buy a company with, or is there more opportunities if you buy a company with GCR work, you're trying to transition, or is there a better opportunity if you have a company that's owner direct, but the margins aren't there? And I would tell you, I'd rather have the owner direct and have an ability to push the margins than to be general contractor with a higher margin profile because the owner direct, you've already got the customer. You've got the captive customer. And your job now is to kind of, quite frankly, prove the value that they've probably already been given in some instances.
That makes great sense, and time's going quick. We've got about two minutes. Got two final questions.
Sure.
First one is, are there still maybe one or two things that investors don't fully appreciate about the Limbach model? And the second is really just an opportunity to maybe give you a chance for closing remarks.
Yeah. So when I think opportunity, and I try to cover this at the end of the investor deck, we're still very much in the early innings from our story. There's tremendous opportunity with footprint, margins, acquisitions. We're still able to move fairly quickly. I think the end of the day too, our model is very differentiated to kind of the first point of your question. We're not running the traditional E&C model, and quite frankly, it's getting even more differentiated. So sometimes it's very difficult because there may not be a comp that somebody can look back on and say, "Okay, I understand where these three companies and I understand where Limbach is." So that sometimes is a challenge.
It's up to us and Jayme to communicate the best that we can and explain kind of how we are differentiated and how that's going to impact us and help us.
Got it. Very helpful. This is a great session, guys. I really appreciate your time, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the day. I think we are just about there. So thanks again, and I appreciate it.
Thank you, Chris. Thanks everyone.