Great. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the Quanta Services 2022 Investor Day. My name's Kip Rupp, and I'm Quanta's Vice President of Investor Relations. We're excited to discuss with you and take a deeper dive into our business and industry trends and the strategies and initiatives we have in place to differentiate Quanta from the competition and capitalize on opportunities to grow the business over the next several years. For those joining us today that may be newer to the story, Quanta Services is a leading specialty infrastructure solutions provider serving the utility, renewable energy, communications, and energy industries, with operations focused on North America and Australia. We believe Quanta is a unique company in our industry with a notable competitive advantage.
This slide presents some of the key characteristics that we feel differentiate Quanta from our competition in the eyes of our customers, employees, and the investment community. As you'll hear today, we remain focused on providing solutions to our customers through collaboration and continuing to advance our capabilities to meet their needs. As our customers' capital programs increase in size, scope, and complexity, many are seeking a long-term and enhanced relationship with Quanta to deliver projects for them safely, on time, and on budget. As you can see from the agenda, our discussion today will be led by Duke Austin, Quanta's President and CEO, and Derrick Jensen, Quanta's CFO. We also have a number of senior executives joining us from Quanta in the room today.
Quanta has a strong and experienced corporate and operational leadership team with decades of experience in the industry, and many with several generations of family involvement in our industry. Duke will start the presentations with a reflection on the last five years, and then we'll discuss key elements of our business strategy. Derrick will then discuss our financial success, our long-term financial goals, and capital allocation strategy. We'll then have a Q&A session to address any of the topics we've discussed during the morning. If you'd like to answer or ask a question during the Q&A period, please raise your hand and we'll get a microphone over to you to ask your question. Please identify yourself and who you work for prior to asking your question.
Additionally, for those joining us through the webcast, you have the ability to submit questions during the Q&A session, and I'll try to balance questions as best I can between questions here in the room in person and those received on the webcast. We expect to conclude the formal and webcasted portion of the event between 11:00 A.M. and 11:30 A.M. Eastern Time this morning. For those in attendance that would like to join the Quanta team for informally for lunch after the event, that'll take place just outside the room in the lobby area. This event is being webcast from our website, and all the presentation materials we'll be discussing today will be available shortly after the conclusion of the event and can be found in the Investors and Media section of our website at quantaservices.com. Finally, a brief housekeeping item.
All the presentations and comments made here today are covered by the forward-looking statement language shown here. Please remember that information discussed during this Investor Day speaks only as of today, April 5th, 2022, and therefore you're advised that any time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate as of any replay of this call. This Investor Day will include forward-looking statements intended to qualify under the safe harbor from liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These include all statements reflecting Quanta's expectations, intentions, assumptions, or beliefs about future events or performance, or that do not solely relate to historical or contracts. Forward-looking statements involve certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict or beyond Quanta's control, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied.
For additional information concerning some of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, please refer to the cautionary language included in today's presentation, along with the company's periodic reports and other documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available on Quanta's or the SEC's website. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and Quanta does not undertake any obligation to update such statements and disclaims any written or oral statements made by any third party regarding the subject matter of this Investor Day. Please also note that we will present certain historical and forecasted GAAP, non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted diluted EPS, backlog, EBITDA, and free cash flow. Reconciliations of these measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in our presentation.
Lastly, if you'd like to be notified when Quanta publishes news releases or other information, please sign up for email alerts through the Investor Relations section of quantaservices.com. We also encourage investors and others interested in our company to follow Quanta IR and Quanta Services on the social media channels listed on the website. Before I turn the floor over to Quanta's President and Chief Executive Officer, Duke Austin, I'd like to kick things off with a brief video about Quanta.
Be the best.
Be the best.
That you can be.
That you can be.
Every day.
Every day. That's right.
Morning, everyone. Welcome to Quanta's 2022 Investor Day. Good to have everyone here. I think it's really important for us to kind of be back in person. We learned a lot about ourselves through the pandemic, how we can communicate. A lot of people on the phone, a lot of people, you know, in video conferencing, but certainly the people in the room, it's good to see you. We've done a lot over the time through the pandemic. I think a lot to say about the company and where we're going. When we think about it and we think about where we're at and the key takeaways, I thought it was important for us to come here and talk about where we're going as a company.
Happens to be years ago, we met in Lazy Q out in La Grange, Texas, and we talked about kind of the things that we were where we were, what we were doing, and our core values. I think it's extremely important to go back a little bit and talk about it before we go forward. We're gonna do that, but a few takeaways. Same. It hasn't changed. Craft skill labor is very key to Quanta. What I will say, we built the portfolio, we built the platform for double-digit, 10% type EPS growth that we talk about all the time. What we're doing today is we're gonna talk about a strategy that delivers 15%+ going forward. I think that's important if you take one thing away.
We have a platform that delivers 10% and a strategy that delivers 15%+ with opportunities and pathways. It de-risks the 10, but has the upside of the 15%+. As we go through, that's one key takeaway for me that that's why we're here, because I believe the company's fundamentally changed. We're different today than we were 10 years ago. You know, we're proud of what we've done, but you're only as good as what you do tomorrow. Like, yesterday is yesterday. We wake up every day, I wake up every day of getting older, reinvent myself. But in general, no one cares about yesterday. They wanna know what you're gonna do tomorrow. I do think for us, we're proud of our base, but I think that what you'll see through this is what we can accomplish.
We have great service lines, great people, but Scott Blattner said it best when we were in discussions. He said, "We don't build projects, we build people." I think this is a people business, so you will see our strategy is certainly centered around people. We've done a lot on our platform and our portfolio of companies through this. We've 15,000 plus people that we've added. We've built out New York, we've done Stronghold, we've done Blattner. If you look at the things in our platform, and then we've built a college, built training, we've built curriculum. I think it's really important 'cause that sets the base of where we're going. What we've done in that strategy, you can see behind me, it's a lot.
We've done a lot over the last five years that allow growth going forward, so it's really about what the value we can add to it on a go-forward basis. You see the numbers. We're proud of them. I think our track record speaks for itself. Same management team, same people in the room going forward. A few faces that we'll introduce later. Ladies, thanks for being here. But definitely same characteristics, same companies leading the industries that we serve and put up these kind of numbers. When we think about the value and what we're doing, it's a couple things here. I think two things. One, we're trying to de-risk our portfolio building on the past going forward while you have the growth.
You can see kinda how we're looking at this and what we've done over the last six years, what's driving the value, but also de-risk the kind of double-digit EPS that we'll talk about. I think it's important in the model too that we're in early stages of really at the very core of how we operate, of getting leverage out of the operating units at the local levels. We're also very much concerned with that, and I do think it will enhance the overall margins. We've talked about that as a company. We said 10% and 1%. Last time that was our goal. You know, this time we're talking 10% EPS growth on a CAGR basis and opportunities for 15%+. Different conversations.
If you look at us and what the model is and why we think it's important, when I see it, you know, the client, we really collaborate at the client level. When we look at where we're at and where we're going, it's about that collaboration, and we provide cost certainty. When you think about it at a client level, the craft skill labor allows us to be certain and allows us to go deliver. I think it's the very nucleus of where we're trying to go, and it allows the total addressable market is much larger than what we've talked about in the past.
I do think part of the strategy was to be able to deliver certainty to the client, to really enhance our ability to look at the total addressable market, and it certainly has gotten bigger. When you think about what we're trying to accomplish, the character of the people in the room, the character of where we're going is everything in our business. We want continuity. We're really creating the value through the people. You're gonna hear me talk a lot about people, about how we're educating people, about where we're going with that, and we have an entrepreneur. No one wakes up and goes, "I'm satisfied." Matter of fact, it's the opposite.
You know, I think we run these businesses in the good times like we run them in the bad, maybe harder, because you can't get complacent and we're not as a company, and it's really around the culture, the character, and the continuity as we build people. In fact, I think we spent more time in the early days of the pandemic; we decided to build a people strategy. Why do you build a people strategy? Well, how are we gonna get to the numbers to where we're going? It was extremely important that we had a succinct strategy around doing that. We did that through the pandemic. In the early days, we were all together. We said, "Let's build a strategy around people," and we did it.
You know, I think the company will forever, you know, we have a roadmap to get where we wanna go. You're adding 3,000+ people a year, so it's important. You can see what's happening with our campuses. We've expanded our campuses. Our investments in those campuses have been tremendous. Aaron's actually in the room, so please make sure you talk to him later about how he thinks about it. The curriculum, the things that we've done there, I think are really important as we train our people. When you think about it, when you think about where we need to go, and you start adding 3,000 a year, you have to do it safely, smartly, and productive. We're building all that back into these programs through our people and our performance.
When you think about how many people we're training, you also have to think about how many people are leaving the business from utilities. Our customer base, the attrition is 100,000+ going this way, load growth going straight up, and we're decarbonizing. You know, every bit more so pressure on people to train to get in the business. We're actually just looking all the way through in many ways, many areas around how do we make this transition? How do we have the workforce? How do we make sure that Quanta is at the tip of the spear of this? I think our workforce and how we train and how we attract and bring kids into the business is really important and is really a core value of who we are.
We work at it extremely hard, and I think this separates us. If you're just starting to think about this, you're way too late. We did this nine years ago. This is a platform we started eight, nine years ago, and we've tacked onto it in the incremental spends because we see a market and we value the craft, and I think this will separate us. We have a video here, I believe, that we'll play.
When we think about training, it's really craft skill is the core of Quanta, and it's really the heartbeat, so, you know, separates us from others to not only say, "Yes, we do have craft skill," but, "Yes, we do train." If we wanna be world-class, we wanna be the very best at craft skill labor, then we have to put the money into the training. You know, I do think that that's one of my priorities as part of being the CEO of Quanta.
Puts our best people in the field. It reduces safety incidents if they're trained right, and it also helps with retention. I think it just shows our employees that we truly care about them, and we truly care about good training.
The overall goal is to provide the OpCo an employee that is safe and productive. When our customers see that we are dedicated to the training, they realize we really are talking about safety.
Probably the most important thing we have in front of us is how to fill the gap. Not only that, our clients are asking us to as well. If we're gonna be collaborative as a company, we're going to have to invest in training that's consistent, that gives us what we need, and allow craft to move as far as they want up in this organization.
