All right. Thank you everyone for sticking around towards the end of day two of Baird's Industrial Conference. I'm Justin Hauke. I'm the Senior Associate covering our specialty contractors like MasTec here, and then I work with Andrew Wittmann on the Engineering, Construction, and Facility Services companies. So MasTec, for those of you who don't know, long history in a lot of different industries. Very successful and kinda moving to wherever growth is. You know, not without growing pains, but has found long-term success over time. We have Jose Mas, the company's CEO, for how many years? 16 years?
Sixteen years.
Yeah, 16 years. Then Paul DiMarco, who's been with the company for a long time-
Sixteen.
Sixteen years as well, but he's kinda newer in the CFO role. So, why don't we just start off with some introductory remarks? I know we have a, we were going to have a breakout, but I think because they've got an early flight, and we're gonna leave a couple of minutes at the end for some group Q&A, too. So...
Great. So look, first, thank you for having us. Happy to be here, happy that all of you have joined us here at the end of the day. My name is Jose Mas. I've been, as you said, CEO of MasTec since 2007. At the time I became CEO, the company was about $900 million, just under $50 million in EBITDA. So I think we've done a great job of building the business. Really, our, our mantra over the course of the last 15 or 16 years was trying to find businesses that we thought, you know, had significant fundamental growth behind them, where, where we could add value. We started as really a telecom contractor.
Those are the roots of the business, supporting telecom growth. You know, we started with copper, obviously. Over time, really pushed it to fiber, and that was our focus all the way up until I became CEO. When I became CEO, one of the initial things that we really tried to accomplish as a business was to diversify our services and get ourselves into businesses that we thought had better growth and margin profiles. So that really led to the expansion of our business into wireless. Today, we're the largest wireless contractor in North America. We, on behalf of the carriers, build out their networks, so the antennas, the lines, the... potentially the towers, although some of them are owned by the tower companies, build that on behalf of the carriers. We expanded into the pipeline space.
We became a very large oil and gas pipeline business through a very early start at the Barnett Shale. Today, we support all the different shales across the country. We started building renewables by building the collector systems on a wind farm a very long time ago. We ended up really building our portfolio along, not just doing the collector systems, but ultimately being able to build, the entire, gamut of what a wind farm entailed, from the roads and the turbines, the foundations, erecting the towers, putting the blades up. We, over time, took that business and expanded into the solar market, doing utility-scale solar.
And then over the course of the last few years, we made a big bet in increasing not just that business, but increasing our energy business and the work that we do on behalf of utilities, predominantly on distribution and transmission. So that's kinda how we're segmented. Each of those businesses is its own segment, and today, we think we're, you know, first, second, or third in any of those businesses relative to our market position and size today.
Great. Maybe talk about some of those platform acquisitions you did. I guess, Henkels & McCoy, IEA, what they brought that you didn't have, 'cause you were in these businesses, just maybe not at scale. So, how they kinda changed the portfolio?
Yeah. So if we take a step back and you think about the pandemic in 2020, we were, we were coming off a really good 2019. The pandemic hits in 2020. There's a lot of concerns around the pipeline business and what happens in oil and gas over a longer period. A lot of talk about decarbonization and what the, the, the new world of energy was gonna look like in this country, and we were predominantly, you know, we were heavy on oil and gas. So about a good chunk of our revenues and earnings were coming from our oil and gas pipeline business. We were worried about what was gonna happen post-pandemic on that business.
And while we were already in the energy space, we were in the renewable space, we were in the distribution transmission space, we were a small player in distribution transmission, you know, relatively good wind business, but didn't have a big solar presence. So really, post-pandemic, we made a decision to really invest in this, in what we think is a, you know, quite frankly, almost a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It's the first time in my lifetime that I think the way we generate power and the way we deliver power is changing. The grids are actually changing for the first time. So we started with the investment of a company called INTREN. It was actually based here in Chicago.
