Hello. Welcome, everyone. Hope you all saw everybody in the room that there is a Wi-Fi network and password. Feel free to get on there. Are we ready on the webcast? Excellent. Well, welcome everyone today to Construction Partners Inaugural Analyst Day. We appreciate having you all here in the room and those of you that are joining on the webcast. We'd also like to thank Nasdaq for hosting us here at their wonderful facility in Times Square. As you can see from our agenda, we are going to have a break. It's actually not. We're gonna have a break after the CFO presentation, just so you're aware. We're also going to have a question and answer session at the end of today's presentation, so if you don't mind holding your questions until we get to that part.
Then before we get going, we'd like to Mirandize everyone so that you're all fully aware of our forward-looking statement, which I will read now. This presentation is being webcast and can be accessed on the audio portion of our investor relations website. All information speaks only as of today's event, which is October 4, 2023. So any time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate at the time of any replay, reading, or listening. I'd also like to remind you that the statements made in today's discussion that are not historical facts, including statements of expectations or future events or future financial performance, are considered forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
Today, we will be making forward-looking statements as part of today's presentation that may, that may be, by their nature, are uncertain. And, so today's presentation, for the disclosures on that, you can see, our forward-looking statement in the press release that went out this morning. Management will also refer to non-GAAP measures, including Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA Margin, and Net Debt. Reconciliations can be found to the nearest GAAP measures in our press release. Please also note that references during the presentation about fiscal year refer to a September 30 year-end for Construction Partners. And with that out of the way, we'd now like to get started, and I'd like to introduce one of our co-founders and our Executive Chairman, Ned Fleming. Ned?
Thank you, Rick. Thank you, Rick. It's nice to see everybody. This is a fun story to talk about because it continues to get better. With a lot of stories, you have a great, exciting beginning, and it kinda slows down. But in this case, with the people that are in the room that run this business and all 4,000 people that work at this business, this story continues to get more exciting, not less exciting. And so it's exciting for all of us to have the opportunity to talk about a business that we enjoy and that we hope is not only changing the infrastructure of our country, but also changing lives along the way and giving people opportunities. So we're excited about that.
So, this business certainly has continued to grow and build in ways that, Charles and I, as we founded this business, never dreamed. I would say the team and the people that work at this business are better than we ever imagined, and they continue to come up with creative and profitable ways to grow this business. So as we begin, this is a very enduring growth story. Having been involved with lots of businesses, it's exciting to see what this business has done, really for us over the last 20 years. Lots of people in this room, have been part of all that. So the first question I want to ask, is there anybody in this room who, when they drive home today or get home tomorrow, can say their roads are in great shape? Is there anybody that can say that?
Nobody's gonna raise your hands, because the truth is, our roads are deteriorated, and we need to continue to fix them. If you think about what we've been able to do, we've been able to partner with experienced operators for a long time. We continue to do that to build this business. We're offering services, so we've become more and more vertically integrated, not just in materials, but in services, that have really essential needs for society as we grow the society. And that's just not in our part of the country, but everywhere you go. So we've got opportunities to grow geographically. We've got opportunities to grow within our own geography. And this business today, when we stepped back and looked at this back in 2001, it was this large, growing, highly fragmented industry. And today, it's exactly that, except it's larger.
People actually know the term infrastructure. When we started out, and we would say we're an infra- infrastructure business and we're building roads, people would say: infrastructure, excuse me? Now, today, they understand that. The voters understand it, the politicians understand it, and certainly the people driving on our roads understand it. So today, no different than it was before, the roads are still given a D grade, and the cycle for routine road replacement, which we do, is 10-15 years. Is asphalt getting better? We improve it every year. We improve the ways we take it up. It's also one of the most recycled products in the country, which we're awfully proud of. And believe it or not, those of us that live in cities, we see a lot of concrete roads.
But the truth is, 94% of all the roads in the country are asphalt. So if you think about from founding to IPO, we went from 0 states and an idea that, two or three people had to 4 different states. We had 27 asphalt plants at the time that we went public, and we had 1,800 employees. So let's fast forward. We talked about it on the roadshow. Let's see how we did versus what we told people. So we exceeded every target that we told people on the roadshow... So those of you that were there, like in a lot of the analysts, Andy Wittmann would be one of them. He was there when we talked about being $1 billion. We exceeded it. We got to $1.3 billion, and in that process, we became better at what we do.
