Good morning, everyone. We're going to allow a few seconds for the room to populate. Okay, let's begin. My name is John Franzreb. I am an analyst here at Sidoti & Company. Our next presentation of the day is Mistras Group, ticker MG. For those of you not familiar with Mistras, they provide asset protection solutions to a wide variety of industries and end markets. We are fortunate to have with us today CFO Ed Prajzner, sorry. Following his presentation, about 20 to 25 minutes, we'll have some time for Q&A. If you have a question, please put it in the Q&A box, and I'll present it to Ed. With that said, thank you for joining us today. The floor is yours.
Thank you, John. I appreciate that. And as always, thank you, Sidoti, for sponsoring today's conference. It's very nice to be in front of you today, and being able to present, and I appreciate your interest in the Mistras story. And whether you're brand new to the story or a little more advanced, I'll provide some good information to help you better understand who we are and where we're going. Before we start, though, I will just do the precautionary legal language here. I will be making some forward-looking statements today about the future. I'll also be referring to some non-GAAP measures along the way. Consider yourself forewarned there. All of those numbers are governed and reconciled in our public company filings.
Be cognizant of those as I talk today. Who is Mistras? Real high level before I dive into some details here. As John just said, we are an asset protection company, tangible asset protection. Think industrial assets in the field, refineries, power plants, windmill farms, et cetera. Safety is a big reason why we're there. We're an ESG enabler for our customers. We're keeping equipment up and running safely, and along the way, no one's going to be injured as the equipment is up and safe. Secondarily, we're maximizing uptime, wherein we minimize their planned outages, and we also try to avoid an unplanned outage at the customer. I'll explain who we do that for and where and how in just a minute. It's basically categorized as a non-destructive testing, NDT.
I'll explain what that is. It's data-driven, and we're moving more into data. It's very proprietary. There's software, there's equipment, there's the technician themselves, there's a lot of expertise in the field. We went public back in 2009, headquartered today in Princeton. Again, our goal is to be this integrated provider, a solution provider to my customers, to solve all of their needs regarding their asset base, the integrity of their assets, keeping them up and running. Our founder, Sotirios Vahaviolos, is currently Chair Emeritus. Manny took over the helm as Chairman. He's a long-term, 20-year director. He took the Chairman role back in October. He's currently acting as interim CEO. In addition to the CEO spot, or CFO spot, I've got commercial areas and IT and other areas under my responsibility.
John Smith is heading up our services field and shop business. Gerry D'Alterio is our new commercial officer, heading up all things, revenue, pricing, strategic pricing, et cetera. I'll walk you through that. And then lastly, Hani Hammad joined us recently as Chief Transformation Officer. He had been heading up the project, which we refer to as Project Phoenix. He was the AlixP artner, individual that was driving that project. So even though he's new on board this year, he had had about a year of experience behind the scenes, helping us through Project Phoenix. And you have a whole new team here that's re-energized and really driving forward, and I'll walk you through kind of what we're focusing on.
Before I do that, though, let me just give you a little more example of what this non-destructive testing is. We also refer to it as non-destructive evaluation, NDE. So I may say NDT or NDE today. They're somewhat interchangeable. But what it basically is, I'm doing something to give my customer integrity of their assets, a feel for that, without damaging the asset. I can't punch a hole in the side, or I'm going to rupture the integrity of that asset. So what am I doing? I'm looking for some unseen corrosion, a crack, a leak, or some integrity of the asset. So how am I going to do that? Well, I might simply look at it with my own eyes, own two eyes. Not me necessarily, but a trained technician that knows what they're looking at.
Simplest inspection is visual, but it gets much more complicated, obviously. Ultrasonic testing, maybe it's an X-ray, Guided Wave, and many other techniques. There's also things we would do to enhance the surface of the material to get a better image, better view of it. The whole goal here is two things: to see what's happening inside the asset from afar, from outside, to most importantly, determine what's happening, what's the rate of degradation here so that I can do something to intervene and act long before it becomes a mission-critical problem. So that's what I'm doing. It's non-destructive testing, evaluating. I may monitor it, I may do a spot check, I test at certain intervals, and I'll walk you through that. But it's all about keeping the customer's asset up and running in its intended state of service.