One of our largest challenges when it comes to training is just finding the time to do it. When you look at how much we invest in our equipment, how much time do we put into our largest asset, which is our people? I think we have to believe that the training is not just check the box. We've got to get behind it. As the leaders, we have to believe in it. We have to know that it's making a difference and that it is truly an investment back to our people.
Quanta's vision is world-class training, you know, regionally at the OpCos, and that's what we want. That's the target. You know, we've got to define it first. World-class training, you know, it really means that it's not only highly effective, but it's affecting time and cost. You know, secondly, we got to be aware of what's already offered under Quanta Craft Training. You know, at a high level, training offerings span the entire career of our craft-skilled workers in telecom, gas, and power. You know, includes pre-apprentice, apprentices, specialized and advanced offerings. These things occur at the Lazy Q, at Northwest Lineman College. There's satellite training yards. You know, there's training at the work site. Some of our OpCos have some pretty impressive training centers.
The way the brain learns is much different than the way craft thinks about it.
In the family businesses, the families taught the families. My dad, I worked for him for 20-plus years. He was passionate about teaching me. We have to have that same passion for every person in this organization.
With Quanta Craft Training, we'll not only realize Duke's vision, we'll redefine craft training forever. Craft is our core. It'll be our finest hour, and our people will be at the center.
So you can see the things that we're doing. I think in general, the video says a lot, but when we thought about it, when we thought about where we need to go and how far we need to go with to be diverse, to be inclusive, to get to the inner cities, how do you do that? It can't be done the same way it was done 50 years ago. I saw my dad. It was a lot different back then, a lot. Things are different. We have to think different. Kids are different. My kids are different. Your kids are different.
The way the brain thinks, we were trained the same way for 50 years. When you add academia, you add curriculum, what happens when you get a pre-apprentice that pays those kids that are yelling? We didn't make them yell. We didn't say, "Hey, go yell and cheer." They got up that morning and did that. They paid double digits to go to school to learn. They're doing that on their own. It's powerful. People say, "Well, where are you gonna get the workforce?" Well, you see it. There it is. I always say, if you don't realize who we are and what Craftskill is, go to Idaho. You'll see it at that training facility.
There's kids that wanna be in this business, and we're working at it really hard from academia, hitting a ton of different ways. It's necessary. What does it do for us? What does it do as Quanta? Why does that make a difference? 'Cause they get in the field, and they know what they're doing. They're productive day one. Not day 500, day one. It matters. Really, when we think about our customer base and what we did there and how we thought about it, we are providing solutions here. I do think when we think about it, the collaborative nature of Quanta and how we think about if our customer's successful, then we're successful nine times out of ten.
I think that's really important when you look at the customer bases that we have and many of them transitioning in the energy transition. We wanna make them successful. The verticals that we work across the board, I mean, that's theoretically we work at that. We work at the customer level, and you'll hear me say multiple times about collaboration. It's key to where we're going and is to make the industry successful through how we deliver, and it matters. It matters where we sit. We're very sticky when you think about our customer base and how many people that we have. Many of these are customers for decades, and we stick.
We stay in the facilities, you know, 17,000+ that stay with our customers on a daily basis, in many ways building the very infrastructure for the transition. It's sticky. It's not. We talk about all the time base business, but you can see this is a great slide around what we're doing and how long we've been on these customers' facilities and what we do for them on a daily basis. You can see where the industry's going. This is kind of our customer base. We're still widely backed by, you know, utility capital, and you can see the spends of our customers going up. I think it's important when we think about it, how deep these relationships are, how we collaborate with our clients as they ramp up their capital. We're moving along with them.
No matter what we say or how we're talking about it, you'll hear me continue to drive, well, we're not doing 30% or we're not doing something, but it's client feedback from our customer base that as they move that capital up with them. You can see kinda we re-segmented the business a bit. We've talked about through the acquisition of Blattner what we're doing to deliver on the transition here. But we have segmented roughly 50% electric, 25 between UUI and your renewables. We have done that. Why did we do that? I just think it, for me and for our investor base, it was a better way that we could speak to it better. I will say that no matter how we segment, it's extremely important in the field that we operate across.
We'll operate across all these segments. We have New York-based talent in the room. They'll be doing electric. You've gotta think of it as while we comment to our investment community around this as we look at numbers, it's in the field we're operating across service lines. Many of our units in early stages of that, and I would tell you that's when we talk about operating leverage and getting operating leverage, it's about operating across these segments. It matters, and you get utilizations out of it. We can certainly do a lot of things. I do think, you know, we have talked a bit about supply chain. I get questions about it every 10 minutes. When I think about supply chain, look, the glass is half full for us.
We'll be the very ones that collaborate to fix the issues, to help. We have a big, broad base of business that I believe allows us to mitigate those risks. We talk about the portfolio. Many of you have a portfolio that you're managing. Same thing. We're managing a portfolio. When you think about the segments, it's that portfolio that de-risks through supply chains. We can't deny the fact that we have a war, we have tariffs on panels. You have four or five different things going on at once. I wanna be clear, we're reiterating where we stand for the year. It's April. We're doing great. I think from my standpoint, yes, we'll talk about it. I'll talk to you all day long about it, but we've mitigated those risks.
I think we'll come out ahead and also create value because of it. Anytime you have a problem or an issue, if we do it right, we do it properly, this company will come out ahead, not behind, 'cause we've already thought about it. Thought about it six weeks ago, six months ago when we went through it. We talked about, like, our fleet. When you think about our fleet, we never missed a beat. When we talk about collaboration, the business was very transactional early. I think why we're different across all segments? What has changed? Why is this a different look today than it was six years ago even? In my mind, we self-perform 85% of our business through craft on all lines. A little bit less in telecom, but primarily, a blended segment, it's 85%.
When we think about it, that self-performance gives us certainty and allows us to provide the solution to the client. It was led mostly around engineering before at the client level. Now it's led with constructability. I think when you think through it, engineering's about 5%-7% of any project. When we're in front of it, we're 80%, 60%-80%, if you take the material. You're thinking through that, why are we not leading that? Why did we always get behind, and why were we never in front? We've been working eight-nine years to get in front to look at the total addressable market and also drive the value to the client. I think that was our biggest thing, is overcoming that.
We're in early stages, that 30% we talk about all the time of that addressable market on the front side of the business. We'll continue to bolster that, and it's not a day goes by that that's just as robust as our construction. When you blend it, and when you have that conversation at a client level that you can actually. It's much like a consultant that actually builds something. When I think about it, that's who I think we've become through this solution-based platform. I do think what was happening in the past, we weren't communicating well enough with the client, and it was really pressing on us and pushing us down.
Now that we can have a deep discussion with them and have much, much more addressable market, actually, and we start early. When you think about why we win, what's going on, why is Quanta successful, we're really early in these projects when you start talking the whole market and you start thinking about the total cost of a project versus just a piece of it. It doesn't matter, like, if you think about how Blattner thinks, you know, we all think. This is why we were successful and what enables us to differentiate ourselves against our competition. This is a. We wanted to give you an example.
There's a client we've had very transactional client for 25, 30, 40 years probably, and you can see from when we thought about it, we were doing five poles in, oh, X, Y, Z city. That was the job 10 years ago, and become 100 poles. Then becomes the whole city. Then becomes the whole program and whole state. The involvement of our ability to self-perform, give them cost certainty, give safety, and also scale to the capital plans of the client. Because if you think through the utility-based customers, they really need the capital deployed when they say they are. For one thing, they're trying to modernize systems to get in front of a lot of the macro trends we're going to talk about here in a minute. It really resonated with our client.
This is just one example of a bunch. Many of our clients are going this way. Majority are moving towards more programmatic ways to look at things versus commoditization of one-off projects. It's big programs. I do think when we think about the transition, and we talk about it a lot about how we look at the energy transition, what are we doing. From my standpoint, you can see the numbers are staggering. This is a worldwide number. Probably has China in it, I'm confident. It'll be a big piece of it. Still, if you say 1 billion or 1.5 trillion, I can say it's a big number in this transition. It's huge. These are things that are driving. I do think we're at the tip of the spear of this. We are.
Where we sit in this transition, we talk about it a lot, but we're providing the solutions to get us there as a country or even in all the markets that we serve, Australia, Canada. We're at the tip of the spear. There's nothing that we're not talking about that's not up here on this other slide to a client. We are providing the solutions. I think when you go back and you look at all the things that we do today and where we're going, it's different. It looks different. We have the things that are core that enable us now, but where we're going, if you think through it, if we're gonna decarbonize, if we're going to carbon free, it looks different.
We'll discuss it, we'll talk about it through the segments, but there's no way around the emerging transition that's ongoing and where we sit in this transition. If you look at every segment, and you look at the megatrends, we're calling them megatrends. I call them pathways. All the trends that you see, these segments have them in there, every one of them. Whether it's, you know, we'll talk about 5G, we'll talk about technology, how we're using technology, all those kind of things, but it's in these segments. It positions us to really have a full discussion and be one stop. On the electric power side, you can see the numbers. This is characteristic of a few things, a few trends, a few opportunities that we see and how we see it playing out.
I do think this is scopes of some of our customers. We talk a lot about, "Well, where is it at? Where is it at? What are you talking about?" We put together some slides around just a few things that are ongoing, and I do think these transitions, this transition is around these trends. When we talk about the pathways, we talk about the growth of the company. As we said before, when we say 15%+, as we go through these segments, these are the things that drive on top of your base that's still delivering double-digit type EPS growth. This is stacking on. We talk about it a lot, but it's additive. I think it's important. We talked about the past, told where we were, where we're going, but this is all additive here.
I do think it's an important thing when we think about what does the transition mean for Quanta and why. We're already doing many things here. We talk about grid hardening. We talk about the undergrounding. If you think about undergrounding, just take that for example. You say, "Okay, well, out west, fire hardening." Ten years ago, we would have said, "Hey, you can't go underground. It's too expensive." Right. Now you say, "Well, loss of life on the West Coast, the amount of insurance that is spent for fire, storms, all those things, you can't afford not to underground in many areas because it's uninsurable." I think we're down that path, very early stages of undergrounding. I think you'll see it across the coastlines. We're seeing it here in New York.