Our technology is better. We're more vertically integrated, both on the services side and the materials side. Annual revenue, we told people, would be single- to double-digit growth. It actually turned out to be 17.6. I'll talk about all the things we went through in the economy, and we still grew this business profitably. We continued to grow our relative market share business. So as an asphalt business, we really have over 70 different markets that we compete in, and each one of those markets is a 50-60-mile radius, and we compete with those people in that radius. So if one of our guys is running an area, he's got a lot of markets that he or she has to take care of. We don't compete globally. We compete in that specific market.
The number of distinct markets that we compete in is 152% better than we thought it would be. We've done 17 acquisitions since we went public. We continue to grow this business in every aspect. We'll talk today about all the different prongs that we can grow this business. Each one of those that we talked about are true today, and they, we continue to get better at doing it. So when you think about it, the runway is long. The future for this business is very, very bright. Let's look at how we looked at the IPO. This is a map here of what it looked like when we got started. 27, you know, we've got South Carolina there. I think that's South Carolina, that is, doesn't have any dots in it.
Over time, as we walked through COVID, post-COVID, inflation, unprecedented environment of labor issues, getting equipment issues, etc., through this time, where did we end up? Today, we have... I think that's gonna move. There we go. That's what it looks like today. So we have substantially grown this business. We're almost three times as many asphalt plants as we had when we started. That continues to grow and get better. We've successfully, in this process, in addition to not just growing the business through different economic times, one of the great things about this business is it will continue to grow profitably through different economic times, and part of that goes to the management team. Every one of our workers, all over 4,000 of them, do a terrific job of doing that.
The leaders that are in this room today, that I'll talk about, have done a terrific job of leading that team in this process as we've grown this business. But not only have we done this, but we've successfully transitioned to the next generation. So Charles Owens, the founder, successfully transitioned this to Jule Smith, the CEO. It has been a real pleasure to work with Jule as we've continued to grow this business. Today, we are stronger as a result of Jule's leadership. We continue to be creative with how we handle ideas and thoughts. And this has been as smooth a transition of leadership as I've ever been involved with in my almost now 40 years of doing this.
Jule stepped into and followed somebody that was well known in the industry and really took that ball and ran with it, and continues to do things and make this company substantially better than it was. Interestingly enough, about the transition, behind the scenes of the public transition of CEO, Greg Hoffman, who moved to Raleigh-Durham 2 months after Jule was made CEO. Now, the street and everybody didn't hear about his move for almost 2 years, that he was promoted, but he moved 2 months, and Jule and Greg started working together, started to think about and planning what they wanted, their relationship to look like and how they wanted to communicate inside the business. One of the signs I think of a great company is that you have people that you can internally promote.
So both of these people came up through the ranks, and when we as a board and a governing body looked at it, we had a decision to make, and it was an easy decision because we had internal candidates to be able to promote. So they knew the people, they understood the business, they understood the culture. We didn't have any issues of outsiders coming in, and both of them picked up the ball and went in directions that have made this company better, and where they will continue to do that. What I think is most interesting is, you usually don't do a transition in the middle of a pandemic. Pretty much when Jule became CEO, the pandemic started. I think it was just months afterwards. One of the first people in the company that got COVID was Jule.
He worked, he worked every single day. I remember talking to him and being concerned about it. We transitioned through a pandemic. We continued to do acquisitions. We had labor issues, as the whole world did, as we came out of the pandemic. We had issues for materials and costs. In the process of transitioning, the old saying that iron sharpens iron, well, our iron was the market, and we became sharper. Jule made sure we became sharper in how we bid projects, how we hired people, how we thought through things strategically. And so as a result, today, we are a stronger business. We are better prepared for the future than we ever have been.... When I look at this business today, yes, when we went public and when we started the business, you had a large, highly fragmented market.