This whole presentation is on Mistras' website for your viewing as well. So who do I help? Well, it's heavy industrial users of metal, vessels, pressure valves, things of that nature that are under temperature, pressure, dealing with corrosive fluids, acids, et cetera. So it's obviously power plants, it's refineries, it's up, down, and midstream. It's bridges, it's renewables, it's aerospace and defense. A lot of the parts, component parts going into OEM parts going into equipment and whatnot is also being tested in a little different way, but I'll walk you through that. So that's who we help, many diverse industries. How do I help them? Well, there's three ways to do it, and they're actually interrelated.
The first is the field service business, which is really, where we got started, although, like, you might argue, we got started in products as well. But in the field, I'm going to the asset itself. I'm going to a power plant, to a refinery, to an offshore drilling rig, to a, to a windmill farm, to do the work right then and there. That's a picture of a technician up on a rope, suspended at height, checking, you know, an elbow curve in a, in a, in a piece of equipment. On the far right is a lab testing environment, where the part comes to me before it goes on to, you know, an aircraft engine, where I test it there as well. Up, up close and personal, the part came to me.
In the middle is the third piece of my business, is the data side, a data solution where it ties everything together, and we've always done it, and we're doing more of that, but that's really the real critical piece. What I know about that asset, whether it's being manufactured today or installed soon to be commissioned or being decommissioned later in its life cycle, there's very, very important elements that I need to know about along the way. So we're a trusted partner, an outsourced, kind of co-sourced manager of asset integrity for my customer. We've got, you know, over 5,000 blue-chip customers globally. Lots of retention, lots of levels of service, and, and lots of good long histories, decade-long history with, with many, many of those customers with, lots of retention.
So, the first area, and a very important area that I'll start with here, is my skilled technicians are critical here. The workforce that I have in the field, showing up at customers day in and day out. We've got about 3,500 technicians today. We believe we've got one of the largest, you know, very highly trained, skilled workforces in the United States. They're very skilled in collecting data. They're QA, QC-ing it as they go. They're using different techniques. They may be collecting it at height. They're certified in the various technologies. I just walked through RT, UT, and others. They're critical here. They're collecting the data. They know their customer.
They have a lot of information, a lot of knowledge and experience of how to best do this in the field, and they're day one front contact with the customer all the time. So the technician is very critical here as a necessary step and component of getting connected to my customer, and a very vital one for us. And the technician is not just out there alone doing it manually. We help the technicians automate their work in many different ways. This cutaway here is an example on the in-line inspection testing in the midstream space, and upstream as well, as to how we augment the technician.
So as an example, on the far left, is an example of an ART Crawler, automated, radiographic, device, that's now going to kind of crawl along the pipe with a little collar that'll spin and take an image 360 degrees. You know, we built this, it's proprietary, it's patented, and we just actually launched generation six of this. This is generation five. So this came out of necessity in the field. The technicians actually built this themselves and thought of it. And it's a great solution now because in the past, two techs would have worked together. They would have taken an X-ray every 18 ft, perhaps, of a weld.
Versus now, this crawler can move along and take an image the whole length of that pipe at different angles. So it's faster. It's actually covering more scope. So great value add for the customer. Inverse, or not quite inverse, but underground, I should say, similarly, we have a PIG, affectionately known as a PIG, a pipeline inspection gauge, PIG, which runs under buried pipe. That is similarly looking for the same type of issues. It's gonna look at the weld, obviously, but it cares about pinholes that might be there and other elements it wants to... You can't see that. Obviously, you can't crawl along that. That's buried underground, but that's another very important way of speeding up the technicians' gathering of data. What do you do with all of that?