They were a distribution transmission contractor, predominantly union, was a woman-owned business, had good history, and I think it's been a fantastic platform acquisition for us. It's grown... So we made that acquisition in early 2021. Fast-forward a couple of years, business has had tremendous top-line growth, performed really well on margins, expanded its geography, and, you know, with the very early signs we were seeing from that acquisition, we had the opportunity to buy a company called Henkels & McCoy at the end of 2021. Henkels & McCoy was a family-owned business, a hundred-year history, one of the pioneers in distribution and transmission, probably one of the oldest historical businesses that started in that space. Very strong family presence for a long period, but it also wasn't performing well.
At the time that we bought Henkels, we talked about it being a 5% margin business. We've now owned it for just under two years, substantially moved the margins upwards, so we think we've done a great job from a margin profile in the integration of that business. Hasn't come without challenges. You know, some contracts in that business needed to be, either right-sized or we, you know, some work we had to give back, but we think what it's done for us in the Power Delivery space, it's really repositioned the MasTec brand, right? So where we were originally thought of as, you know, probably, a more geographical based, you know, relatively strong in certain geographies, this really has given us a nationwide presence.
So we've, you know, we do a lot of work on the West Coast, we do work in the Northeast, we do work in the Southeast, the Mid-Atlantic, the Southwest. So it's really elevated our presence across all utilities. We think that in this space today, we're the second largest... and with tremendous opportunities to grow as we think about everything that's happening with the grid. So if you think about grid hardening, responses to storms, responses to fire, what's happening with electric vehicles and the changes needed in the grid, what's happening with just, you know, overall energy consumption as you think about computing, and data centers and AI, and the, and, and everything that goes with it, tremendous opportunities for us. So, you know, we, those acquisitions are done. We're a year and a half in. We're actually really happy with the progress.
Again, hasn't come without its bump and bruises, but we feel really good about our trajectory, both from a revenue growth perspective there, and more importantly, from a margin opportunity, expansion subset. At the end of 2022, we had the opportunity to do a deal with IEA. IEA was the first public company that we've ever bought. It came with a different set of challenges, some of which, quite frankly, we weren't prepared for, and the biggest challenge for us in IEA has been the revenue deceleration. So we have two big renewable businesses. We had our legacy business in MasTec, that last year did about $2 billion, this year will be about $2.2 billion, so it's up about 10% on a year-over-year basis.
Then we had the legacy IEA, which did about $2.4 billion on a full year basis, the year we owned it, we only owned it for a couple of months, and this year's gonna do $1.7 billion. So a significant revenue deterioration in the business in the year that we've owned it, and when we peel back the onion and we really try to understand why, the big challenge with the business has been the conversion of assumed project wins into, into hard backlog and into constructability. So this is predominantly solar projects. They're historically, IEA was a very strong wind company, did a lot of wind revenue.
They were converting a big chunk of their portfolio to solar, and if you think about all the issues that have happened in the solar market this year, starting with the, you know, the panel circumvention issues from a year ago to, you know, everything that came from the IRA. So the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, is gonna be a huge catalyst for our business. It's a huge catalyst for renewables, but in the short term, it's created a world of have and have-nots, right? So you have all the tax legislation associated with IRA that makes projects. The return profile for products better for developers, comes with its own set of challenges because the rules haven't been fully written, and for a number of developers who need to sell tax equity in the market, the market's been very difficult.
For those that have been able to carry the tax liability on their books and carry the tax credit on their books, it's been somewhat of a different world. So our challenge over the course of the last year was really project selection, understanding the risk of those projects, and really counting on projects that we probably should have known better relative to the risk profile that we were seeing. The way we've looked at 2024, we've fundamentally changed the business. We have one go-to-market strategy. We've got one renewables business today. We track every project. We understand where the projects sit from an interconnect perspective, from a financing perspective, PPA perspective, material procurement perspective.