You had a management team that had been doing it for a long time. I will tell you today, with Jule and Greg at the helm, we are better prepared organizationally for the future, we are better prepared financially for the future, and strategically, we continue to do the same thing. We are disciplined with our strategy. You will not see us get off target with how we do things or what we do or how we buy companies. This is a business that's ready for the future. One of the keys to that is every face that's up here.
What's interesting about this business is a lot, and we talked about this last night, many of these people are businesses that—they had run successful businesses, and they've come on board, whether it be Mike Crenshaw, David Ferebee, John Harper, they all came on board as owners of their business. And so this is a company that when Jule runs it as the CEO, that we think like owners. We understand what it is to be owners. It's also evident that culturally, we care about our people, and it's the 4,000 people that go to work every day, Bob Flowers and I were talking about it this morning, that work hard every single day, that make sure they do what's right, that do things safely, that really drive this business and will continue to drive this business as we grow it.
So I want everyone to know that today, although we have transitioned from one founder to a new CEO, Jule has not only been fun for me to work with and a pleasure for me to work with, he is creative, he listens well, and he has put this company in a position that we are today as well-positioned to take advantage of what I think is a terrific growth path for this company. So for me, it's a true pleasure to not only get to talk about all these people, but to introduce my friend and partner, Jule Smith.
Good morning. Thank you for coming to our Analyst Day. Now, some of you are wondering, "Okay, Jule, when was that picture taken?" And I will tell you, I know it was the last couple of days of March 2021. And I know that because it was just a couple of days before Charles's retirement party, me taking over, and that guy looks so relaxed and confident, right? So anyway, Charles has been a wonderful mentor to me and many of the guys in this room for well over a decade. And hopefully, you'll hear today that the company that he worked so hard to build over the last two decades is strong and ready for the next two decades. So today, we want to share with you our strategic plan of what we call Roadmap 2027. Now, we like our ticker symbol, R-O-A-D, ROAD.
You hear us use it a lot. Roadmap, Roadworthy, the road ahead. We do try to avoid at all costs using the term roadkill, but other than that, we love using our term, and Roadmap 2027 is simply standard operating procedure for us. We update our strategic plan every five years, I mean, every year and look out five years. And so really today, we're just sharing with you what our updated strategic plan is. And when I say we, I mean our leadership team at CPI. As Ned said, these are very experienced, talented, some of the best in the industry. You'll hear from some of them today, Greg Hoffman, our Chief Financial Officer, Nelson Fleming, our Vice President of Strategy and Business Development, David Ferebee, President of Ferebee, and Mike Crenshaw, President of King Asphalt. They'll participate in a panel later on.
But we also have here, Bob Flowers, President of C.W. Roberts, John Harper, the President of Wiregrass, Brad Armstrong, our Senior Vice President of Operations, Heather Reese Akins, the President of Scruggs Company in Georgia, Heather, Dr. Heather Dylla, our Vice President of Sustainability, and Ryan Brooks, our Senior Vice President for Legal. These, this leadership team is what works on, this strategic plan, all the time and helps make sure we have a vision of where we're going. Now, any five-year plan, as you're looking out, is gonna have some element of uncertainty. It's gonna have certain assumptions that need to be made.
For us, the two main assumptions I want to communicate today that we're making in this five-year plan are this: that the federal and state funding mechanisms that are currently in place and working, and working well, that they continue, and that there's no severe economic recession. You'll hear us talk today about being seasonal, not cyclical. And so our model is built that we can handle the normal economic cycles and move back and forth between private work and public work. But we are making the reasonable assumption, we hope, that there's not a severe slowing of economic activity. So Roadmap 2027 is a five-year plan. The first year is actually the year we just finished midnight last Saturday, which was our fiscal year 2023.
We are going to announce and have an earnings release in late November as typical, but this morning, we released our results, did a pre-release. We're pleased to tell you that we've had a good year in 2023. Our revenue we anticipate being up 19%-20%, and our adjusted EBITDA up 51%-55%. A year ago, at the end of fiscal year 2022, where we had grown the top line 42% and the EBITDA, the bottom line, 20%, we said our goal for 2023 is to simply reverse those and to get back to double-digit EBITDA margins. So we're pleased to share with you today that we've accomplished that.