Well, now you assess what that means. It's dots and dashes, maybe, that were captured. All of that means something, and you want to assess that to give the customer an assessment, a state of health of that asset, and to find a lurking issue that they can deal with. That's what ties it all together. Again, this is a technology that's helping the technician work much faster. So that's the field business. On the lab side, the shop testing side, that's the inverse. The part comes to me. So this example of that is wherein there's a foundry, a casting, an extruded part, what have you, comes into my shop from that fabricator.
And in my facility, not only do I check it for, you know, the integrity, making sure there's not a void inside of that chunk of metal, but, you know, there's all kinds of QA, QC steps and testing. Maybe I need to chemically etch it. I need to get a better view of the surface. Maybe I do some light, you know, finishing. There's a notch in it. Maybe I square it back off. All of that's value-add steps. I'm doing more and more of this. When I've been saying I'm investing more CapEx, this is what I'm doing recently, last couple of quarters, to expand my service capabilities for my customers.
That final part will leave my shop and then become, maybe it was a chunk of titanium coming in, it's a fan blade going on a jet engine motor on the back end there. So I'm doing more and more steps for my customer to help them speed up their supply chain. So in our shops, it's generally aerospace, commercial aerospace, private space as well, maybe defense and other industries, but it's the part coming to me. Again, data is very critical along the way there. The piece that tied them together, as I led off on that first slide, between all the services here, is right smack in the middle, data solutions. And what that means is, yes, I'm in the field, yes, I'm at height, maybe I'm diving or using a drone...
You know, maybe that's in my lab doing that testing, but all that analysis means something. The root cause of what's happening, why did it happen, what can you do about it? It triggers more engineering thoughts and some consulting, and maybe there's a light mechanical fix while I'm there. It's my proprietary equipment in many cases that was helping gather the information or, or monitor it, the sensors, et cetera, we build ourselves. But it all comes together in this bundled solution, this one-source way of looking at everything in a much more comprehensive way, being this sort of co-sourced asset integrity manager for my customer, thinking deeply for them, trending things, looking at root causes, looking at conditions and trajectories, and, the propagation of that, of that over time. What's happening?
What can we do about it to minimize that wear and tear today, minimize any sort of downtime, and obviously avoid some CapEx repairs, excuse me, prematurely down the road. So this bundle is what I want to really spend most of today's conversation about with that little setup now, is data is king here. So to the right here, this little, you know, flywheel of what I'm showing, that's really the story that we have done and over time, and we're really leaning into it. I used to sell all those little circles separately. Now, I'm selling them really as a package, as a bundle, as a solution for my customer. So it, software drives a lot of this, data drives a lot of this. PCMS is a core central piece of this.
My software that I own, it can be proprietary, it can be a SaaS for my customer. They can buy a module, they can buy the whole thing, so we make it very, flexible for them. Onstream is, well-known in the inline inspection space. New Century is also newer to the piece. That's more of a geolocation to help me understand the consequences of the asset, et cetera. So really, how this kind of works is I can start on the service side, maybe there's an ART Crawler or a PIG run happening or some other testing. That's great, that's static, that's a point in time. But maybe I want to tie that into online monitoring and then know what's happening all the time.
Now, I can trend the data together, what's happening, and then maybe I can better plan next time. Maybe I over-tested, maybe I under-tested. Let me build a better dashboard to know how I can keep your assets up and running fail-safe in a smarter way going forward. So that's the pinwheel here. I can come in on the services side and add data. I can have data first and add services later. Both can push and pull the other forward, and that's really what we want to really lean into right now. The core of this is that data analytics on the left side there, and that's PCMS, as I just mentioned, Plant Condition Management Software. This is basically telling the customer, there's a consequence and then a probability map here is all it's basically telling you.
So the green assets are in great shape, you don't need to worry about them today. The yellow is probably a condition is out of spec, and you probably should think about that. The amber is in a worse condition. There's a spec or two, or something is more significant you probably should worry about. That's where you're going to have, you know, something of much more significance. The red asset's too late, you missed your window, the asset's probably offline and in some fail state. You know, too late, but let's work to get them back up and running.
