Welcome to the 26th A nnual Needham Growth Conference. Our next presentation is going to be with the management of Montrose Environmental Group. We're gonna be doing a fireside chat. We're really pleased to have the company CEO, Vijay Manthripragada, and Allan Dicks, CFO. My name is Jim Ricchiuti. I'm the senior analyst in the equity research department, covering some of the industrial technologies companies. Vijay and Allan, welcome.
Thanks, Jim.
Thanks, Jim.
Okay. Thanks for spending the time with us. I think maybe a good place to start, and it could be either Allan or Vijay, for people who aren't as familiar with Montrose or who maybe need a refresher, you know, just give us a kind of a quick overview on the company.
Yeah. Yeah, we're... It's a, it's a vertically integrated environmental pure- play, that, is about 10 years old. The business, and what I mean by vertically integrated is it has elements of the industry that don't typically come together, and the thesis behind that is that we can solve some of these environmental challenges more effectively if we do it that way. So we have, advisory, consulting, permitting expertise, toxicology expertise, coupled with, physical labs and testing capabilities, coupled with technologies and patents that help remediate or treat select, removal of contaminants from air, water, or soil. So we work across media. We're also, almost exclusively focused on, but not completely, on the, on the private sector, which is also atypical.
We're dealing with the constituency that historically has not been served in the same way as it relates to environmental issues. It's been a fantastic run.
Maybe to again to level set for people, go through the business lines, the three main business lines in terms of the makeup of the revenues and just the margin profile, and then we'll dive into some of the discussion.
You wanna take it?
Sure, yeah, let me take that. So Assessment, Permitting and Response segment, which is the advisory, consulting, permitting, and our emergency response business, runs at around 20%-25% margins. So that's the first of our three segments. About a third of revenue moves around a little bit, depending on the size of some of the emergency responses that happen on an annual basis. But currently, about a third of the business, running within that range of margins, so they're at about maturity. It gets distorted a little bit by acquisitions, right? Typically, when we acquire companies, they tend to be mid-teens, and it takes us a few years to get those margins up to the 20%-25%.
Our measurement and analysis segment, which is our testing segment, that business should run around 20% margins, call it 18%-22%. It's a mature segment for us. We have a national footprint, and it runs at around 20%. It has done that consistently. About a third of the business today is the smallest underlying addressable market. So over time, we expect that will shrink as a percentage of revenue. And then finally, our remediation and reuse segment, which is the newest segment for us, little immature, lots of growth opportunity and trajectory. Margins are immature today. They run in a mid- to high- teens. That business should run operationally at 20%-25% margins.
Again, about a third of the business today should be the largest of the three segments over the next three to five years.
Maybe, also just with respect to either, you know, remind us, the guidance for revenues for this year or trailing twelve-month revenues, however you want to address it. Again, just to kind of level set before we get into this.
Sure, yeah. The midpoint of our guide is $615 million of revenue, and $78 million of EBITDA. And then next year, we're expecting kind of the high end of our normal organic growth rate, which has been 7%-9%. Historically, we expect we're gonna be on the high end of that.
Vijay, roughly how many people are at the company?
We're just shy of 4,000.
4,000. What I've been struck by over the years since I've known the company is the, you know, the level of expertise,
Yeah
... for these people. I mean, maybe just spend a moment on that.
I mean, these are, it's a very science-intensive business, so you know, lots of PhDs, folks with you know, advanced degrees. They make up the majority of our advisory business, which is to be expected. On the testing side, depending on the level, we have one of the largest field operations, so we're able to collect samples on-site for our clients. Within our labs, we have a similar number of biologists, chemists, and advanced degrees, and on the remediation side, it's primarily engineers. On the research and development part of our business, which mostly impacts the remediation part, the treatment technologies-
Mm-hmm.
That's almost exclusively PhDs.
Yeah, I want to spend some time on what you both think are some of the most compelling growth drivers in the various business lines, including PFAS, which I'm sure folks in the audience have been hearing about for a while, methane detection, greenhouse gas emissions measurement. But before we do, you know, one of the challenges for some people is the fact that the investors don't always understand fully where some of the R&D initiatives are going, and you know, the projects, the areas that you're working on, I think sometimes that's lost on investors. So spend a little time on that topic.