Now, for us, the year, and especially the second half of the year, for us, it felt a lot just getting back to normal, things getting back to normal, which is good. And we told you that when we were working through that pre-inflationary backlog during 2022, we said: Hey, you know, we were hit in the summer of 2021 with a surprise of rampant inflation that we hadn't seen in over a decade. And we had to work through and build those jobs we had contracts for. But we told the market that our model would adjust, and that throughout our 60-70 areas, they would start turning in and submitting bids that had those costs covered with contingencies and escalators.
And we also said at the same time, that due to the strong demand, we were starting to see 250-300 basis points of pricing power on the margin side. And so what's really been apparent the last two quarters is those costs were covered and those margins are starting to come through. So we're excited about 2023, and we're looking forward to the new fiscal year, which just got started on Monday of this week. So where do we go from here? And that's really our Roadmap 2027, is where are we going in the next four years?
And just to put some numbers on it, we see that over the next four years, continuing to grow at 15%-20% annually, which would put our top line somewhere in the $2.7 billion-$3.2 billion range. And we see that our EBITDA margins not only get back to 12%, but that we, over the course of those four years, achieve an EBITDA margin of 13%-14% or 50-75 basis points annually. So, and for us, that's really continuing to do what CPI's done historically as a growth company. So if you do the math, and everyone in here is really good at math, you can see that, okay, a company in the range of $3 billion revenue and $400 million of EBITDA, that's gonna create a lot of shareholder value, and that's good.
We're excited about that. But the really good news for our shareholders, and great news for us as the leadership team, is that we're not announcing today any new vision, any new product, any new concept, any new strategic plan. In fact, the big news today is that there's really no big new news, but that this concept that the company was founded on, the strategic plan that has been working for the last 20 years, we see that for the next 5 years, continues to be a sound plan, continues to be even more relevant with a growth runway and a macro environment that makes it more powerful and potent than ever. And so that's exciting for us.
So I want to now just take you through briefly and just touch on six points of our strategic plan and share with you a little bit of maybe some insight into what we see as sort of the secret sauce that makes CPI successful. The first thing we'll go is the asphalt-centered infrastructure company. And that is simply that we organize around an asphalt manufacturing facility, and that builds for us a market. And you can see here, Ned's map took us to the end of 2022. This is where we are today. We've been busy in 2023, and Monday, first day of our fiscal year, 2024, we added Walhalla, South Carolina, to the map. So you can see here, we organize around that hot mix asphalt plant in these markets, and that creates a competitive advantage in that market.
We're going to talk a little bit about that. But today, we're over 4,000 employees. We have about 60% of our revenue continuing to come from public projects. We're in 6 states now with 67 markets around hot mix asphalt plants. We have 13 aggregate facilities and 2 liquid asphalt terminals. We'll talk a little bit more about those. And you can see here the footprint. We'll talk a little bit about the geography there and talk about some of those light gray states that we get asked about so often. All right? Now, we say we're reasonably focused in the Sun Belt or the Southeast. And a couple of years ago, I started joking that if the Southeastern Football Conference could define Texas and Oklahoma as the Southeast, we could, too.
But a few months ago, I realized I've got to stop using college football conferences to define geography. So we're not no longer going to use that. But we're in the Sun Belt, in the Southeast, and for us, we think that's a tremendous advantage. It's the fastest growing part of the country with the strongest economy. And there's two really big drivers of that, and first is residential migration. I'm not going to go through all the numbers there, but there is tremendous growth in people moving to the Southeast. And that not only drives economic opportunities on the private side, but also the public side.
So in the fall of 2021, when the opportunity came up to potentially move to Nashville and to get some operations in Nashville, I said, "Well, I'm gonna go out there and ride around." So I spent a day riding around Nashville, and I was shocked at how much growth, how many projects, how many construction cranes I saw. But what really shocked me even more was how the roads were struggling to keep up, and how many 3 and 4 cycle light delays I was sitting at just because it was struggling to keep up the infrastructure. And so private development not only creates that opportunity, it creates the need to develop, to invest in public infrastructure. So we have residential migration, but we also have business migration.