You know, we're obviously trying to focus on those projects that have the highest probability of moving forward in the shortest period, and that's kinda how we came to our 2024, you know, kinda rough estimates that we've put out today. So, you know, really important for us. Obviously, 2023 has been a very challenging year. We've taken a lot of pride in how we've built this company, and quite frankly, for years and years, we were very consistent in terms of how we reported, how we earned, and, you know, we've taken that outlook to 2024, and we're actually trying to create a floor that we think we can absolutely hit and then build off of as the market improves.
All right. So a lot, lots to unpack there. That was, that was a great overview of a lot of things. But I mean, it is important to stress, I mean, this is not your first rodeo. I mean, I know when Andy and I picked up coverage, you had kind of a customer concentration issue with AT&T and DirecTV and really, you know, transitioned the business then, very successful. And then, you know, I mean, your oil and gas business, the EBITDA contribution has come down 75% from its peak, and you're kinda back to where that EBITDA was through these other things. So even with the growing pains, I mean, this has been done before. But I do wanna, I wanna obviously talk about that 'cause that's, you know, I think, where the focus is.
So you talked a little bit about with IEA specifically, the, you know, coming in short of expectations and the, and the backlog that was there. Is it, is it a customer issue in that backlog? Is it a project issue? How much visibility do you have now that's different from when you first acquired them?
Yeah, and look, one of the messages that we're clearly trying to get across is we do not believe this is an IEA customer issue, right? When you look at the quality of the customer base at IEA, it's a high-quality customer base. It's filled with developers that have done, you know, gigawatts of renewable development. So we're not gonna blame it on our customers. We actually think this is much more of a MasTec issue in terms of the project selection that happened behind it, as you think about the projects that IEA selected. So many of these customers that IEA worked for had other projects. Some went, some didn't, right?
So, there's definitely some bad luck in all of this in terms of, you know, they picked some projects that unfortunately didn't go for lots of reasons, but it should have been managed better, right? We should have known the risk profile of those projects better than what we did to better assess whether those projects were ultimately gonna hit in revenue in 2023. And that's been our biggest challenge, right? It's not... You know, we actually are super encouraged by the customer base that we've picked up. It's made up of some of the biggest name in renewables. You know, the flip side of having a very bad year is we've had a lot of time to spend with those customers. We've been at the most senior levels of those customers, building a relationship, understanding what their plans are on a go-forward basis.
They understand the pain that we went through in 2023, and quite frankly, they wanna work with us, right? They wanna see us be successful. They know we're a large player in the space. You know, irrespective of these issues, we built billions of dollars of renewables in 2023.
Right.
So it's not like, you know, all projects went away. A subset of the projects went away. So I think we've used this in a way to really strengthen our relationships with our customers, change the relationship style. Today, we're you know, we're trying to very actively with our customers do things like alliance agreements and, you know, put people in their offices to help them with their plans and constructability and ways to save money in, you know, in exchange for having, you know, some rights to future projects or in exchange for trying to get a certain percentage of the work. We think it's really a win-win situation. So again, we, you know, when I think about IEA, 2023 was incredibly challenging.
We're very disappointed with the results, but I think we will look back on this acquisition over time and feel like we got great value for what we paid. So we paid about $1.1 billion for IEA, hasn't contributed much in 2023, but the reality is it's a business that should be generating hundreds of millions of dollars of EBITDA. So as we get this business working, as we get it to where it should be, and looking back on the multiple that we paid, I actually think we'll be comfortable with the transaction over time. It's just causing a lot of pain today. But again, you know, I think a lot of this is self-inflicted. You know, the industry has its challenges for sure, right? Financing of projects and tax equity is an issue for all developers.
All developers use it, whether you're the biggest developer or the smaller developer. If you can hold it on balance sheet, you're in a very different position than somebody who's forced to sell it. So the projects are different, but I don't think people realize the strength of this industry. There's, when these issues get resolved, when Treasury finally puts out its final, you know, verdict on where tax equity stands and the ability for people to sell their tax equity, there is gonna be a massive release of projects that I don't think people realize. I don't think the investment community realizes the size of this market, the pent-up demand, and the opportunities that people in our industry are gonna have once this happens.