It's, it's fair. We haven't spent as much time talking about R&D publicly. And just to explain where the concepts come from, it's almost like our acquisitions, it's almost exclusively client requests or client feedback. And so our our research and development investments are, in order of investment, size, water. So water is where a lot of our original ECT2 technology, efforts, bore out. That's where a lot of our PFAS expertise kinda got commercialized. It is now expanded beyond that. So, to your point, Jim, you know, we've talked about the power of regenerable resins, and that's been a big part of our organic surge over the last couple of years.
But the number of patents and treatment options that we've now created beyond just resins is substantive, and so we're looking forward to talking about some of that. So that's one area, is water PFAS. The other is the extraction of other contaminants that are emerging on the water side. So metals, right, selenium, lithium, as we think about what's going on with manufacturing and mining, we've got some unique capabilities there. We've talked about destruction, and then we're also pretty heavily invested in real-time monitoring so that our clients can make decisions regarding levels of contamination or emissions in real time, which is not necessarily fully regulatorily driven yet, but it reduces cost and reduces liability.
So, that's where most of our investment's been, and then recently, at the request of some of our food and beverage clients, we've invested in and succeeded in a pilot related to carbon CO2 capture from industrial emissions processes. It's done with a much smaller footprint, without the typical historical ways of removing CO2, and the by-product of it is an input into their manufacturing process, so it's a closed-loop system, and at the appropriate time, we're looking forward to sharing some of that.
Okay, so this is an ongoing pilot that just-
It closed, and it succeeded.
We'll be hearing more about it?
Yes.
It's one, Jim, it's one of the advantages we have. Because 90% of our revenue comes from the private sector, we're solving real-world problems, right? They're coming to us with real-world problems. So our ability to commercialize these R&D efforts is significant. We can deploy them quickly across our 6,000.
Okay, well, let's start with the PFAS topic. It, it's been consistently in the news. We're starting to see get more clarity on the regulatory front, including you may wanna talk a little bit about the final rule that's come out of the EPA, under the Toxic Substances Control Act. There's more, I think, a better understanding of where the regulatory initiatives are going, but maybe start on that.
Yeah, it's a, it's a pretty fluid and evolving landscape, so there's kind of four major buckets of regulatory activity. We get this question a lot, Jim. There's four major buckets of regulatory activity. One is related to drinking water limits, which was proposed several quarters ago, was anticipated at the end of 2023, and got delayed. And the latest update from the EPA is expected at the end of Q1 of 2024, based on the number of comments that they received. The limits there were lower than many folks expected, and the number of compounds were more than many folks expected, and so as a result, that's created a lot of inbound interest because of our relative effectiveness with those types of standards. But until they're promulgated, there's a little bit of wait and see. That's drinking water.
The other big buckets, the RCRA regulations, so the management of solid or hazardous waste. There are some proposed rules there that obviously for many of our clients, especially in the private sector, means that if you're if you make transport or dispense of any of this, you have to be concerned about, you know, what the classification is and what the implications are. But that has yet to be fully promulgated, but also creates significant tailwinds if that happens, and that's expected soon. The third big bucket is the designation of some of these compounds as hazardous substances under the Superfund CERCLA regs. That creates this concept of responsible parties. If you ever touched it at any point in time, you may be responsible for cleaning it up.
Legacy contaminated sites may get opened up, new ones may get created. That is a whole new set of opportunities on the treatment side for us. And then the fourth, which did get promulgated, is under the TSCA regulations, the Toxic Release Inventory requirements. So if you manufacture, import, or export, you have to keep track of and report on it, and that has substantive implications for our consulting and for our testing.
If you kinda take that in aggregate, Jim, it's one of the reasons why we went from, call it, you know, single, low double-digit percent of our revenue three years ago to, you know, close to 20% of our revenue today, and we think that'll grow, just by virtue of how immense the potential regulatory implications are for many of our private sector clients.