As we bring wind on, you'll see more and more undergrounding across the system. It's a big trend. I do think you'll see our segments move across here. If we were at, you know, doing gas, it's not a lot different. We do it here in New York. It's not a lot different underground, no matter what service line you're putting in, gas, telecom, electric. It's the same principles, the same people, until you get to the very craft at the end, and then we can supplement the craft. In my mind, that's it. That's how we're doing, you know, how we go across and transition into the underground. You also have your interconnections on renewables. There's about 10 different things in my mind that we're doing on the electric side.
When I think through it, EV is a huge example of, well, what does that mean? Well, EV, when you put electric vehicles on systems, it's not only the charging stations, but it's the incremental spend on the distribution systems that will go on for a long, long period of time. You have a 50-, 60-, 70-year-old distribution system that is not modern, that needs to be modernized to handle the load of EV. Well, it's at night. You're charging at night. It's different. It's totally different. I don't think we even understand as an industry yet the magnitude and the amount of electric vehicles that are coming onto the system. The manufacturers are there. OEMs are there. They're going. It's gone. We're going to EV.
The load on those systems, we're in early stages of that build, and that's in our mind what we're considering a mega trend when we think about why the growth, where the business is going. Early stages, you have workforce attrition going on within the utility business as well, as I discussed, and load growth. All three things at once, with attrition. If you look at the capital budgets of the clients, somebody get questions all the time around, "Well, what does it mean?" around Build Back Better or the transition. Well, they had $75 billion in the transition in the Biden plan. You can look at just a fraction of the customers up here that we work for. You can see the capital spends.
Much of this doesn't even include your EV build or different things today. This is like a three-year, five-year type timeframe for our clients. It doesn't include a lot of your internet, anything like that. This is just a small fraction. This is what gives you and us the confidence in getting up here and talking about a five-year, 10-year strategy around this. I think it's multi-decades, actually. These strategies and what we need to do as a country to get where we're going transition, you can see our clients are behind it, and it's something that you can look at from a capital spend standpoint. Technology, when we think about 5G, it's kind of our telecom piece of the segment. We've invested in technology through Starry.
I think that will prove to be a great investment to the underserved, fixed wireless capabilities, allows us to build out abilities, and that's in the segment. It really, in my mind, gives us growth patterns. We use technology throughout the organization, and I think when you go through communications, we have many of our clients with secure networks or wanting secure networks. When I think about where we're going as a company, our electric business, our linemen, our guys in the field are also very much involved in the telecom build-out, whether it be 5G or wireless. Either way, we're involved in this build-out because our utility electric customers are also secure networks. With RDOF and all the things that are happening here, your customer bases are changing.
It's not necessarily just your traditional customer base you've seen in the past. You got, you know, big players in here and through federal funding that's allowing a different customer base. Your utilities are building out, your cooperatives are building out, your municipalities are building out. In my mind, huge opportunity here. I will say we're proud of where we sit. We're not execution. We own that. We'll fix it, and we have fixed it. Part of who we are is only when you have mistakes, and you're not as good as you thought you were, it makes you go back and think about how do you execute better across this spectrum. I can tell you that you can ask anyone in the room.
Personally, it bothers me when we don't execute what we think we can and what we're capable of. Yeah, we're just getting started here. We're gonna execute here. We are executing here now, and I do think the opportunity here is significant going forward through technology, through the customer that we have. We got off to a little bit of a slow start, but where we're going now and the platform that's put in here is certainly significant, and the drivers and mega trends here are significant. Renewables. I'm gonna talk about obviously big piece of what we've done here lately would be our Blattner acquisition and where they sit and how we think about the infrastructure solutions around this and also the interconnections. In my mind, the country's moving this direction. We're going. It's about.
I looked it up this morning, it is 35% of the world is renewable with hydro, if you add hydro. Take hydro out, I know in North America it's like 20%. When you think about it, and you think if you're moving in that direction, there's no way to go where you wanna go as a nation without solar, wind, balance of builds. It's significant. When we leaned into the Blattner acquisition, it was really around this market, and we saw it from a macro level. When we met the family, thought about it was just like Quanta. Every bit of where Blattner sat in this market was certainly where we were on the other side of it.
It allowed us lots of synergies that we haven't even talked about, but just philosophically on how we thought culturally was large for Quanta here. In my mind, we're also thinking around hydro in Canada, all the interconnections there, and what we can do through the transition. When we think through Canada, well, Canada's bounced a bit, but the hydro and what we're doing from load from Canada really, you know, backstops that market. Solar wind, obviously, where we sit here, I think at the very top of the sphere and where we can go and what we can do for every client, synergies that we can give, not only from a top-line growth, but also internally. We have a very robust supply chain here. I think it separates us on the renewable side.
I'm real proud of that as well on the other side. Really can drive some value. You can see here the load, what's planned, they're large. You can see where it's going. You can see the load growth. You see the miles of transmission that we believe are necessary, the renewable generation that we're gonna put on the systems. It's massive. To think you can put load on here without doubling your transmission corridors is probably not possible at this stage without some kind of technology that we don't know what it is. We're not seeing the technology to give us any kind of load. I mean, wire, you can do some things with wire, but ultimately, you have to expand your transmission system to handle intermittency of renewables coming. You also have the renewables coming on the market.
Both those two things are driving our renewable business and that segment, and it's massive. I do think when I think through it, you might have short-term blips here or there, a speed bump. What I would tell you is anytime you see a speed bump, we're gaining market share on the other side of it. Definitely. That gives me a lot of confidence. It gives me a lot of confidence of our client base here and how we think. If you're a utility or a developer, whatever it may be, we're thinking through next year. We're thinking through the previous year, how we go about it, how we build. As someone's considering their carbon-free plan or energy transition plan, we're at the very top of that, and we talk to them all the time.
I mean, if you go back and you think about how much renewables has been built, we've built around 25% of renewables in North America. Well, lower 48%. I mean, 25% is significant. I do think with the ability to repeat that or beat that number going forward, if we do it right, and we are. We have the platforms to do so, and the opportunities are certainly there in this transition. I do think when we think about it, in both companies, we talk all the time about how we're alike. Blattner was 115 years old. When we thought about it was really about the client and how we interacted at the client.
The clients would say, "Can you do it like Blattner?" At Blattner, I would say, "Can you do it like Quanta?" We didn't even know, like, until we got together. I think that really gives me a lot of confidence. You know, when I think about confidence in how we can deliver on the same way we deliver transmission or telecom or gas on the other side, deliver the same way in a solution-based environment with the client driving value on renewables. The conversations get way broader than just a wind farm, a solar farm, a transmission line interconnect. It's much broader than that. We're looking at programs. We're looking at large long-term spends here. Lots of trends here. The relationships are key for us.
I do think when we think through and you hear, in this segment, you may hear some others say, "Well, we're having trouble." We have scale here, and the scale allows a lot of flexibility within the segment. We can move people from wind, solar. We've talked about it a lot, about all the things that we're capable of. I will say, make no mistake that our clients are moving this direction, and they want a solution. We're able to provide that now with what we consider the best renewable, solution provider in the world. Together, the transition becomes very much in play for us on this segment. With that, I think we have a video here on wind work, please. Everything we do in wind, solar is big, real big. Big cranes.
Uniquely positioned here in my mind when we thought about Blattner as we go into the UUI group, really the self-perform capabilities, you say, "Well, what separates?" Their ability to train people and get people more productive, same. Very much in line. That's why the margins are there. That's why they lead the way. Same with Quanta on the other side, 85%. I do think it separates. We're not a general contractor or a engineering firm. We build it. We build the people that build it. I do think that's really a characteristic if you think about how we differentiate in this segment or any other segment that we have. It's around our people craft.
UUI, you saw the mega trends up there, all the kinda things that we think through, whether it's carbon sequestration, hydrogen, methane leaks. You are getting a programmatic spend on your local distribution systems. The values are going up in the systems. As you can see with the utility, when they sell a system, it's they're getting good value for those systems. Why are they getting good value? 'Cause they're there. They're gonna be there a long period of time as we make through transitions. I do think natural gas is a play here for a long period of time as we transition to a carbon-free environment. It's very clean in many ways, and you can blend hydrogen in it.
We're at the very top of that level talking to those clients on a daily basis here at this. When I think through it, we also have got the core competencies to underground electric, to underground telecom. We can move across our service lines here. We underground a lot in wind and solar. We can move. All the things that you hear around the transition on the gas side, electric side, telecom technology, it doesn't matter if you think about gas in this segment. One day it's gas, next day it's something else. The portfolio is big. I do think you'll see LNG build out. Obviously, with what you see from a security standpoint, I do believe the country will build LNG out. You'll start to see more of those projects get built.
Our Australian business is robust. Mining, significant mining on batteries as well as, you know, you got high oil, good LNG, so that business goes way up through this as well as Canada. People say, well, all the time, "Well, why? Why not just divest?" Well, you know, in my mind, it's a portfolio of companies, a few geographies that we can operate in that allows us to be what I think at the very top of the transition, and we're thinking through it in Australia just as much as we're thinking through it here. We learn. Many times they'll have ahead of us and many times we're ahead of them, so we learn back and forth.
In this segment, it's certainly something that there is a lot of things going on, even in our industrial business on bio, biodiesel, how catalyst is done there, where we sit in our industrial business. We have a really nice start to that this year, so I think again, as we move forward, we're in the right spots to take advantage of the transition, and not only to take advantage of it, but to help the clients in our industrial side and our UI side get to where they wanna go from a carbon-free standpoint. When they start talking about, "Well, how do I get there?" We're there. We're already there. We're talking to them. Whether it be, "Oh, I wanna build a solar plant. I got 5 million acres in X, Y, Z," or whatever. We're able to do those things.
I think that really positions us well from top-line growth, and when we talk about synergies across the portfolio, it certainly de-risks us to the 10% and also gives you the upside plus of the 15%, when we think through it. We talked about the portfolio. We talked about where we stand and where we sit. I do think the de-risking of it is important. When I thought about it's not just the growth, but it's the de-risk thereof. Our addressable markets are getting bigger. As we provide the solutions across the front side of the business, it's early stages of that for us, developing those programs, helping the clients, whether it be battery charging stations across the country or at the OEMs or whatever it may be.
We deal with multitude of clients that we have the ability to get to the transition through these segments, and it's all around craft, which we know very well. Many, many verticals we could go around craft as well, and we think through that every day. Where can we go? What can we do off this platform which creates value? That's what we're here to do, is create value. When I think about sustainability, ESG, our portfolio, it's pretty easy to talk about. I think in many ways we were already doing much of this. When I thought about it, "Well, what are you doing?" Well, okay, so we think about Puerto Rico, what we're doing on the island and what we're doing for people on the island and how we think through that.