So, you know, while we're obviously very disappointed with 2023 and where it went, we're very optimistic about the future and where it's headed.
You know, it's interesting because, I mean, some of these projects have moved forward. I guess I'm just curious, now that you've kinda integrated the businesses to one renewable platform, you know, these tax equity issues, they resolve themselves. I mean, because, you know, from a financing standpoint, they can wait a little bit to, you know, be able to enhance the returns by getting a little bit more tax contribution in it. But, how on the hook are you with the projects that you've already committed to developing versus other ones that might come out that are maybe further along? You know, I guess what I'm asking is, I mean, do you have to, like, maintain-
Yeah, it's
a base there?
It's, it's a great question, right? So we've... You know, all year, we've talked about deferral of projects, and-
Yeah
... you know, these projects that have been deferred. I think one of the things that's important is we haven't had deferrals from backlog. So when we actually put a project in backlog and we call it as backlog, those projects have actually built. So we actually have very stringent requirements on what we put in as backlog versus a job that has verbally been awarded or a job that we think we're gonna get awarded, which is a lot of what we're talking about. When we think about 2024, we're not counting on these deferred projects to be, you know, what generates revenue for us in the future. We've actually taken all these projects, and we've dumped them in with all the other projects that we're tracking, and we've reprioritized.
The truth is that we're reprioritizing to those projects that we think have the highest likelihood of working in 2024. Some of those might be those same deferred projects, but the reality, most of them aren't. We are not obligated contractually to do any of those, right?
Yeah.
As, as these projects ultimately get financed, get finished, they will get repriced because it's been a long time, so they'll reprice everything from materials to labor. In some cases, you know, customers won't put that out. It'll be a, a one-on-one negotiation 'cause we've done a lot of work on them. In others, you know, we may not wanna do them, right? So the reality is that while they're important and they're a piece of what we're tracking and looking at, it's not what we're depending on for future work, right? We've kind of... we're reprioritizing the workload as it sits today and really focusing on those projects that we think have the highest propensity to build in 2024. And that customer selection, I think it's, it's, it's critical to the industry.
We get a lot of questions on, you know, so and so isn't talking about issues, or you look at the supplier base, and some suppliers are really performing while some suppliers aren't. And the challenges that everybody's having in the industry, again, isn't. It's not an industry problem, it's not a customer problem, it's a project problem.
Yeah.
If you're good about your project selection, and if you happen to work on the right projects that get built, your year is gonna end up being really good. For those that had challenges with the projects that were in the portfolio, their year is ending up not being as good. Really, our focus for 2024 and what our job is, is to make sure that that customer selection process is as solid as it can be, as predictable as it can be.
Okay. All right, so not to continue to beat up on IEA, we'll move to some of the other things. But some of the other areas that I think have been more pressured than where original expectations were, were on Power Delivery, particularly this last quarter, and then in telecom. Your telecom market is, you've got a wireless side and a wireline side. So, just flesh out the issues that are going in, in those markets and how they're... Are they project-specific too, or are these more industry dynamics?
Look, Power Delivery for us, the Power Delivery market's a fantastic market. I mean, if you look at utilities all over the country, their spend plans are increasing. The issues that they're having on system, you know, on system reliability, the hardening projects that have passed through public service commissions and have been committed to, and in some places more than others, the business is actually doing well. We did have an issue in the third quarter. I think the industry had an issue. I think others have corroborated the same thing. I mean, storm on a year-over-year basis was radically impacted. We haven't had this slow a storm season in four years.
Just to confirm, I mean, margins on storm are much, like double, maybe what-
They're significantly higher, which impacts-
Right.
But it impacts revenue, and it impacts margins, right?
Right.