The point being, it really cuts across the different businesses.
It does, yeah. Yeah.
... the, again, large opportunity, other, there's clearly-
And sorry, one other point, and I didn't articulate this well. This is not all on the come for us, right? So we see upside in the future, but we've already been harvesting the opportunity set. Oftentimes, it's the questions we get are presented as everyone else says this will be revenue in 2025 or 2026 or 2027.
Mm-hmm.
It's been in our revenue and growing since 2022 at scale.
The competitive landscape in that market, it's a topic that, and something a lot of folks are working on. What is the competitive landscape like?
Depends on the segment.
Yeah.
Right. So on the advisory side, well, I mean, everyone talks PFAS, right?
Right.
So on the advisory side, all of the environmental consultants and risk consultants are acutely aware of this. On the testing side, it's all the large testing instrumentation companies, right? The big European players and some of the larger private players in the United States. And on the treatment side, if it depends on the media, if it's soil, you run into the traditional ENCs.
Mm-hmm.
If it's water, you may run into the Suez, Veolias, right? Evoquas, so it just depends.
Usually where I'm going with this is, and we're gonna talk about cross-selling later on in the discussion, but this is an area, I think, of your business where, given your expertise, there is an opportunity for that. Isn't that fair to say?
It's huge, yeah. I mean, we've been told by several clients that we're the only company that they are aware of, and these are some of the, you know, call it Fortune 50 companies-
Mm-hmm
... that are able to kind of address the multifaceted nature of the challenge that they're having, right? What's my risk? What's my liability? What is the government gonna measure? How can they do it at these levels? Well, where am I vis-à-vis those levels, if they come to fruition? And then, what's the most cost-effective way of treating it? And so we, And it's not just PFAS. I mean, we've heard this on the methane side as well. We've heard this, you know, recently with the government's emphasis on environmental contamination in disadvantaged communities, right? The huge sums of money flowing through the IRA into various initiatives. We're one of the few that is able to measure contamination in real time, share that information with the community and the private sector, obviously, the impacted party.
Assess toxicology and the impact on the local community's health, and then potentially treat on the back end of that. And so we're excited. There's some large projects underway now that hopefully we can start to profile in the coming quarters.
And then, just going back to PFAS, and we'll go on to some other topics, but you mentioned about 20% of revenues, roughly. What's your— As you think about this market over the next couple of years, what could it grow at? And the follow-up to that is, is it skewed to, you know, regionally? And by that I mean, you know, more U.S. You've done projects in Europe.
Yeah.
How do you see... and Australia?
Yep. It's, I mean, look, it's, it looks like, our footprint, so the majority of the revenue is U.S.-based, but we do have, that's the part of our business that has globalized-
Mm-hmm
... because we've gotten pulled by clients into those geographies. Our European footprint is small, but growing. We'll likely go triple digits, right, 2023-2024, but off of a small base. Those pilots have succeeded. We're now starting to win the projects. Australia is kind of a steady eddy for us, and then the U.S. opportunity is where, we've been focused, and that's growing nicely. So you know, we think on a dollar basis that that'll be multiples of where it is today, as we look forward kind of in that five-year horizon.
Yeah, but the company public in 2021. You, I think management's been fairly consistent about suggesting to investors that they try to assess the business more on an annual-
Mm-hmm, right
... basis as opposed to quarterly. And there's some good reasons for that. But, and by the way, it's not inconsistent with other players in the market, right? I mean, there are other players that are also suggest that investors take that view of it. Tell us about why, number one, and then there is some seasonality, you know, particularly now with this latest acquisition that you've done, with the acquisition of Matrix. And Allan, maybe that's a question for you.
Yeah. Let's start with the seasonality. So you're right, we have a lot of field-based teams, particularly in the measurement and analysis segment. In the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, that can be challenging to get out to client sites. And we typically see Q1 as the slowest quarter, and therefore the lowest margins. And then Q4 is kind of the next lowest. And in the summer months, Q2, Q3, have historically been kind of the very large quarters. There are opportunities for us to expand into, you know, the Southern Hemisphere. That'll offset that a little bit, but you're right, Matrix was a large acquisition for us, about $80 million.