But that's what this is giving me, a dashboard and a way of assessing the risk of what's happening at my customer's location, and, you know, this is very important and this really dials in the inspection plan and the capabilities across the board for the customer. Why that's important is because that really drives this evolution that is happening across our industry: let's go to more risk-based inspection versus time-based inspection. And what I mean by that is, right now or historically, I might show up with my technician every 36 months, I'm just picking an example. Do a test, do a static test, understand what's happening there right in front of my eyes or what the device sees for me, and I tell their customer that.
So that's interesting, that's important, and maybe there's a known location that they're studying, and they want to get, you know, an assessment of it, that's great. But now I'm going to leave, and I won't be back for 36 months. So now you're running blind all that time. I don't know what's happening. So maybe I should censor that spot and get some rudimentary, rudimentary information along the way, so I know what's happening. I can trend it better. That's the connectivity. And maybe over time, I've been there so frequently that I don't need to spend, spend the time to send out an expensive technician. Maybe an algorithm could have predicted what was going to happen, and that's a whole better, more enlightened way of figuring out, how do you manage the risk and what could have been going wrong?
And then how do I understand, oh, the rate of thickness of that metal, a traditional thing we're looking at, maybe it's more aggressive than I thought, or maybe it's a little more modest than I would have thought. How'd that happen? Well, different catalyst, different temperature, different pressure, some other variable was happening there. And the more I can understand that and, you know, help the customer understand that, all the better for them to manage their asset base, keep more uptime, avoid the unplanned downtimes, and maybe avoid some wear and tear on their CapEx. That's the holy grail. That's the magic of what I can bring together by having all this connectivity to the customer. All of this is in my portfolio right now. I've had all this forever. This is not new. I am not new to the data game.
Verstratis has been in this for quite some time with software and sensors and predictive analytics and monitoring things. Now, it's bringing this great bundle together and flexing it over to new industries and new customer locations. Or maybe it's my service customers never saw my data offering, or my data customers never saw my service offering. I can, I can push one to the other, and expand out this more interconnected way of looking at life for them, for their benefit. Much higher ROI to this as well, you know, for my, for my customers. So again, software is the key and really getting the information available to them.
I would also stress that this view, this data view, PCMS, and this journey that we're on, it's really contained to, although it's fairly diverse right now. I'm covering, you know, analyzing 1 million assets in the field right now at many, many sites for my customers. It's fairly well concentrated to the two highlighted sectors. These are my 7 key end markets I serve. Most of this data right now is concentrated in oil and gas, up, down, and midstream, and other process industries. I can expand this out to aerospace and infrastructure. I only dabble there in, you know, industrials, petrochem, power gen, on and on and on.
I've got lots of this growth available of my current portfolio in all these other core markets of mine that I serve right now, where I only do services. I can add the data equation to them as well, and that's a very easy path with a lot less resistance than selling it entirely new to someone that doesn't know me or know about my products. This is a cross-selling opportunity that we feel is a, you know, great advantage for us. You know, we can cross-fertilize that, and we do repurpose our technologies across different end markets all the time. So that's where we're going to take the market. We feel this is very unique, and our competition does not have this combination and this bundle that we have.
So why is it worth it so much, this data thing that I'm teasing out here and talking about? Well, because it is worth it. The ROI is very amazing, and it's abundantly clear to the customers when we go down this discussion. So here's 2 real live examples. I had to mask the name of the customer, unfortunately, but you would know their names and recognize their names. But on the left side, this is PCMS, the core of the example I'm using here, our software. It was used in this case, where a planned shutdown of the customer was contemplated. So this was a phased shutdown over a 2-year period of time, a $50 million proposition for them to be offline during this downtime cycle. So a $50 million cost to them.
Using PCMS, for a $500,000 fee, they were able to cut that downtime by 10%. So there you go. They saved $5 million on their $50 million. They got a 10-to-1 payback in the first year, and that payback's going to continue for them 'cause PCMS is gave them that knowledge and had them kind of level set and debottleneck and do all kinds of things. They don't have to do that extra work forevermore. They're going to save $5 million forevermore in the work. That's very compelling. That's a significant savings for them. That's going to keep repeating there. And then my PCMS software will be a license for them now, that I'll be getting an annuity from that, as well as doing additional work for them over time.