So it impacted us on both places. You know, that's a very clear number for us. We know exactly what we did on storms last year. We know storms were, you know, virtually nonexistent this year. On a year-over-year basis, it was a significant drop in both revenues and margins. But the reality is, the storm also has impacted our customers.... We probably didn't understand this well enough, and let me explain. So you're a utility, and you're a utility in an area that's not storm affected, and you're predominantly on the East Coast 'cause it's closer. You have cooperation agreements with all the other utilities. When a storm comes, you allow your linemen to go work that storm to get that area up and running. In some cases, utilities send thousands of linemen to the storm.
So, and this has been happening every year for years. So all of a sudden, you're a utility, call it in the Northeast, and you've created a budget for your year. When you think about the third and fourth quarter, you build into that plan that there's gonna be some level of linemen that are gonna leave to go work storms. 'Cause again, it's been. It's happened consistently. Well, this year it didn't happen. So all of a sudden, the budget that you had for the year is consumed faster because none of those people left, so the work got consumed, and now there's less work for the balance of the year.
Rather than, and I think one of the differences that we're seeing this year that we historically wouldn't see in that situation, we'd see a lot of customers pool work in from the next year because there's just that much demand. But with interest rates where they are, in some cases, companies are going through rate cases, we're not seeing the pooling in of the next year's budget to offset that, and that's impacting capital spend in the back half of the year for some of our customers, predominantly on the East Coast. Not really a West Coast issue because they haven't really traveled for storms. It's been more of an East Coast issue, and I think that's specifically a 2023 issue that we'll see go away in 2024. We normally don't budget, you know, a storm season aggressively.
So if you think about the level of storm activity that we would have worked on last year, we wouldn't have expected to work on that level this year, but we wouldn't have expected it to be zero either. So I think that had, at least for MasTec, and I can't speak for the others, it had a significant impact to the latter half of our third quarter and the beginning of our fourth quarter than we would normally see.
Yeah, I mean, I, I think it's 'cause we haven't seen utilities cut CapEx budgets.
That's right.
If anything, I mean, the outlook for them over the next couple of years is higher than it would be normally just because they're dealing with load growth that they haven't dealt with in 20 years. So I
But if you even look at our peers, the acceleration of growth in the second half versus the first half shrank.
Correct
... across all of them.
Yeah.
So while, you know, maybe MasTec was more or less impacted than anybody else, the industry was impacted, and I truly believe that, you know, everybody was impacted by storm, but I don't think people realize the impact on the utility side and how that would affect their contractors on a go-forward basis. As we think about 2024, look, we hope there's no storms, and it's a very easy year-over-year comp, but the reality is that we would expect more storm activity than what we saw this year in a normalized year.
Okay.
On telecom-
Yeah, telecom.
To answer the telecom question, look, I mean, the telecom wireline business is... And this is where MasTec started. We started as a telecom wireline contractor. I've been in this business, hell, I was in the business in high school. I've kinda grown up in the business. This is where I started. I've never seen the level of activity that exists in wireline today in the communication sector in my entire career. RDOF, which is the main driver of that, is, you know, has - the money's out. We're seeing dozens of customers use RDOF funds to build out broadband systems, and we're in very early stages of that.
So the reality is that so much of the activity that we've seen to date is engineering, it's permitting, it's a lot of the pre-work things that you would need to get a project going, and we're, you know, some have started construction, but so many are converting to construction in the first half of 2024, and that's gonna be a huge catalyst for the industry because the construction drives so much more of the revenue than the engineering does. So, and then on top of that, you have BEAD funding, which was in the infrastructure bill, which is three times the size of RDOF, where the first dollar still hasn't been awarded to a company to actually build something. So, and we expect to begin to see that in 2025.