Not only are we building a modern infrastructure, we're also providing jobs, built a college campuses, inner cities. How we develop inner city, I think is really important. When you think, "Okay, how do I make sure that we're diverse, inclusive in our workforce?" We really have it down where it's. We know what to look for in the inner city. We know how to recruit. We know how to get kids in and provide great jobs. We not only do that for ourselves, we do it for our clients. Lots of opportunity here. Obviously, we're a renewable build. We use batteries all over the place where we used to cycle oil. We recycle a lot of the, you know, hardware we put in the air.
As an industry, as a company, I think we're right in the middle of this, whether, when you think about family and how much we give back, there's no company that's more committed to their people than we are. In my mind, we really drive that, and it gives us, you know, lots of things to talk about and from an environmental and governance and everything that we're doing here in a social aspect. We're proud of this. We're proud of where we sit. I do think as we move forward, we're going to have good metrics, and we're going to put them up. Obviously, our fleet is. We use it every day to build the very infrastructure that allows us to go to an energy transition. We can't take away the fleet.
What we can do is, as batteries progress in fleet, we go with them. I mean, we talked about a partnership with GM. We just did with GM, and it's a large number, thousands of Silverados in the West. Right in the front of it. Not behind it, in front with GM, developing those vehicles and the workforce around our ability to make the transition. It can be on a solar plant, it can be underground, but we will move the fleet towards batteries as they progress. Obviously, they haven't picked up in a heavier duty truck yet, but as they do, we'll progress with them as well. We're working with OEMs here, as Quanta to really pull down our footprint, and we have technology on our fleet.
Almost 100% of our fleet has technology around GPS, so we can idle times, things like that, we'll be able to account for those things. I do think we'll spend a lot of time on reports here, and you'll see us stand behind this and put, you know, significant reporting out on how we sit here 'cause I think it's a great story, not only what we're doing as a company, but where we sit as people and what we're doing internally. We're proud of this. We're proud of where we sit here. You'll see us put more reporting out here. I think for me, key takeaways, I've talked to 10 and 15. I've beat that to death, so I'm not gonna keep beating on you about it. Jamie's gonna calculate it here in a minute.
That being said, I do think it is a takeaway. We've built a great platform, and we've de-risked the platform. We have a great portfolio like many of you, and that gives us a lot of what I would consider strength that we didn't have six years ago. Six years ago, we were trying to build our base. We were trying to find identity. Now we have growth platforms that we can grow. We're excited about it. We're excited about our track record. We're excited about how we collaborate with the client, where we sit in this transition. Derrick gets to have the fun part and tell you all the numbers. In general, I would just say the management team's committed. We're gonna have Q&A after Derrick gets up. He's next.
With that, Derrick and I have worked together a long time, and it's fun. We have fun together, and I will tell you, like, what we've done with our balance sheet and the things that we've done, I will say it gives us, me, the ability to stand here and talk about how we're gonna grow EPS. 'Cause we did a lot of things when we weren't sexy. I'm not sure we're sexy today, but in general, we did good things and across the company, and it was a strategy. That same strategy will be deployed on a go-forward basis in how we allocate capital and what we do. With that, I wanna turn it over to the main man, Derrick.
Good morning. I don't have any of the sexy sizzle videos that Duke does, so I'll try to do it with some numbers. How about that? We're very proud of the last five years. As we sit here and set ourselves up, we think for the strategic aspect of how we're gonna be able to go into the next five years. When we think about the organic growth perspectives of what we've done, how that's delivered a degree of cash flow, how we've deployed that capital, which we'll go through very much to Duke's point of having relived the last five years, I think that theme will continue through in mostly the level of excitement that we have about thinking about those next five years and where we can go. We think we're very well positioned for it. Here's the last five.
Double-digit revenue growth complemented by end markets that have led us to have $20 billion of backlog as we stand here today. With an EBITDA that's grown equal to the level of revenue with expanding margins giving us a 17% growth in EBITDA over that period. Deploying capital, that's translated to almost a 30% CAGR in adjusted EPS through this five-year period. EPS growing faster than margins, growing faster than revenue. Five years ago, almost to the day, we were in front of an Investor Day presentation, and we talked about a $10 billion opportunity and $1 billion of adjusted EBITDA. That was the organic. What we did not do at that time was share our inorganic expectations. The middle column here represented our internal model at the time.
You can see that we had, at the model, at the inorganic contributions, we expected to be at $12 billion, $1.26 billion of adjusted EBITDA on a 10% return on invested capital. Column on the right is what we did. We exceeded our revenue expectations. We're eerily close on our EBITDA performance with a little bit of margin dynamic that is largely associated with the COVID. If you were to adjust for the industrial impact in 2021 on our COVID, that 10.3% is almost spot on. When you go through and then look at adjusted EPS, and then more importantly in our mind, return on invested capital. 8.9% is what we ended at the GAAP perspective of that.
When you exclude the large deployment of capital at the end of the year for Blattner and four other acquisitions, our ROICs exceeded 10%. Proud of that five-year performance and most specifically, how close it came to modeling against or performing against what our internal models were. That's the last 5 years. That's what gives us the confidence and as we look forward for the next 5 years. That underlying nature of our business is still intact. That base business growth, the visibility into our end markets are all still intact. As we stand here, we think that we have the ability to exceed $20 billion in revenue. We think we have the ability to exceed $2 billion-$2.4 billion of adjusted EBITDA, providing for an aggregate cash flow of $4.5 billion-$5.5 billion.
That gives us still yet, in our mind, the ability to achieve a $11-$12 EPS target, which is greater than the 15% CAGR growth. That is with the deployment of capital, but that's built upon the organic perspective of an EPS that has the ability to grow up to $9.50, which is a 10% CAGR, all on the backdrop of still yet exceeding a double-digit return on invested capital throughout these periods. Before I break those numbers down a little bit, let's come back and revisit who we are a little bit. These are 2022 expectations inclusive of the acquisitions due in the Q4 . As we look forward, we believe about 90% of our revenues will be U.S.-based revenues. We still have a Canadian and Australian presence.
Those represent around 10%-11% of our revenues. We still believe there are ample opportunities for growth and contributions out of Canada and Australia. We like those individual markets, but we are largely still U.S.-based at this point. When you look at the top right, you can see that still, as Duke made reference to, largest portion of our revenue is utility-backed. Between 65%-70% of that revenue is a utility-backed revenue. When you go and you look and then renewable energy developers and communications, that aggregate represents about 85% of revenues that we think are highly visible, highly recurring, and growing capital spends driven by the, those end markets of all of those individual customers. Down on the bottom, you see our contract type.
Fixed price work runs about 45% of our expected revenues going into 2022. That's something we always come back and talk about because it's something that we think we exceed at, is our performance on fixed price work. It's important to recognize materials represent a small component of that equation. Materials are, at times, a part of our fixed price work, but the largest portion of what we do is customer-provided materials. So that means for our fixed price work, the vast majority of what we do is we are estimating the risk associated with labor. Duke has spent a lot of time talking about how we lean into labor, how that represents 80%-85%, right? of what we self-perform. So that gives us high visibility into the way that labor is gonna execute. It gives us high visibility in our ability to manage that labor.
One of the things that we'll put is when we look at the on the right side of that bottom right last five years, 1% of our contract value has had any noticeable component of losses. That's six projects in five years. One of them was a processing facility. That leaves five other projects. Those five projects aggregated around $100 million dollars losses over a period of time in the five years where we recognized $7.2 billion of gross profit. Project execution issues rarely give us the circumstance we do not meet our aggregate financial expectations. What drives that is the one distinct difference I would put forward, and that is our operating model. Remember, the vast majority of our current operations are still run by the former owners.
In the back of that room right there, and you all are gonna spend time with them, are the vast majority of our operating leadership, who are all former owners. Scot Fluharty, Paul Gregory, Duke Austin, Redgie Probst, Scott Blattner. Those guys back there are more. Aaron Howell. Our training leadership, former owners. That's what leads to the type of performance you see here. Driven largely by our base business. That still remains intact. That component of the business that is that small, repetitive, recurring, every single day type dynamic, Duke made reference to the 17,000 employees. That's the dynamic of the jobs they're working on. Large projects are a component of our business, but it's not what defines us.
Electric Power, 90% of that business, 95% of that business, we think that base business has still yet the same drivers, the ability to grow at a mid-single to double-digit growth rate. We've been speaking about that for a decade. As we look forward, we still see the same dynamics. Grid modernization efforts remaining intact associated with the Electric Power group. Large projects remaining, being, representing a small component of that business. When we look to the Renewables segment, we think that that is very recurring and very visible. We have components of base business and Electric Power that we recategorize to be within that Renewables group, and then we add on the generation component. What we would consider on the generation side of the equation is very, very recurring, very visible. High volumes with work, high demand.
Project dynamics that although there may be a component that may move at any given point for any given project, the demand in total and the opportunities that are there are such that the work is very replaceable. In our mind, that gives us that visibility to lean into the growth dynamics the same way that we think about the normal aspect of our base business for electric and underground. We've slightly shaded it different, putting it a little bit, you know, because we recognize it's not as repeatable, sustainable. We definitely think it's highly visible and highly recurring and has the same type of multiyear trends associated with it. When we look at the underground space, around 90% of that is that base business with the mid-single- to upper-single-digit-type growth profiles. This is a very consistent perspective that we've had.
We think it's important to recognize that nothing's changed about our aspects of how we think about those next few years of growth, whether it be within this five-year horizon or still yet beyond. Fundamentals of that business are still intact. This is how you can also get a perspective of it. If you were to aggregate that base business and look at the last five years, the organic base business had a 9% growth rate. Nice acquisition contribution being able to get us up into that $13 billion range. The base business itself, organically, aggregate has grown 9% from 2016 to 2021. Our future expectations in the aggregate are still very firmly in that mid-single to the double-digit opportunity of that base business.