Now, you might argue, "Well, Ed, you were doing some of that planned downtime work at your customer. Didn't you give up and cannibalize some of your work?" Well, I may have there, but maybe my technicians will be out there still doing light mechanical or calibrating a sensor or doing something for PCMS, so I don't entirely lose all that time. But I will be getting a better margin on it from the software piece. Plus, I've built more connectivity to my customer, a bigger barrier to entry, of someone else stepping in and, you know, trying to displace me, so well worth it, and we've got lots of examples that do exactly that. This is an ROI model that trumps a cost-based, cost-plus model that I'd be dealing with only on the services side.
Hence why it's, it's well worth it to lean into this, component of my portfolio. I won't walk through the right side example there. Again, it's on my website to view, but very similarly, there's lots of ways. That's a little more complicated example, but same way, you can save, you know, a lot for the customer, and it's a win-win-win, where they're spending less with me, and I'm getting more margin on the work I do. That's a win-win across the board, and, and we have lots of examples where, where we'll do that, have done that, and we'll continue to do that. I'll, I'll kind of wrap up here. We're getting close to, the end of this piece. But, Project Phoenix, we talk a lot about this. This was launched, in 2023.
It drove a lot of cost discipline, taking out overheads. Our outlook is baked into this page, including Phoenix savings contemplated this year, which we are realizing. Project Phoenix as well, was much bigger than a cost-out study. It went into commercial things and pricing strategies, and a big part of the price increase we got this year is due to Project Phoenix, a better deal desk, a better bid tracker, a more enhanced CRM. So there's lots of things driving the top line from Project Phoenix. More to come. We're also looking at gross profit margin, mix of business, how do we better leverage that footprint, and obviously, you know, focusing on taking out SG&A along the way is another very critical focus of what Project Phoenix did.
But it's really bringing this in-house, making it an institutionalized way of how I look at life, and, you know, we're well along the way now of driving this. We're not done yet. There's more cost-outs we see. There's more leveraging of our portfolio, more methodology to our pricing approach. Much of our work is done under longer-term, three-five year MSA agreements. Many of those haven't really come up yet for renewal, so we'll look at each one of those in a vacuum and get very precise about the ROI and how we can better serve the customer with this mix of, you know, technicians and software and sensors, et cetera.
Leaning into the ROI we create for the customer is how we, you know, we'll drive up higher value, and that's what our commercial team is really focusing on, along the way, to, to really drive that value equation. And I, I really believe that's how we're going to succeed and, and really lean into that, and then leveraging a lot of our technology. And we do exactly that. Much of our technology does get transplanted. Things we did on bridges for decades and decades, we've transplanted over to, you know, windmill farms. So, you know, our technology is fairly interchangeable and, and can work in newer technologies. We're agnostic as to who we support, in terms of our customer base.
We're not tied to any legacy markets, and we will flex out across different end markets as markets develop and as our customers grow and expand and change what they're doing, we flex along with them. So with that, I'll kind of bring this kind of prepared section to a close, coming up on 23-ish, four or five minutes. So John, I'll throw it back to you to clarify any comments or questions you have, and go any deeper on topics that you'd like me to.
Thank you, Ed, and that was a great overview. I'd like to start with a question about your sales strategy and expanding the data systems proposition, or what is that strategy? Can you kind of articulate how you're going to bring it to new markets?
Sure, yeah. Great question, John. Really how we're going to do that is kind of have our data guys think more congruently in a way, more unified. So as an example, in the past, my data guys sold software separately in a silo, virtually. My sensor guys sold their products in a silo. I had products guys selling in a silo, and then I had the services guys selling in a silo. I would suspect there are certain cases when multiple salespeople from Mistras showed up at the same customer on the same day, not knowing they all planned to be there. And that actually did happen, and that's very unfortunate that we wasted energy that way and probably didn't look very intelligent in front of the customer.