So our outlook for wireline, not just in the short term, but in the longer term, is probably as good as it's ever been. On the wireless side of the business, which is a big piece for us, 2023's been challenged. It is one of the places where carriers can cut CapEx. There's not a ton of places for them to cut CapEx, but in difficult economic times, and we've seen it happen a couple times in the last 15 years, it's an easier place for them to moderate CapEx. All of the carriers have said they expect 2024 to be flattish with 2023.
We talked on our call about an award, a large expansion award that we received with one of our wireless customers of about $100 million a year, and our initial 2024 outlook said we will be flat, including that award. So we think we've built ourselves a really nice buffer relative to our expectations in wireless, and if they are actually flat, then we'll actually perform better than what we've said. If they're down slightly, we should be in line with what we've said.
So maybe that's a good bridge. I mean, we haven't talked about oil and gas, but you're talking about 2024, and you guys did give a 2024 outlook-
We did.
a framework. Mid-single-digit to high- single-digit revenue growth and a margin 7.5%-8%, which would be versus this year, that's in the low sevens, something like that. So it's, it's obviously assuming growth. You're saying telecom, expectation flat, oil and gas, MVP has been a big contributor that's pushing a little bit into 2024 as well, but you've got a little bit of a headwind there. So, with backlog being down sequentially, what, what's the visibility into, you know, setting that as your base expectation for growth for next year?
Look, I think it goes back to what we said earlier, right? I think we take a lot of pride in having built a company that for years and years consistently performed. We not only performed our expectations, but we were in a very common rhythm of beating and raising. And when we think about how we set our 2024 plan, it was with that in mind. We absolutely hate the position that we've been in in this last year. We hate, you know, having to come to these conferences and talk about underperforming relative to expectations. So at the onset, that's how we thought of 2024. I mean, you generalize 2024 because you took it in a total bucket.
Sure.
But if you break it out by buckets, right? Our telecom business, when we said, you know, we thought we were very conservative in our guide for wireless. We think we're very conservative in our guide for wireline because we have the projects that are gonna considerably expand relative to construction. You know, our margins in that business are down slightly in the second half of the year, partly because we've had somewhat of a slowdown in wireless we didn't expect. First half of the year this year actually overperformed relative to where we were expecting. That's a double-digit margin business for us, right? It's been a double-digit margin for us for, you know, X years in the past. And, you know, there's no reason why that business shouldn't be there, especially in an environment where revenues are growing.
When we look at our oil and gas business, what we said was, we'll do about $2 billion this year, you know, at a reduced rate of $1.8 billion in 2024. We're gonna earn exactly what we earned in 2020. So what we've said is, from a margin dollar perspective, we expect the year to be flat year-over-year. Why is that? While MVP did help revenues, they hurt margins. When we look at the work activity that we have booked for next year, when we look at the projects that we either have in backlog or we know we're gonna sign, those are projects where we perform at a much higher level than what we performed at MVP.
So while MVP was a contributor to revenue, it really impacted our margins 'cause it's cost plus-
Right. I was gonna say it's not an execution issue, it's-
Hundred
... it's just a mix of it.
That's right.
Right.
We'll have some of it go into 2024, right?
Right.
But the reality is that the business that we'll be doing in 2024 is a higher, at least gives us the ability to attain higher margins than MVP would. When we look at, you know, our Power Delivery business, I mean, we're talking about mid-single-digit growth, that actually, you know, we hope that the business allows for considerable more growth. We talked about on our call about having certain consolidation efforts that our customers have done, where we've gained market share. So we've just gone through some RFP processes, where we've picked up a bunch of territory that we didn't have on the utility side. So, you know, we're very encouraged about what their plans are, what the go-forward market is there, and our ability to perform and execute.
Again, we've talked about the margin appreciation of INTREN and Henkels since we bought it 18 months ago. We think that's gonna continue. We think, again, we've, we've said multiple times, that should be a double-digit margin business for us, and we're gonna grow into that. And then I think you get to clean energy, where, you know, obviously, we've had a horrible year relative to what our expectations were. And all we've said in that business is we expect to grow it at double digits, which we think is... I mean, when you think about all the issues that we faced in 2023, we think that's a very realistic target, and we're trying to get it to a base margin level. You know, we're not getting to high single digits. We're trying to create a bridge from where we are today.