The way we think about the modeling is large projects will still be able to be a component of our equation. Large projects and emergency storm restoration. That, in this modeling, shows that to be about $1.4 billion of contribution in 2022. We've modeled it to be the equal level of contribution in 2026. It'll have some variability. It'll move. Large projects move up and down. Storm work moves up and down. We believe that the consistency of it is such that we think it'll be a regular contributing component to the equation and be nicely contributing on top of that base business overall growth. Segment type dynamics. A lot of numbers on here. The first thing I'll mention to you is that most of these will seem very familiar to you.
When you think about Electric Power, you see at the top line of that 5%-9%, large projects pressing down just a little bit of the growth rate against that base business of that mid-single to double digit. Operating margins, 10.5%-11.5%. That is inclusive of the, you know, our internal operations and joint ventures. That's built into that number right there. We're looking at that as having a steady contribution throughout. This reflects a little bit of an aspect of expanding on our telecom margins to be at parity with our Electric Power group today. When we think about the Renewables, top line growth of 8%-10%.
We very much feel confident in renewable generation at a double-digit CAGR throughout. Pressed down a little bit by the large projects, being a consistent performance, and then equal to what we've commented to. Renewable generation we thought could be out in that 9%-10% or double-digit EBITDA contribution throughout. The underground group with the 3%-5% horizon. That 5%-7% growth pressed down a touch by large projects. We do continue to believe that it. The midpoint guidance for this year was a 7% margin for that underground group. We continue to believe we can see some expansion to that, seeing that start to press into what we consider to be that upper single-digit margin performance range.
This is a great spot to talk about that the underground group's performance or revenue expectations are slightly muted primarily because, as Duke said, the portfolio of the way that we're gonna deliver. Where do we see more growth aspects of it? As we're undergrounding electric power. Those resources and the growth opportunity there is actually supplementing the electric power component of the equation more so than it is here because we see the opportunity to share those resources across. Two points I wanna make additional is the opportunities that aren't reflected through here as an example. We have the ability in our mind to continue to see margin improvements through execution. If you look at our performance over the last few years, you'll see that we exceeded our electric power margins.
If you look at the pre-acquisition results of Black & Veatch, you'll see they exceeded these margins. We do believe we continue to execute, and that gives us an upside characteristic. Other things that are not in here, Puerto Rico, to the extent we were to see new awards in the T&D component of the space, we have not modeled that into here. We believe that these numbers as presented still yet have a degree of upside to it with our performance and other opportunities. Growth rates that are more comparable to what you've seen in the last five years. One other point I'll make is Duke referenced our ability to be more in the front-end component of the space.
To the extent we're more in the front end, that might lead to an engineering side, that might lead to procurement, that might lead to right of way, that might lead to permits. Though time then, that type of revenue stream might allow for higher revenues, less capital deployment, could in fact put some degree of pressure on margins. Not all of that work necessitates the level of capital and might have a lower margin profile. It is possible, therefore, that some of these margins might be a little lower, but if that is the case, we will call that out. We will pursue that work because it will expand our return on invested capital, which is our ultimate goal.
We will pursue that work, and to the extent that it puts any pressure on any of this margin, we'll make sure to color that as we go. This is the portfolio discussion that Duke was talking about. These black dots represent legacy operations for these companies. The green dots represent where they go. These are example companies we have today. Some of them are in this room today. Whereby our underground group is spending time focusing on growing in the electric power space. Some of our electric power operations are delivering across into communications. The aggregate of the groups, we think, have the ability to find nice complementary and synergy, synergistic work when working with Black & Veatch and the renewables group.
With organic growth, with the degree of a margin expansion, with cash conversion remaining consistent and growing, both with renewables component, I think having an expansion and the opportunity for, of cash conversion, the front-end services having a different cash flow profile, offering ability to expand the rate of conversion. When we look forward, we have, we think we have the ability to have $4.5 billion-$5.5 billion of free cash flow generation. Very robust cash flow generation that if we were to sit here today and do nothing, it would have produced a negative net debt by 2026. We historically have not been a company to sit on cash. We have historically found ourselves in a position to deploy capital, and most specifically, I would tell you that it, we do believe managing a conservative balance sheet is important to us.
You can see our target leverage on the right there is at 1.5-2 times. I think that very much will still be part of our equation. I think you'll see variability at that at times. On the most part, we still yet believe that running a conservative balance sheet is very important to us. I think we have proven our ability to historically deploy capital. Our capital priorities remain the same. First, we're gonna lean into the organic growth of the business. Working capital is a very important component of the business. Capital expenditures will continue to be that, you know, as we lean into the aspects of the growth itself. Inorganic deployments into M&A and investments are important, and then still yet think about share buybacks. In the middle portion of this is what we've done over the last 10 years.
I think what we're trying to highlight here is no doubt we think we've had regular deployments of capital. I think you'll see that there's a balance between where we acquired companies and where we bought our stock. I think you can see it's lumpy because it represents an opportunistic way of deploying it. We believe that creates the most value. I think what you can also find is it's consistent. On the far right, you see the aspects of our M&A and share buybacks through that 10-year period. When you see the $5.7 billion of cash or total consideration paid relative to acquisitions, you see an acquisition multiple between 5x and 7x. That's the average multiple of all deals combined for the last 10 years.
Below that, you see stock repurchase $2.5 billion at 95 million shares at an average price of $26.67. We think we have been very deliberate and very purposeful in creating shareholder value with those deployments, and I think you'll see that continue. The main thing I'd also emphasize about this is when you think about deployments. That M&A does continue to be a large component of that. We do believe that M&A is very value added, but we will not pursue M&A without measuring it first against buying back our stock. We look at every single transaction against what value we could create by buying back our stock. I believe that that is a do-no-harm model. We know no one like we know ourselves, so we will look at buying ourselves before we buy someone else.
To the extent that we do that, though, we do think there's definite value-added capabilities. Historically, when we have looked at M&A, we've looked at the core characteristics of strength of management team, that management team that you'll spend time with, lunch with today. That becomes the first thing that we look at. It becomes the most fundamental thing that we look at. We think that those type of transactions still exist. We think we can still go through and acquire transactions that are additive, value creating, and differentiating between us and our competitors and to our customers for the value, the services that they provide. I think that these are a good example of some select acquisitions on the bottom. What I'll tell you, we're not afraid of doing large transactions, evidenced by Blattner, largest transaction we've ever done.
Right after Blattner, we closed four other transactions in the Q4 . Run rate revenues around $200 million-$250 million. Total consideration, about $230 million. We like those transactions. We're very regularly looking at transactions like that. Those bolt-on acquisitions provide ample growth opportunities for us, and we think that those are a nice way to play, and I think that you'll find that to be a very common way to think about the M&A transactions. The numbers then translate to an EPS perspective of growth of nearly a 10% type of opportunity at the organic level, up to $9.50. At a turn and a half of leverage, $9.50-$11.
At 2x leverage, which is still a reasonably conservative balance sheet, $11-$12 opportunity. That is greater than 15% CAGR opportunity in relation to earnings per share, with opportunities still yet to execute above. Combine that with our. In our mind, you know, although dividends are a smaller component, we do believe that it's valuable to think about dividends and the ability to continue to see that grow commensurate with the net income and free cash flow generation of the company. Overall, you know, we intend to manage ourselves and our balance sheet for the long term. We think a strong balance sheet is very important. I think that, our investment grade status is very important. We will continue to manage ourselves that way.
We do believe that we can create value and create long-term shareholder returns that are quite beneficial with the debt deployments. A big component that I did not discuss was how the mega-trend component of that comes into the equation. We believe that the mega trends that Duke spent the most of his time talking about are complementary to everything we've talked about. We believe that our future five years in and of itself have the underlying drivers that have still been intact to remain intact throughout, to give us the same type of opportunities to develop and grow, to continue to offer the same type of return dynamics. The mega trends either enable that growth.
If there's any other type of headwind in there, to the extent that there are adoptions of any of these mega trends a little bit sooner, they enable growth, or they expand our ability to grow faster, or they extend the long-term nature of the growth. We think that they play into it very much in the way of being able to build on top of that. When you think about the electric vehicle charging and the amount of grid hardening that would need to, grid support to be able to adopt that level of electric vehicle, load growth, hydrogen, carbon sequestration, all of those mega trend components of that play into us in one of three ways, enable, expand, or extend. The tailwinds of the base business are intact. Opportunity to grow. We're very excited about where we stand today.
As it stands here today, I'm starting my 25th year with the company, and this is the most exciting time I've ever been with the company. I think that each of these items that are out here today, we will continue to lean into to create value and to create a long-term perspective. We'll turn that back over to Duke for his final comments and take some Q&A.
Thanks, Derrick. You can see the numbers. It matches what we're talking about from how we deliver. I think from my standpoint, why we're here, what we're thinking about, the company that we are today is different. It's different than it was five, six years ago, and where it's going will be much different. When we think about an investment, if you're investing along the energy transition, utility backbone, technology, we check the box. For me, what the value we can create for our stakeholders is significant. The numbers are big, but the strategy that we have is the same. It's very much total addressable market, the same strategy we had before. When we think about acquisitions, as Derrick talked about, we're not taking a shotgun approach. Very calculated.
We're doing things to really enhance what we do or give us more service line expansion, one or two. I do think we sit in a great place. One thing we do a great job of is have great people, and they allow us to get up here and talk and pinch myself every day because of the people that we have and the people in the field that are out there today, on a pole or, you know, on a wind tower. They're the guys that make it, women that make it. Our ability to get up here and talk about it is pretty incredible. Pretty incredible what we can do as a company and where we're going. We're extremely excited. A matter of fact, I think we're just getting started.
We're just getting started. We're proud of it, and we're proud of where we're going. I think we laid out a nice strategy here today. We're here. Jayshree is gonna come up. Derrick's talked about the numbers. We've talked about who we are and what we think about ourselves and where we think we can go. With that, we're gonna turn it over to Q&A. Jayshree is gonna come up as well. She joined the team, what? Two years ago.
Yep.[inaudible]
Seems like yesterday. She's helping us with strategy and then very, very knowledgeable of the renewable business as well, so great background. She'll answer some questions as well. With that, Kip, what are we doing? Ready?
Yeah. Like I said, we may have some questions coming in from the webcast, so I'll try to kinda bounce a little bit.
Oh no, I'm good.
We've got Julie and Jackie with mics who will run around and give you a mic. Like I said, name and company please before you ask your question, and please try to limit your questions to one question and one follow-up. You know who you are. Maybe just real quick, start with Steve up here, Julie, in the front.