Canada
... in Canada. And so that'll exacerbate the issue in the short term. But nonetheless, on an annual basis, that's a beautiful business that we're very excited about. The quarterly comparisons, so you've got the seasonality challenge, but you've also got large projects that are not linear, right? So you deliver a large project at the end of Q1, or the first day of Q2, that revenue can move, and the margins move-
Mm-hmm
... pretty substantively, as a result. And then, our emergency response business, CTEH, when they respond to a very large event, like they did in 2023, the Norfolk Southern derailment was a massive project for them. That started in Q1. So even year-over-year, Q1 to Q1 is not necessarily a good comparison. So we will continue to emphasize the annual, that on an annual basis, it's just easier to compare year over year in terms of margin and revenue.
You touched on CTEH, and maybe it's a good opportunity to talk a little bit more about that.
Sorry, Jim.
Mm-hmm.
One other point I think that's worth noting is we don't just say that to say it. That's actually how we manage the business, right? So we manage the business on an annual basis in terms of planning, budgeting, and our teams understand kind of where the what it takes are. So the only reason we kind of guide that way is because that's candidly how we see it.
Yeah, fair enough. CTEH, you alluded to it, there's been a lot of noise in the overall numbers as a result of that. Where are we with respect to, you know, how we should be thinking about that business? There are always going to be you alluded to one incident that was a large contributor, but just in general terms.
I think thematically, and we've, and we've talked about this, and we, we're gonna start doing it. We need to separate—when we purchased the business, it was almost exclusively a response business, right? And so, a hurricane hit, various events related to climate, right? So whether it's increased frequency of hurricanes, floods, fires, or man-made issues related to aging infrastructure, all of that has caused the number of episodes that they've responded to over time to very consistently increase. And you can see that if you kind of chart the number of responses over the last 15-20 years. The response is separate from now, what we're seeing is substantive benefit from the Montrose cross-selling engine.
So the derailment that Allan referred to, a lot of that revenue was not legacy CTEH, it was actually the cross-selling benefit of Montrose, whether it was air testing, monitoring, consulting, or remediation. And so we need to... Jim, I think we will always have that part. It's a beautiful strategic element that makes it tougher in the public market realm. We need to separate pure response from the non-response side of the work, and so we've been kind of talking about it in aggregate. But we've been focused on, over the last couple of years, really growing that more classic Montrose-
Mm-hmm
... part of that arm. And so we'll separate that out, and I think that'll become a smaller and smaller piece of the pie. But does that answer your question-
Yeah
... in terms of how we think about CTEH?
Yeah.
So look, it's been a, it's been a little bit of a tale of two cities. We bought that business in 2020, right when we went public, and it was doing around $60-ish million. And then in 2021, 2022, they did over $200 million, right? Because of various responses that we talked about. And so we had to constantly explain how the core engine is growing double digits, but the, the noise on this response looks really wonky. And God, it's been a, it's been the bane of our existence in this environment, right? Because every time something like that happens, we'll come out in Q1, you guys will say, "Why does it look different?
Mm.
We'll say, "Well, this was response, and then, by the way, over the course of the year, here's all the upside that we're seeing." So that, I think that'll just be something we have to manage.
In addition to which, that period that you talked about, where we saw that spike in revenues-
Yep
... that revenue mix that you were getting was not always, you know, the normal CTEH profitability.
Right, right, right. Right. And so it just created, you know, for a small company-
Right
... that obviously creates a lot of noise. As the rest of the business grows, it becomes a smaller and smaller piece of it, and as we diversify that revenue stream. So we're, we're excited. I think we're through all of that.
Yeah.
You know, this year, as you'll see that in the guidance, I think, you know, we're, we're gonna strike a pretty optimistic tone, and we're-
And that actually segues into the next question. We're sitting here in mid-January, we're not looking for your guidance for 2024. But I think it might be helpful to talk about, you know, the kind of visibility you normally have as you're giving that guidance for the year.