If you add in a bunch of the inefficiencies we've had, that's kind of what we're guiding for margins in 2024 in that business.
Okay. I know we're getting close to time. We don't have a breakout, and I promised questions. But, Paul, maybe you could talk a little bit about where leverage is, cash flow, and also maybe just the tenor of earnings for next year, within that framework.
Sure. So, you know, from a leverage perspective, our nominal debt balance is gonna end the year relatively close to where we expected it, even through the prior durations of guidance. The issue from a leverage component is really the denominator, right? So our earnings are not where they need to be to get back down to the 2.5x target that we had put out for the end of the year. We'll be in the low threes in the end of 2023, and then we think with both strong cash flow in Q4, because of the seasonality of the business and into Q1, we should see a more nominal debt reduction that allows us to get below 3x relatively quickly into 2024.
And then the earnings opportunity that we foresee, that Jose laid out, that we think is, you know, pretty achievable, allows us to, you know, get back down to that 2.5 times pretty quickly in 2024. So, a lot of focus on cash flow still. The mix of businesses, or the mix of revenue going into 2024 also contributes to that. The clean energy business has a lower working capital requirement than, like, our communication segment, for example. So there's a little bit of a creative dynamic there relative to cash flow, as that business becomes a higher growth opportunity relative to our communication segment next year.
You know, we think getting to that cadence of continued cash flow, Q4, Q1, probably a little bit of consumption in Q2 as we ramp, you know, puts us down to that 2.5 level, you know, within the framework that we've laid out into kinda the back half of 2024.
Okay. All right, I'm gonna open it up to questions. I know we're kinda at time, but let's-
I've got two quick ones. Jose, do you have a proper incentive compensation structure in place for those individuals at MasTec that are entering into contracts on behalf of the company in terms of the proper risk reward framework? And then the second question is, you ran at 11% EBITDA margin for three years, 2019 to 2021. Given the current mix of business, can you get back there, or is the mix so different now that you're not gonna be able to get back to that 11%?
Do you want to repeat the question one more time?
Yeah. So the question was, it was a twofold question. The first was, do we have the proper compensation structure for people that are entering contracts on behalf of MasTec, or I guess, bidding contracts on behalf of MasTec? And the second was, you know, we ran three years in a row at roughly 11% EBITDA margins. Is that a target that we can get back to? So I'll start with the second part. Look, I think that, you know, we're in a dynamic industry that is rapidly... All those segments that I talked about have tremendous opportunities, you know, maybe not as we just think about 2024, but as you think about the next three- to five-year cycle, there's gonna be an enormous amount of pricing pressure in the industry that's gonna allow us to, over time, creep up margins.
So I'm not gonna say that we could never get back to the 11, but when we think about the business mix that we're running today, you know, when we laid out long-term guidance, we, you know, we laid out high- single, low- double as our target. I think 11's on the high side. You know, we're talking about 7.5 to eight for next year, right? So the reality is, how do we get, you know, how do we step there to nine, 9.5, 10, and then obviously, over time, try to shoot for more? From an incentive perspective, look, I think everybody in our company is aligned.
You know, one person doesn't have the ability to mandate a contract structure for us, so it goes through lots of different iterations, from bidding to understanding what execution. Our execution teams, you know, are aligned with our bidding teams as we go after projects. And, you know, at the end of the day, we don't—nobody's incentive to get revenues in our company. All of our incentives are around profitability. So if somebody goes out to win work for the sake of winning work, there's no financial incentive to do that. If you want, we can open up a breakout session for a few minutes, if anybody's got a question, 'cause I know we're over time.
As long as you have a couple of minutes, then we'll go ahead and do our regular breakout, which is right next door, I think.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.