You know, one of the things that made Nashville grow so much was just the fact that so many businesses are relocating to Nashville. They're following their workers. We see a lot of reshoring, businesses that want to strengthen their supply chains, moving back to the United States. And when they look at the map, they're making the same calculation as the residents are. They're saying: Where can we go that has low taxes, good weather, and in the case of businesses, a non-union labor force? And so more than any time I can remember, we're building and working on sites that are manufacturing facilities, industrial warehouses, labs. So those two things really drive the economic activity in the Southeast, and it's coming right at us.
All right, the next point, and this is really one of the strongest ingredients of our secret sauce, is we organize in local markets with the local workforce. You can see that map on the right is our Oak Park asphalt plant, with a green dot is an aggregate facility nearby that supplies that plant. And that circle around it’s about a 40- to 50-mile radius, and that’s how far you can haul asphalt. And that creates, in our industry, a relative market share business, where you know the market, you know the dynamics, and you can stay right there. But for us, what’s so important is we develop a local workforce that stays in that area, that sleeps in their beds every night and are experts in that business. And that does help to attract and retain a tenured long-term workforce.
But for us, what that also really means is they become experts in that area, and we can then participate in the revenue in that market, the recurring revenue. And this is something that's so important, is in those local markets, the state DOTs, the cities, the counties, but even the private companies, general contractors, developers, they're gonna spend a certain amount of money in those markets. And what we want is to have a steady effort by our local workforce to capture that. And so not only do they get to know these customers, they know how to do business with these customers. You know, our company in Raleigh, North Carolina, our North Carolina platform, has been there operating in that city for almost 100 years. And I saw how powerful that was to know.
For example, we had a team that constantly, every year, did the projects for Pulte Homes, and they knew, how does Pulte want these projects to be bid? How do they, what's important to them? And they got to where they were practically a part of that development team for Pulte Homes. The same thing at the airport and working at the Raleigh-Durham Airport and just knowing what's important to the airport, what's coming up, and partnering with them. But it also goes to local knowledge. We, the teams in Raleigh, became experts at the geology. Raleigh, you have rock in a lot of places. Some of the rock, you have to dynamite, and some of the rock you can rip with a bulldozer. And if you know which is which, that's a tremendous competitive advantage in those bids. And so that is so important.
It's the same way across the Southeast, in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina. These companies, these local workforces, are experts in that market, know those customers, and generate recurring revenue. All right? Another part of our strategy is the type of work we go after. We avoid the big mega projects that inherently have high risk. The work we do is mostly shorter duration, smaller projects that are higher margin and lower risk. And for us, that gives us the opportunity to turn over our backlog every year and to have vision of our projects, but it also, this type of work has upside. And so historically at CPI, in the course of working on thousands of projects in a year, a lot of those will finish at a higher than bid margin.
And so for us, the type of work we go after is a big part of our strategic plan. And the last point is we're a growth company, and we have multiple avenues for growth, and Nelson is gonna cover this in more detail, so I'm just gonna talk about a few high points. But part of our roadmap plan we see is continuing to grow at that 15%-20% per year. And as we've told you for many years, we still think it will be true. We see about half of that being organic growth and about half of that being acquisitive on average. Some years it's gonna vary. But for us, our first focus, and the way we think we can build the most shareholder value, is focus on organic growth, right?
Whether it be a crew or expanding capacity in a current market at a 3x multiple, or going to an adjacent market and establishing a greenfield at about a 4x multiple, we see that is a powerful way to build value. And I get the question often: "Well, Drew, if that's so good, why don't you always just greenfield or grow organically?" And the answer is: that's not always the right answer. There are some times where an acquisition makes the most sense to enter the market. And so acquisitive growth has been and continue to be a big part of our story. We've done a lot of acquisitions, as Ned said, and we've gotten, we've gotten good at them, as we did one just Monday in South Carolina.
So we've learned how to evaluate potential acquisitions, what makes a good strategic fit, what's gonna be a good market to be in. And so we talk to a lot of sellers, and we're the acquirer of choice in the Southeast, as Ned said. There's really three reasons why that is. We've developed a reputation of treating people fairly, of dealing fairly with these sellers, and that's important in our industry. The second thing that's important to folks that are looking to sell is they need confidentiality. It's very important to those sellers that they'd be dealing with someone that knows how to keep confidences. And the third and most important thing is we know how to take care of their workforce.