So what we're doing now is really making sure that each group is aware of the portfolio we offer, making sure that the sensor guys and the software guys understand, "Oh, what service is out there? You're testing the same asset that I'm trying to monitor. Let's approach that together. Let's share information. Let's work as a bigger group." So internally, we have the group leveraging each other more to understand, you know, "Do you realize all these capabilities we have?" We've been really enhancing and growing the sales team and really figuring out, okay, who are our SMEs internally? Who knows this technology? Let's make sure we have a common group of customers and that we're all sort of approaching it in the same way. Go to market together with a bundled solution.
We announced a good win, a very nice win on our earnings call a couple of weeks back, doing exactly that, where it was a bigger bundled win, where it was our software being implemented with testing happening in the field, in a new construction site, in a new LNG facility, where we're doing everything at once: testing brand-new equipment being installed, getting a nice baseline of that. That requires a real technician taking a real measurement of the metal thickness. It takes a real data person there, layering that in as a beginning data point of a big, giant empirical dataset I'll build over time, measuring that asset along, along the way. So that's really how we're going to do it, is approach the customer differently, think about what interconnects there, and then get on the journey as quickly as I can with the customer.
Not just come in midstream while the assets are, you know, in their service life or getting near the end, and they're corroding and they need help, but get it from the very beginning there with data, with a sensor, with a technician, to go over the whole life cycle and journey with the customer, and that's where we're bringing the sales guys together and all things business development and SMEs to the table up front and really figure out, you know, where's the bigger value proposition I can add all of my services to the customer?
And again, where I did service, bring in the data, where I did data, bring in this—bring in it the opposite way around, and it really just comes from more collaboration, having the sales team and the ops team, who sees the customer all day long, work more, collaborate more together, and partner together. So with sales coming together, with operations, with our SMEs internally, to really, you know, triple seal that, that opportunity for the customer and, sell the ROI to them. But it's, it's really just coming together as a unified group, approaching customers more in a centralized way versus being so decentralized before selling it individually. That—that's really the... No magic to that, but that's how we're going to win the end game, I think, and drive the value up for the customer.
Ed, what percentage of your revenue comes from data?
From data? I mean, right now, you're in a 10-ish% level of my total revenue, up from probably only 5% a couple of years ago. So it's growing rather quickly. You know, and it has, you know, we believe, a very good upside to it as we start to bundle this together and bring this more to the forefront. Again, it's always been there, but it was always sort of a hidden piece of the business and not something necessarily we were focused on. We were selling it in and of itself. Now, we're realizing it could be pulling other, you know, other business forward. But, you know, very attractive piece.
It's revenue may be modest in percentage of total, but its profitability is better than that 'cause it carries a higher profit margin to it, and it interconnects other things we do, so it's not in a vacuum there. Again, that data. And this actually happens, if you're using PCMS, as an example, maybe an insight pops up to you while you're using it. You do a calculation, the customer does, and they realize, "Oh, I'm overdue on some maintenance. I'm overdue on an inspection test. Hey, maybe I should get somebody out now to confirm something." Or maybe the data shows you some anomaly, some algorithm that says, "Huh, that metal thickness doesn't sound right. This can't be right. The math is wrong.
Go get somebody out there to confirm that that measurement makes sense, that the math is right here." And then you'll go check it, and then you'll update the algorithm, and away you go, the machine is smarter now. So there is a little bit of that, where you need both. You know, the human will be involved in the equation there, and that's how I think we move this forward, and how data becomes bigger than just the software I ran before. It becomes much more intelligent information, helping the customer drive decision making, and it might feed, you know, services for me, and we see that actually happen or vice versa.
The services makes it abundantly clear, had you had data, you could have risk-based what you were doing in the first, in the first place, so bring in the data now on top of service and vice versa. So they do kind of feed each other, and having them work together, you know, in a bigger, as a bigger bundled group, I, I think drives them both forward, actually. So some of our big data push might end up with accelerated services growth, and that's okay. Where we put it, who's P&L, I'm not too concerned there because they kind of bundle each other and pull each other forward. What we- where we categorize them is secondary in my mind. It's, it's more important that they all pull each other forward.