You wanna take that, given-
Sure. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Again, you, you need to break it down by segment, very different drivers. The assessment, permitting, response, then you've got to separate CTEH out.
Mm-hmm.
Over the course of the year, they pretty consistently will respond to about 200 incidents, so there's kind of a baseline that we would expect from them. What we can't predict is these larger events, and so we typically we'll put some number in our guidance related to those, 'cause they tend to... They've certainly happened over the last several years. The rest of that business, there's probably a couple of quarters of visibility. Some of it is related to permitting that's ongoing, but not contractually recurring, but as long as facilities are operating, they need to have their annual permit renewed. So that business has been pretty steady, growing really nicely.
So again, not, not a full year of contracted backlog, but, but a high degree of, of visibility, and probability as we look at it. The measurement and analysis segment, again, not contractually recurring, but these compliance tests have to happen every quarter or every year. And so, there's a very high degree of confidence as we look into the amount of revenue from those customers that comes back. It's, it's in the, you know, the high 90%.
And that's the, that's the point, Allan. This is not necessarily a-
Yeah
... a recurring classic recurring
Yes
... revenue story-
Yes
... but there's a repeatability with it.
A highly probable repeatability.
Yeah, and we wanna be careful because Allan keeps saying it, we don't want to mislead folks. It's we operate under MSAs and we get the calls. And so we're, they are not, like, our clients are not contractually obligated to call us. But we've and we disclose this percentage, I think it's been, you know, the revenue from clients the prior year come back the next year is, like, over 95%. And it's not like we lose the incremental five, that's just movement in the nature of the project. We don't lose a lot of clients. I mean, short of a quality lapse or a safety lapse, which we have had some.
The number of clients, probably worth talking about that. Roughly 5,600? What is the count?
Yeah. Yeah, between 5,000 and 6,000. But it's, you know, it's... I would say there's about 1,000 of them that make up the majority of the revenue, especially on the testing side-
Mm-hmm.
where we have high velocity, high frequency tests. And that can occur for various constituencies. That counts as a separate client, but they're not necessarily core to our overall strategic thesis. So about one-2,000 of them would kind of fall into the, "These are the folks we're targeting, that we're studying, that we're working on cross-selling into, that we're expanding into." And then the others, we're servicing, but we're very conscious of our pricing leverage over them. Making sure we're kind of being, we're kind of maintaining quality. But if for whatever reason we don't get the price, or we don't get the the reciprocity, we're, it's not core to our thesis.
Let's spend a moment on cross-selling because it seems like it's a really good opportunity. I mean, even if it's 1,000 clients that are, you know, bread-and-butter clients for the company, there's a real opportunity to cross-sell.
Hmm.
Talk to us about, Vijay, how satisfied you are with the progress you're making in that area.
So we... That's been the emphasis of our sales and marketing investment that we made and really started in 2020, when we went public, and put our CRM in place in 2021. Almost all of the organic growth that we've seen over the last couple of years has been from cross-selling. We're not really acquiring new customers; we're largely selling into an existing customer base. And so we are early days in that, Jim. There's, as we look at kind of percentage of our clients spend on environmental, what percentage we're getting, it's still a tiny fraction. There's multiple levers. There's, the same service into multiple facilities, and then there's multiple services into the same facility, and those are multiplicative.
Mm-hmm.
It is early, early, early. I mean, there's only... You know, we disclose the number of clients using more than one service, but in reality, we look at clients using more than five, more than seven, more than eight services, right? By location.
Some metrics for us?
So we disclose, what is it, over 30?
18. It was 18% in 2021.
Right.
That grew to 35%. So these are number of customers taking more than one service.
35 in 2022?
35% revenue in 2022.
And then we'll disclose the 2023 number when we come out with our filing.
So going forward-
Sorry.
Yeah.