Great. Thanks very much. Steve Fisher with UBS. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about, either Duke or Derrick, in terms of your growth assumptions, market versus market share gains. I would assume you would be in a very good position to have market share gains as part of this, and I'm wondering what type of things you consider would be market share gain drivers. I would tend to think of them as, you know, on one level, bigger projects, but there's probably a number of other things that you would derive market share gains as well. And then I guess the related follow-up is in terms of the IIJA, how have you factored that into the growth rates?
'Cause I would think some of the IIJA is really tied into these mega trends, but it sounds like you're almost sort of thinking about mega trends as more upside opportunities. If you could talk about those things, that'd be great. Thank you.
Yeah. When we think about, like, market share and where we sit, I do think our ability with craft and what we've done and that certainty does allow us to expand our market. Our discussion with our client is no longer very, like, a year or one contract. It's a program, elongated, and it's also our ability to capture the front side of the business. You do expand there, and you expand across as well. We have the framework in place to deliver, and when I think through craft, I think crafts is so critical on a go-forward basis of kids getting in the business and our ability to get them to the field safely. The client and how we collaborate and what we say and where we're going with the client does allow expansion.
We will take market share along the way. Many of the areas that we see today, I think when we think about operating leverage, when we talk about that in the field, it'll be around our service lines. If you're doing gas in an area, you're really big, gas service provider, solution provider, then why are we not doing electric engineering across not only the geographic but the customer? One customer, we may do gas, electric, telecom, where before we may have only done one discipline. We have the ability to do that in engineering and the front side of the business and get you to your energy transition. We expand our total addressable market with each client that we have a great relationship and we collaborated for many, many years on base infrastructure that we've done in the past.
I do believe that expands our capabilities, and we'll take market share along the way. When we discussed it, we think from a mega trend basis as we've tried to lay out, when I think about it gives you opportunities for 15%+ growth, but it also de-risks your portfolio at double digits. It does two things. Any kind of risk you may have, well, we've mitigated through a portfolio, and we've also provided ourselves the opportunity to grow through on those mega trends. Did I miss anything?
No, no. I think that's right. I mean, you know, I think it's fairly clear we've been trying to be prudent with our modeling, which is very common for us. But then I think that Duke addressed that the upsides are exactly what you're talking about, whether it be on the level and/or taking a bigger portion of the market share.
Move over maybe to Jamie.
Sure.
Hi. Good morning.
Morning.
Jamie Cook, Credit Suisse. I guess two questions. One, you know, as we think about, I guess, why is the 5%-8% organic growth sort of heroic, given what you've done historically? Is it just sort of the law of large numbers? And to what degree are the mega trends you're talking about embedded in that or not? I guess that's my first question.
Yeah. When we think about the growth numbers on the 5%-8%, I just you're adding 3,000-5,000 people, and I know we've grown past that. I believe that's organic type growth numbers, not acquisitions. When we think through that, can we grow past that? Absolutely. We've done it. But I do think we need to be prudent about how we're discussing where we can go and how quickly we can deploy people. We're already at 3,000. Can we make 5,000? Can we put 5,000 craft organically in the field? The numbers are big. We see them. We took a prudent approach there, Jamie, on the organic growth.
When we look at acquisitions and look at what we can do, I will also say that typically they grow faster than we do, and we're able to expand quicker. Opportunities like Puerto Rico, for example, doesn't give you top-line growth, gives you bottom-line growth. Those opportunities are there, and we see more of those as well. Things come in every day much, much different than we were in the past. People are coming to us around this transition, which I do believe, I mean, every day it's something new, and it's big. We have to think through that about where that's at in our organic growth. I think we were prudent, put a number out that, in my mind, we can deliver on.
We typically like to exceed our numbers so, I'll just leave it there.
Two other things. You know, underground is the smallest growing component, right?
Yep.
As we're focused first on making sure we get to the right margin profile, right?
Okay.
You've heard us talk about that a little bit. When you think about the electric and the renewables, they're both renewables. We have a 10%. Electric is very close to that, I mean, from a range perspective, for certain. Underground is what bring it down a little bit, but we're focused on the margin expansion. To your second point on megatrends, no, we have not explicitly modeled anything associated with the megatrends, and so that would be the point where megatrends have the ability to expand that growth perspective.
Am I allowed a second question or no?
Please.
Okay. Just back to Black & Veatch. To what degree, I guess, is the business more transactional today versus your approach to sort of, you know, understand your customers' CapEx and sort of have longer term contracts? Where is that today versus where it should be in 2026? To what degree will you walk away from one-off projects which could hurt growth in the short term but positions you better longer term?
I think when we look at Black & Veatch, they're probably as collaborative or engaged as much. If you think about where they started, they started in a difficult renewable market, stayed with it in the nineties. They're ingrained in this whole build. I mean, you think about it, if you think about like a funnel, they can only handle so much, and their top 10 clients have so much that our ability to expand, even in markets like this where you have some solar issues with tariffs and things of that nature, we can expand. There's people ready to go and so that we haven't had the ability to work for in the past. We'll expand the customer base, but there's also lots of different things we can do in a synergistic way that we haven't even calculated yet, but it's early.
Can we build substations with Quanta's traditional group? Interconnections. How do we get into the queue? Can we help? Yes. I think our ability to look at the total addressable market, the total cost of the projects, and get them what I would consider kinda done at the client level is significant. Black & Veatch delivers. Last year, they delivered on every single project they had, COD, when they said they would. We did the same thing. That's how I see it.
Thank you.
Mm-hmm.
Julie. Andy, back there.
Andy Kaplowitz with Citigroup. Duke, I think you said that your glass half full when it comes to an inflationary environment. Maybe you could elaborate?
Except supply chain.
Supply chain.
Okay.
Okay. Maybe you can elaborate on pricing and how you think about sort of the 5%-8% growth. I would assume you're getting a bigger component of pricing given your scarce craft labor. Is it a much bigger number going forward than it was over the last five years? How do we think about that?
That's a great question. In my mind, I wish I could get inflationary numbers right. I probably wouldn't be sitting here. In my mind, we're looking at it to normalize at some point here. I do think you have some inflections. You got war. You have, you know, still a lot of Poland and Ukraine. There's things like that that I don't believe will be elongated 'cause we're gonna work through supply chain. We'll work through those things. We always have as an industry. When we talk to our customer base, yes, things are escalating a bit, but it's not insurmountable. Do we need to work on it and work on the total cost of
Where we think it benefits us is we can look at the total cost of a project without affecting us or the client, drive the cost down through constructability, through the ways that we bring our manufacturing capabilities, or we might know a supplier different than they know, and we're in a broad business and across a broad geography. We look at and see things differently, think differently at the client level to collaborate. That's the issue. I do think we have already thought through this, whether it be concrete, steel. Doesn't matter. Like, we're already ahead of that. We felt this a long time ago. Like, if when we think through it, if we say, "Well, that's an impediment for us to get to completion," you can bet we have a strategy to fix it.
It's a long strategy. I like it. I like the supply chain. It gives us more addressable market. We can. I of course don't like it, but it's there, and we've addressed it. We'll mitigate risk through the portfolio and through our ability to collaborate with the client. Comments? I mean, inflation, big interest pushes everything. Hopefully we have, you know, small rate increases and things of that nature. But I'm more worried about high interest than I am the supply chain issues of today.
Maybe this is somewhat related, Duke, but I think you mentioned you're trying to get operating leverage at the division level, and you're just sort of scratching the surface there. When I look at Derrick's numbers, like, I don't see you pushing margin. Really, it's kind of the same margins that we see. Maybe in UUI, there's a little bit of margin expansion. You know, how do we think about you pushing the margins and gaining the leverage? It's a much bigger company. You should be able to get operating leverage over time.
Yeah, it depends on growth. I do think, you know, we didn't really comment on what we believe in the top line, how quickly are we gonna grow, how what's the top side of the business. You also have to look at the returns. I do think our returns expand. We've expanded our return on invested capital considerably. I think we'll continue to expand our return on invested capital, whether the margins go up or down, past where they're at. Obviously, we take a prudent approach. I mean, we're talking about a long-term strategy, we did take a prudent approach to it. Certainly, we're there to drive utilization and value across our portfolio, and I do think there's opportunities to do so.
We need to be prudent about it, and we need to think through it because you get into the front side of the business and you start bringing material components and things like that through, it does press margins a bit. We need to watch it and just, you know. Returns should expand.
Yeah, I would say the same thing that, you know, reality is that there is a degree optically of a better absorption, but it's pressed down by the front end, you know. What we're saying is that we think that on average, we believe that that margin profile was there. To the extent that it wasn't, it's not gonna be because of fixed cost absorption or the underlying business changing. It's gonna be because the growth dynamic of the front end might actually flatten it. We try to model that into as the portfolio delivered it.
I don't think you hear the company come out and comment going, "Oh, I'm sorry we missed our earnings because we're growing." It's, I think we have those processes in place.
Jump to the webcast. Got a couple questions. I'll take one now. Duke, related to your comments about potential opportunities in LNG, given the geopolitical environment and everything else, are you seeing anything yet? How do you kinda think about that? Where the opportunities could lie if that does start to materialize?
When we think about it, I mean, energy security will be a topic. I'm highly confident. It'll be a topic geopolitically in how we think. That would be another place that I believe we have huge opportunity for growth. When I think through it, LNG is certainly something that you've seen FID on a couple plants that will require a significant amount of infrastructure. We'll be around that infrastructure for sure. It does create opportunity. We talked a long time ago around big pipe. What would elongate big pipe? Well, LNG would elongate big pipe. I said it before. If there's opportunities there, then certainly we could expand our Canadian market. It's quicker to market in Europe if you're on the east coast of Canada, so there's opportunities there with, you know, that expansion.
You're expanding to the west, so I believe Canada will come up through LNG. As far as the Australian market, where you have coal seam gas that's priced off oil. Oil's high. That'll deliver into Asia much quicker in Australia. That market will come up, all around energy security. I still believe Canada's a much better place for us to collaborate with than places that we don't. It's right here, so we need to figure out our borders and think through that with LNG and other things. We're definitely gonna see that as part of energy security.
Adam.