Who we give credit to, you know, is a little bit secondary because it is a bigger bundled solution.
Couple questions about the near-term outlook. I realize you recently reported, and you spoke about the second half being slower than the first. Can you talk about those puts and takes, and which end markets are slower, and which ones may be accelerating?
Sure, yeah. We've said this really since last fall, that we thought the spring turnaround season would be very robust, turned out to be that case, and that the fall turnaround cycle in refineries would be moderate, modest, less than the spring turnaround, and we still expect that to be the case. So even those two out, the spring turnaround and fall turnaround season this year, average out to be what would be a normal, ordinary run cycle for the entire year. So it's more about you had a little front-end loaded, you know, downstream, you know, downstream work than you would've had in the second half. All other end markets... And that's not a bad thing, that's just a normal cycle and evening out over the course of a full year.
All other end markets are actually very stable and growing. Actually, all the end markets we serve were up in the second quarter, so we see strength across the board. Nice level balance, there's good supply and demand, there's good capacity utilization out there across the board in a lot of our end sectors. We do see that the aerospace business continues to be very strong, you know, up in the high teens, almost 20% growth rate. We continue to see that grow. That's actually our second largest market. So we continue to see growth there, expanded service offerings for that sector. We see that one staying up at that level going forward, well beyond this year. So yeah, and we like all of our end markets now. They're all very stable. Our legacy markets are resilient. All of our newer growth areas are growing and expanding.
So yeah, we feel very good about the portfolio. And if we can, you know, layer in some good longer-term, new construction, you know, longer cycle work, that adds more stability and less variability to our overall mix. So you know, we feel very good going forward at all end markets. We like them, we're servicing them well, we're broadening our, you know, offering and, you know, a good combination of volume growth coupled with some pricing increases is going a long way, and a big part of why we're seeing, you know, good, solid, you know, 8% growth this year thus far. And, you know, we'll continue to see, I think, a good, healthy balance across all of our end diversified markets.
Okay, and I'll sneak just one last question, though I have a host of them here to fall back on. How much of your rework is discretionary versus mandatory?
Yeah, great question, John. I mean, much of our work, it's just the right thing to do. So maybe a regulatory body mandated it, maybe it's OSHA, you know, someone of that nature. So yes, a lot of it is regulatory in nature, it's mandated. This work has to be done at a certain interval, so absolutely, that's a requirement here. But on the other hand, my customers are good owner-operators. They wanna do right, to do the right thing here so that they can keep uptime at a high level, that they have minimal, you know, planned outages and very little or no unplanned outages. So they're doing this for the right reason, to be green, to, you know, minimize CapEx.
So even if a regulatory rule wasn't written to make them do that, they're gonna do it anyway 'cause it's in their best interest to keep the health of their assets running at peak efficiency with, you know, the best economics there. But no, there's an awful lot of requirements here that mandate the work. You know, that part has to be tested, or that facility has to be tested, so we don't, you know... But most folks go beyond that and will do it more frequently than they would need to, and they have their own testing plans where it's in their best interest to do it. Again, they wanna maximize their assets and get a little more turn and life cycle out of them, so we're happy to do that. It's just the right thing to do.
But safety's job one, really why we're out there, to make sure that that's an absolute, obviously. But, you know, it's really about keeping those assets up and running over their whole life cycle as optimally as possible. That's really why we're there for the customer, and we're happy to do it for them.
Okay, we ran a little bit into overtime here, but thank you very much for presenting today. I know you have a full schedule ahead of you. But, any closing remarks?
No, John, I appreciate the time, and thank you everybody for listening in. Really appreciate Sidoti's conference today. So, sorry if I couldn't meet all the one-on-ones a little bit, we're a little bit oversubscribed, but appreciate your... My contact info is on the page, email and/or phone number. Reach out anytime, happy to walk you through the Mistras story. Thank you again, John, for hosting today. I appreciate it very much. Thank you, everybody.
Sure. Have a great day.
Thank you.