Real quick, Allan alluded to this. The reason we're bullish on our organic growth outlook for 2024 is precisely because of our visibility into not just what the aggregate annual book looks like, but also what we can see from the cross-selling opportunity. So we— It's not— We're not looking for new clients, right? We know where we're already going.
So internally, it sounds like this message has been delivered throughout the organization, and it's a focus.
It-
Obviously, with this kind of... Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, compensation's tied to it. Our sales and marketing engine is dedicated to it.
I want to talk about the M&A strategy, which has been core to the business. You've been very acquisitive over the history. I think the company's completed something where along the lines of 65 or so acqui-
Over seventy.
Seventy.
Yeah.
Okay, acquisitions. For the most part, these tend to be smaller deals. You have done a few larger ones, ECT2, dollar-wise, larger CTEH was certainly large and most recently, Matrix. First, you know, maybe let's talk about the smaller deals. What do you typically look at? What kind of multiples do you pay? And maybe talk to us about that, the integration process for these smaller deals.
So it's. You should have an integration, Allan.
Okay.
Our acquisitions are almost all like our R&D's, word of mouth, right?
Mm-hmm.
So either our customers, like in the case of CTEH, tell us that they think they would be a good fit, or our existing teams tell us that, you know, a company like ECT2 or my colleague that I worked with over years-
Mm-hmm.
-would like to join and they'd like to have a conversation. So we're not really. We don't use, typically, the banking community. These are internal word-of-mouth referrals, and as a result, they tend to be warm leads, and they tend to start with very constructive conversations. The mission matters a lot. We usually look for geographic expansion to serve the need of a specific client or clients. We will look for select expertise, so technical capabilities we may not fully have in-house. And then in select instances, though it's rarer, we study it a lot, but we're just not as active in terms of acquisitions. We'll look for specific technologies that we think we need-
Mm-hmm
... and are missing. These-- if you think about the tens of thousands of companies that make up this space, it is core to our thesis. We buy these businesses at mid-single-digit EBITDA multiples. On average, that average has not really moved, even with all the noise in the financial markets, over the last couple of years. So when cost of capital was much lower, right, the sponsored community was high. We got a lot of questions saying: "Is that a big issue?" Not really back then, not really an issue now. And that's because, again, these tend to be smaller, you know, five, 10-, 15-person firms... and they're very additive to our strategy, obviously, in our ability to service customers, but it's because of the multiple arbitrage, there's a quick, financial opportunity, but that's, you know, that's financial.
The thesis really pans out if the organic growth is and the cross-selling is happening over time, because then we're creating a platform for that business to grow better in our hands. And that's why we're focused on that metric and disclosing that metric.
Typically, the principals, the owners of these firms-
They stay.
Stay.
Yeah. So we have very little. We're not really designed to buy and cut costs, which is why the concept of a roll-up doesn't really apply to us as much. This is really a revenue synergy play, and these are small companies, and so often there's cost dyssynergies out of the gates. To Allan's point, it takes a couple of years to get the business fully professionalized. And then integration is critical. Do you want to talk about that?
Yeah. So when we think about integration, you've got kind of back-office system integration, and then you've got the cultural, the cross-selling, the marketing, integration. The back-office integration, we're hyper-focused on. We will cadence deals so that we don't get too far behind. And when we integrate, we run on a single platform globally. So our acquisition of Vandrensning in Europe in 2023, that's in Workday. Our Australian business is all in Workday. Matrix is now in Workday. So through the end of 2023, every one of those 71 acquisitions is in one platform, right? So we're fully integrated through all the acquisitions we've done. Sets us up nicely for the next set of acquisitions that we'll do in 2024.
That's just platform, you're talking about, like, policy.
Yeah. So it's, yeah, single-
Mm-hmm.
Single payroll, single bank account, by country, single handbook. Right, we. If I need to pull up an aging globally, I can do that, right? It's all in one single set of policies. All the accounting is the same. And it makes for an ability to close the books really quickly and therefore spend a lot more time analyzing. So that's that we do as well as I've ever seen. It’s a very rigorous playbook, very seasoned integration team. What takes longer, and we're now starting to focus more on, is the operational side. We're finding tremendous opportunities in pricing, for example. A lot of these smaller companies aren't as disciplined, they don't necessarily have the... They're not large enough to really have a lot of pricing ability.