Thanks. Adam Thalhimer, Thompson Davis. One for Duke, one for Derrick. Duke, what inning are we in for electric utility outsourcing? Derrick, why are the underground margins structurally lower, and is there more upside there? You talked about a recovery in Australia and Canada, so mining and energy recovery.
Yeah. I think when you talk about, you know, what inning we're in on outsourcing, I just. You've got a tremendous amount of capital deployment throughout, and we've really prided ourselves on the workforce, the craft skill piece, and those solutions around it. I don't believe you'll see the utilities really build. You might see one or two. I mean, you might see some in the West build some workforce up. It's, in my mind, the efficiencies we can gain in how we work together on labor, how we think through the build. We're certainly getting that organic growth on there, and I don't think you'll see vast amount of utilities are out. They deal with assets primarily around their asset base and delivering to the end customer how they deliver.
Building out heavy infrastructure is certainly something I believe we fit that model, and that portion of it will certainly get outsourced. I mean, they may have more meters to go back and forth with and set meters and things of that nature and have the facing of the customer. The outsource model with the attrition, I mean, we're way ahead of that attrition. As they have that attrition, it'll be more outsourced. I do believe you'll see outsource gains within the utility model over time on top of what you already see in capital growth. Derrick, you had the-
Yeah, relative to the margins on underground, I mean, probably two main components. One, there's the smaller fixed-price component. You know, the rest of our work with the larger fixed-price, we tend to have the ability to manage risk and execute through contingencies. There's a smaller component of that right now in the underground, but more of it's the seasonal effects.
Reality is the second, third, and Q4 of the underground group. Oftentimes you can see an 8% type margin profile. The Q1 of the underground group, we oftentimes can see it down in the lower single digits%. That presses all the way through the year to bring the overall margin profile down. The electric power has more revenues overall, and so it has less of the seasonal dynamics, but it even still sees lower margins in the Q1 rising, the second rising, and the third. Well, underground has that just more exacerbated right now. The volumes of work in the Q1 activity aren't as much. We continue to work to see what we can do about the, to handle that from a geographic perspective, though. It's one of our main things.
Plus to Duke's point, you know, back to when we think about the portfolio, when we're using underground assets right now within the Electric Power group, it is delivering at margins comparable to what you see in Electric Power. When we're managing the aggregate, the aggregate still has the ability to deliver double-digit returns with underground assets sometimes being deployed within the Electric Power group. That's what we're really focused on, is how that portfolio delivers.
Let's go to Ian, then Rich.
Thank you. It's Ian MacPherson from Piper Sandler. Duke, the trade case on modules and cells seems a little bit more than just garden variety inflation.
Sure.
I know that some of the developers are concerned about availability for a few years resulting from this, depending on the outcome. What is the feedback from your customers on how that could dent the project cadence and what kind of workarounds they might be looking for to keep the train moving there?
Yeah, I mean, I think we're all just grappling with the tariff. If we're gonna go to where from an energy transition standpoint, you can't retroactively say, "I'm gonna put panels up 300%, 250%," and think that, "Oh, we're gonna go develop against that." That case needs to play out. I do think they need finality in it. It won't affect us from a standpoint of, "Hey, we have more cost in our modules." What you'll see is some switching where developers will go, "Well, this is this, so I'll put more wind in the air this year, or I'll do more modernization." You'll go from 1.5 meg to 3 meg. You know, your turbines will go up.
We'll do a bunch of retrofits on turbines. Things like that. If you go to our clients and we've talked to them, I mean, they're reiterating where they're going. You might have a speed bump here or there that causes them some issue. Our portfolio is big enough, and the way we're thinking through it, we'll overcome those. We talked about supply chain and how we can help with supply chain and how we think through that. We are working with them daily on that discussion and how we work through supply chains, whether there's places that we may finish a project without panels, waiting on panels. It just makes us a little more inefficient.
With the scale that we have in the business and how we think through it and how we work with the client, and they can switch from solar to wind or build transmission. We're right there to kind of work through those things. In my mind, while it is something that we should all look at, it's not something that's affecting the company at this point.
Thanks.
Go to Rich in the front row.
Thank you. Rich Wesolowski, Neuberger Berman. Thank you for holding today. We appreciate it.
Yes.
I'm curious on Blattner. I recall them relying really on a handful of project developers for their project flow historically, and I'm curious over the timeframe and the process by which you brought them out to, you know, the name brand utilities of the world and start working directly with them on generation and wires together.
Yeah. I'm gonna let Jayshree take it. She has the background development, so I think it'd be great.
Yeah, no. Blattner's done a great job over the last 20 years developing really strong relationships with, you know, the top 10 developers out there. Yes, already we're seeing within the Quanta family that the relationships that Quanta's developed over the last 20 years with our strong utility customers and the fact that utilities now are moving more toward rate-basing renewable generation, the expertise that Blattner brings, along with where we have been sitting for the last several decades, that's actually coming together very nicely. You know, without mentioning specific names, we've already seen some customers saying, "You know what? Because of the Blattner and Quanta combination, this is who we wanna go with on the utility side as well.
Thank you. If I could, just one more.
Yeah.
Unrelated.
It's okay.
On communications, Duke, you spoke about the growing pains.
Mm-hmm.
We're in the very early innings. The opportunity is very large. But from an outsider's perspective, it's also a little bit different in that it's a different customer base. They work differently, I'll say, than your utility customers would. And separately, you self-perform a lower share of the work, from my understanding. So would you discuss those challenges and whether you view this business potentially as high quality as your transmission distribution business?
I think when we think through it. What it allows us to do is be fully utilized in a portfolio. If our portfolio has more gas LDC or there's more telecom and higher margins or things like that, we can just move back and forth. It really allows high utilizations, which creates the margin impact at the bottom with telecom group. You haven't seen us make large acquisitions in telecom group. Been there, done that. We've been able to expand organically and build a platform. It's a little more painful than buying a platform company and expanding on it, but it's the right answer when you think about capital allocation. We've done it economically, and now we have the ability to take advantage of a large market.
How I would characterize it is we're one video game away from more fiber in the ground. If you think about it and you say, "Okay, if they put one video game that every kid wants, and that 5G platform really takes off," like it will, the amount of fiber, the amount of infrastructure to be put in the ground. I'm almost certain that you'll see the technology players that were putting fiber in the ground because the your traditionals wouldn't put fiber in the ground, it's fixing to come again. It won't go fast enough for what the technology is there. If you talk about AI, robotics, anything you're talking about, you really need this dense 5G market. The ARPA money does some of that on fixed wireless broadband and how we play in those markets.
I think, you know, we'll continue to expand that with the operating units we have and take it to the same approach we made early on, I mean, in Quanta's history, made tons of acquisitions around telecom. I think in my mind, we can grow that business in a different manner. Not to say we won't make some strategics, but we can expand them so quickly once we do it. I like the market.
Let's jump over to Marc over there. Start right from the back. Jack, you said.
Thanks. Marc Bianchi with Cowen. Duke, you made a comment earlier about, in your comments earlier, in the prepared remarks about EV charging and kind of the load impact at night. What was interesting to me, and maybe I just misheard, didn't sound like you were talking about charging stations, you were talking about charging at home. Is the relative opportunity just not as exciting on the charging station side? Maybe you could help quantify what both of those mean in the context of the 5%-8% growth.
No, I mean, like, we like them both. What I would tell you is, like, when you think about what the impacts of charging are is on the distribution network, it's probably 25 to 50 to one on the backside of infrastructure to handle the load variability. That's the thing. I mean, you're saying, "Well, one transformer on a pole will not handle the load now, so I've got to change the transformer." You do that seven times, and your circuit's not big enough. You had 12 KV, now you need 35 KV. It goes all the way back to the substation. Well, the substation, you need a bigger breaker, need a bigger transformer. Oh, well, hell, you need transmission.
It's a pendulum effect as you start pushing EV and I don't like how fast it goes. That's what everyone said, "Well, it's gonna go slow." It's not going slow. It's going faster. I mean, all the OEMs are building manufacturing battery plants. It's going faster than the industry probably predicted. What I would tell you is that exponential load that goes on those distribution systems is significant. We will be in, like, your high voltage or high density charging. That's kind of where I see our markets across North America. Going into the home, we'll do it, but it's not really something that we'll be the ones that do that. We don't want to go install a charger in a home. We like to stay at the meter and out, not go in.
If it has a bed, we don't like it.
Maybe just following up to that. On the infrastructure bill, there was quite a bit of money for charging station build-out. How do you see that phasing over the next couple of years? You know, how much of an opportunity is there for you?
I mean, we talk about it from the OEM all the way to utility daily about how we build this out and how quickly. Everything has to be pretty coordinated. You just can't go and say, "I'm gonna do it tomorrow." You need a modern grid, a robust grid. You gotta think through, well, okay, in a storm situation, if I'm out of power three days, I can't no transportation. This grid's gotta get extremely modern, where you don't have public transportation and ways to transport people. I mean, the customer base itself is going to demand it. I just continue to see the build-out. We're in early stages of the distribution piece of the build-out, very early, and that's the biggest piece. All right? It's a multi-decade expansion.
We'll kind of move towards the back, maybe start with Neil.
Thank you. Neil Mehta here with Goldman Sachs. Appreciate all the content here today. The first question, Duke, is just the philosophy around share repurchases. How do you think about when to deploy it? Is it fair to say your view on this is more opportunistic as the stock has done very well, even though I think we can all agree there's a value gap there? And how do you think about leveraging your balance sheet to take advantage of dislocations that could emerge in the stock with economic volatility?
Yeah, I mean, I'll point back to our past a bit, and we'll lean into it when there's disconnects in the market, for sure. I—we do wanna stay agnostic to share count, whether it be through acquisition or through how we make sure we incentivize our employees around Quanta. Typically, we'll stay agnostic to share count, and I think we need to, and we very much will lean into that as well. What I will say is the deployment we've shown through capital, if we sit on cash, it's our only way to really destroy value at this market, okay? If we sit on a pile of cash, it makes no sense. I'll let Derrick comment on the rest of it.
No, I mean, I don't think I have anything to add. I agree with you. I mean, we're very willing to step into it. What I'll tell you is that, you know, just like when you think about the last 12 months, right? There are times where potentially it may have optically looked as though we had the opportunity to step into it, but we didn't. The reason is because at the same time, we were actively working the Blattner acquisition. You're gonna see a dance, right? We're always looking out at how things are playing out at the six-nine-month window, and we're gonna measure against that.
We'll clearly look at a path to, you know, go above our leverage profile, but we fundamentally believe that we're gonna always be trying to operate with a conservative balance sheet. Opportunistic is our primary way of thinking about deployment against that. I think you'll continue to see that.
Thank you. The follow-up question is just on the utility bill, Duke. Maybe you could talk about when you're having your conversations with the customers over the last 10 years, one of the key tailwinds for utilities' ability to drive rate base has been a depressed natural gas price in the United States. In a scenario where Henry Hub and power prices potentially rerate as there's global linkage of U.S. gas to the rest of the world, does that limit the ability of the utility CEO to make the rate-based investments at the same CAGR of the last 10 years?
I'll throw it back. If you believe that the country's moving towards a carbon-free environment, and you're making this transition, if you believe EV is going into the systems with the investment you see through the OEMs, you don't have a choice. You've got to modernize this grid to take on the transition. Unless you decide we're going toward. We're gonna go back to coal, back to. We're gonna get nukes. I mean, this is the only way you have to do this is through transmission, batteries, all the kind of things that we're doing now with balance of plant solar and wind. I do not think we're going back as a country. I think we're going forward in this transition. Can we get, you know, PTCs? Yes. Are there ways to drive costs down? Yes.
In a high interest rate environment and high natural gas environment, I would make the case that it makes more sense to put solar in the air or on the ground and wind in the air than high natural gas 'cause it balances the load. Again, natural gas is a piece of this transition. I always thought it would be. It is, whether we want to talk about it or not. But it's there, and any increases make solar and wind look better and better.
Maybe Noelle.
Hi. Thanks. Noelle Dilts with Stifel.
Noelle.
Hi. I was just hoping for a little bit of clarification on the mega trend upside to growth versus the base $20 billion-$22 billion. Is there a way to think about which of those mega trends are contributing to the upside? In other words, if you look at renewables, arguably, that's a mega trend in and of itself, but I would assume that's kind of in the base. Is there a way to parse that out? I'm not sure if you got that granular when you were sort of thinking about it.
Yeah. I mean, it's. You know, we talked about the growth patterns or pathways, whatever you wanna call them. It's EV. That EV impact to the grid is what I would consider a mega trend. The undergrounding effect, that large undergrounding to the west, large undergrounding to the south and east mega trend. It's on top of the growth that you see, the 5%-8%. It does two things. It protects the downside, but it provides the growth. I'll let Derrick comment with the numbers and make sure I'm careful.
Yeah. No, everything's simple, right? I mean, the mega trends are not explicitly in our model, okay? So anything he's talking about are not explicitly. Do we think that there are certain of our customers that are proactively addressing some of those pieces? Yes. But for the largest portion of this, we think that that's you know, 25 and 26 and beyond type of activity. The renewable component of the equation, I would tell you is largely based upon our original expectations associated with Blattner. We see a double-digit profile that is fundamental to our model, right? Renewable generation itself. But to the extent that you see acceleration of any of that, you know, there's still a degree of upside opportunity there.
I mean, I'd say largely it's the fundamentals of our historic business plus the renewable generation piece of Blattner with everything else that's still yet happening, carbon sequestration, you know, hydrogen. The real aspect of the underground, I think as Duke Austin spoke to, is there are some activities associated with that, but the acceleration of that is probably in more of your outer periods. At levels that you're gonna see would drive up or elongate. I mean, I think there are several components of the equation that would add to the core of what you saw. One other clarification I'd probably say is that although there's been a few references to the 5%-8% on the revenue side, we're not focused on the revenue side.
We're focused on the EPS side, which is really the 7%-10%+.
Okay, thanks. Just circling back to the solar tariff issue, given, Duke, your comments about developers sort of shifting from wind to solar depending on what's going on. I mean, are you already seeing uncertainty around the tariffs start to impact project development or timing or awards, or do you think that's something still, you know, that we'd see a little bit later in the year?
I want to be clear on this. Like, it's early, just kinda coming out, and what I think is everybody's disappointed. Well, more than disappointed. They're a little angry. I don't think it's gonna affect our ability for our guidance, nor do I think it is. What I would tell you is, like, we have LNTPs, like, limited notice to proceed on multitude of projects. It has a cadence to it. Will that cadence be interrupted a bit? Maybe. You know, there's project ready work that's there. Like, we expand the funnel, it looks different. I just think our opportunities, people wanna work with, you know, someone that can build something certain. The inbounds are as big as what any movement.
We just have to position ourselves properly to take advantage of any disruption for growth as well as if clients choose wind versus solar or batteries or whatever it may be, we can move those directions with them. I think everyone today is still getting their head around how long it's gonna last. Do you really wanna do this? Do you see the impacts of this to the transition? I think you'll get a fairly quick decision here, and it'll move forward fairly quickly. We're too far the other way. While you might hear the disruptions here or there, as an industry, these things happen. We move through them. For us, I still say glass half full. We'll be better because of it.
Thank you.
Yeah. Another thing I might add is that, you know, although we guide and color by segment, I mean, our overall expectations are consolidated return. I think what Duke's partly talking about is that there might be headwinds or pushes and pulls in any given component of the individual segment numbers, but we guide to an aggregate, and we're looking to execute in the aggregate. I think that's what you've seen over the last little bit, is despite other places that might have had headwinds at points in time, you know, telecom execution last year, we delivered on our aggregate portfolio.
Any kind of push is just pent up. It just, you know, it's been greater on the other side.
Let me just hit one question online and then to you, Mike. A bit of an M&A question. Granted, you know, the acquisition of Blattner is still relatively fresh, but are you guys thinking at all about other kind of bolt-ons or M&A from the renewables side of the business?
I mean, I think it's our job, right? We are thinking through it. We leaned into Blattner because we believe in the macro markets. Where we have displacement or we need to expand our front-end services or things like that, if the right company is there. We're not out looking for acquisitions at any given time. I didn't come up here and tell you we're gonna make five acquisitions to get to our number either. We said we have a platform. We said what we can do and grow and how we're gonna allocate capital. It's what we said. We're not in the business of searching down acquisitions.
If we see the right one, we know the good companies in our spaces and other spaces, and if we were to see the right thing, we would lean into it, much like we did with Blattner. We do have some bolt-on things that make sense for us to expand in areas, but it's all creating a growth quicker than we're growing or it wouldn't work or against our stock price. I'll let Derrick comment to the rest.
No, I agree. I don't have anything to add.
Okay. Mike.
Thanks, Kip. Mike Dudas, Vertical Research Partners. Duke, as utilities are looking at their capital budgets longer term or all the trends that you've put forth, have you noticed a shift on wanting to do less operational budget, more capital budget, so the utilities can earn a better return on that investment? How does that impact how you do your base business relative to your customers and how that flows through?
Yeah. Good question, Mike. Obviously, I think when you think about it, the utility's ability to earn is based on capital deployed. They're getting a return on capital deployed, typically. So they would much rather spend capital than O&M. O&M comes off the bottom line. I would say that as you modernize the system, you would have less O&M, number one, but your capital deployment is far outpacing your O&M and as you modernize the system. We do work with them a lot on just O&M daily stuff on any given day. I mean, we probably a good percentage of the business, I can't tell you if I'm on a capital project or an O&M project unless I'm in the field. It's just we don't see it any different.
We look at a whole plan of what they're trying to accomplish, and they say, "Well, I've got this program that's another $1 billion. You gotta do what you do here, plus this other $1 billion over the next three years. By the way, I got another one behind that and another one behind that." You know, from us, a craft skill electrician, a gas technician, welder, it doesn't matter. They don't see the difference. Like, "We're doing line work or welding or whatever it may be." We have to look at it more holistically as we think about it strategically as a company. How do we collaborate with the client to get the best outcome for the ratepayer?
Sean?
Thanks. Sean Eastman with KeyBanc. Thanks, gentlemen. Duke, you really leaned in on the human capital side of the strategy and the focus there.
You gave the numbers on what you invested in recruiting, training, over the past number of years. Is this gonna be more expensive and more challenging over the next five years than it was over the past five years? You know, how many people do you need to train to hit this organic growth outlook for 2026?
I mean, we're adding around 3,000 a year, something like that, give or take. You at least need to pace that in the current growth rates we have. When I think about it, we've got a great platform today, and we have the ability to think through academia and how we recruit. Now, we work more in a holistic manner with the client to both recruit what we need and for a broad set of where we're going or where they're going. If we added something, it would be because a client asked us to help them, and we would work together on a transition or a platform that makes more sense for us to do it in a collaborative manner than one-off.
I think the investment in craft will always be there from a training standpoint, but the significant outlay early has been done. Our ability to expand campuses or expand on training our curriculum or whatever it may be across craft, with the add of NLC and that academia-based approach to our on-the-job training, I like where we sit there and we're able to expand it fairly quickly. We also do significant amount of mobile training. Where we don't have to take crews and uplift them, we can take the mobile side of it, which is phenomenal to our people. We can train at the people level for anything, really, in a mobile fashion.
More questions?
Anybody?
Anyone?
All right, easy.
Last chance.
Last chance. Okay. With that, what we're gonna do is eventually we're gonna get off the line here. But before we do, I wanna say thanks for the people that are listening who couldn't be here. We've all learned how to communicate remotely. That said, I mean, I do think the interest in the company, where we're going, how we see it is robust. We see great markets. We've built great platforms around great people and great companies with longstanding history of performance. I think you see this management team. You'll see the people here in the room. They're very much committed, how they wake up every day on how to get better.
We press ourselves internally, and we're working hard to make sure that we deliver the transition because our clients and everyone we've worked for ever depend on us to do so, and we're at the very tip of that spear. We think we're at the tip of that spear to provide solutions across a broad spectrum. If you go back to e-commerce and you think, how does e-commerce work? It's infrastructure around that, no matter how you think, and technology that does that. If you think about how you get to the transition, you cannot get there without infrastructure. Can't go where you wanna go. We're right there at that spear to enable that and help and collaborate. I, again, thank you. Thanks so much for the interest with us, and it's exciting times. Glad to be up here.
Glad to see you in person. It's been good to get back out and see everyone. With that, I just thank everyone. Be safe on the way home.
Yeah, we can cut off the webcast. Just some logistics for those in the room. Like I said, you're welcome to stay and join the team. We've got as