We're finding a lot of opportunity. Again, Matrix is a nice. It's not just raise pricing 10%.
Mm-hmm.
It's being very systematic and data-driven around, right, those customers that maybe are marginal, Vijay talked about them, and taking in many cases much more than 10%. And maybe your larger customers that are more strategic, right, they get a lesser percentage. But we're finding a tremendous amount of value in pricing the cross-selling opportunities, so we're training, introducing teams a lot earlier into the process, building that trust. And so we're seeing an acceleration of cross-selling. And then in these larger deals, we are starting to see cost synergies. Because we run on one platform, we have pretty robust support functions. Increasingly, we're able to replace these larger back offices with a team that's in place today.
Might be worth spending a moment on Matrix, because it's a larger deal. What, what attracted you? What appealed to you about the business? And, you know, how is that integration going?
So I'll take the acquisition, and then you should have an integration. It's going back to our original thesis points on what compels us. Our clients were talking about... So we have several clients that cross the U.S.-Canadian border, particularly in the energy side and the utility side, focused on various water remediation and environmental stewardship issues. And as a result, we were constantly bumping into limitations in terms of our capacity and capability in the Canadian market, and so we were referred. We were introduced to Matrix. It is an environmental pure- play, which is rare, right? So most businesses, by virtue of how this industry grew up, are, you know, they do some environmental and a lot of other kind of stuff, right?
Mm-hmm.
Because we're focused on the environment, that's a rare asset of size. It's geographically where we like, which is kind of Western Canada, right? The western half of the country. And very consistent with our sense of mission and purpose. And so we were not the highest bid, but for those reasons, they were attracted to us, and we were attracted to them. There's a lot of revenue synergy opportunity. The leadership team is exceptional, has all stayed with us. They've now introduced us to a host of new opportunities in Canada and the United States, the western part of the U.S. So the thesis is kind of playing out exactly as we would have hoped.
What was challenging for us in the public market domain is, you know, they were running at 4%-5% EBITDA margins, right? So with the scrutiny on margins, that was going to further complicate our story.
Mm-hmm.
Over the long run, it's very, very accretive. And what we've said is that by the end of this year, so in 18 months, we'll get that four to 15-ish, 13%-15% margins. And we'll talk about where we're—it's going exactly per plan, and we'll talk more about that when we disclose the numbers. But that's where a lot of the efforts around cross-selling, pricing, operational synergy, all of that kind of plays out, Jim.
We've got just a couple of minutes, but maybe, just with respect to the topic that is on folks' minds, just in terms of driving margin expansion. Allan, why don't you-
Yeah
... comment on that?
So this is still a young business. We are bAllancing, right, investments in R&D, investments in infrastructure, that over the long term will benefit the company. Operationally, on the base business, we're seeing really nice margin improvement, as we get the benefit of scale, the benefit of some of the pricing learnings that we've had over the last couple of years. What complicates it is acquisitions. Again, when you buy a Matrix, that depresses margins temporarily, right, a year or two. Most acquisitions are not running at the operating margins that we are. So that takes some time to put into the fold. But we're very pleased operationally with how the individual business line margins are progressing.
The remediation reuse margins are the ones that are really subscale today, vis-a-vis where we expect them to run. So again, mid- to high-teens versus 20%-25%. That will come with a Matrix margin improvement that we've talked about, and then, the PFAS opportunities that we think are substantive, as well as some of the other new elements coming out of R&D. So we expect, again, over a three to five-year period, we're going to get into that kind of optimal range. But we feel really good operationally about how those margins are performing. And vis-a-vis kind of public companies that do the same thing, we perform really well.
And then the corporate side, again, we've been investing pretty heavily in. That's largely built out, and so you'll see the benefit of scale as that cost is put over a larger and larger revenue stream.
Perfect. We're going to end it there. Thank you.
Thank you, Jim. Perfect. Thank you, all.