That is so important to these sellers, they wanna know because they're gonna see these people at the ball fields and in the grocery stores and at church, and they wanna be able to look at them and say, "We took care of you, and we gave you a better situation." So acquisitive growth is gonna continue to be important to that. And when we talk to sellers, the opportunity to join CPI is an attractive one. These sellers are almost always very, very successful family businesses. They've done very well, and now they're moving to the stage of their family where they're planning retirement and they're planning the next generation and how to transfer their wealth to them. And the CPI opportunity to attract.
I know this because in 2010, my family was looking at opportunities to sell Fred Smith Company and evaluating different opportunities. And for me, when I heard the opportunity in talking with Charles Owens to join CPI, to me that was very attractive, to continue doing what I loved with the management team in North Carolina that was very talented, but to have CPI behind us with the resources and the capital to take advantage of opportunities. And we built tremendous shareholder value over the next decade working with CPI. So for me, I really have lived that and understand, you know, the power in that. All right? So you've heard, Ned talk about the thesis of aging roads. Well, we've seen the last few years that our nation, our states, have gotten serious about starting to invest in that.
The IIJA, which we talk a lot about, is a five-year plan. You can see on the slide, 47% annual increase on average, in the highway funding program. But for CPI, the IIJA is so much more than highways. There's a lot of money to invest in airports, railroads, ports, even the charging stations that are gonna be built need infrastructure around them. And so for us, that's a lot of opportunities, to work. And it's really just getting started. You know, I get asked a lot: "Well, you know, is the funding going yet?" And the reality is, yes, it is, but it's, there's gonna be more impact in 2024 than there was for us in fiscal year 2023, because it, it, it so often does, it takes time for that money to get flowing.
So we see the IIJA as something that's gonna affect our P&L statement for the next 6-7 years. But also in our states, and our states all have healthy, normal funding mechanisms, but we've seen them take the initiative to invest in aging infrastructure. Florida, just, as you can see, just passed a $7 billion additional program for their infrastructure in their state. Tennessee just passed a $3 billion additional investment in theirs, and South Carolina is trying to expedite projects and put $850 million to it. So the opportunity and the demand is gonna be there because our states and our federal government know they have to invest in infrastructure. But the reality is, 4 years from now, our infrastructure is not gonna be all repaired. This is really just a down payment-...
on something that's gonna take decades to get fixed. So once the IIJA is over, there'll be another investment to fix our infrastructure. So as we're working in this demand environment, and we're growing on the top line, how do we continue to expand the bottom line and grow margins? And for us, there's really 3 parts of that plan for us other than the demand environment. The first is we wanna build better markets. We wanna continue to grow. We wanna be the number 1 or 2 player in our markets and build better markets. For us, every now and then, we'll get an opportunity to make an acquisition in a local market and grow our market share, but we also want to be smarter in the markets we're in.
It's amazing what new technology and this artificial intelligence is allowing us to do, and we're trying to use that to its fullest extent. Power BI, we're able to put into the hands of these area managers more information about their market dynamics than ever before, and that helps us be smarter bidders on bid day. The second part of our margin expansion strategy is vertical integration, which is simply capture more margin along the value chain. There are a lot of examples of vertical integration, but the two that are just most you know, powerful and easy to understand are our asphalt terminals. You know, four years ago, we had the opportunity to buy the asphalt terminal at the Gulf Coast in Panama and Panama City.
We said at the time that that would add 20-30 basis points to the bottom line of the company, and it, it's delivered. So two months ago, we just opened our second terminal in North Alabama to service from Birmingham to Nashville. So those types of investments will allow us, without growing the top line, still just buying the same materials we were gonna buy anyway, to capture that margin and to grow the bottom line. Then the third lever of margin expansion is, it's not anything dramatic, but over time it can be powerful, and that's scale. If we're gonna grow the top line 15%-20%, let's focus on growing our fixed costs slower, and that can lead to 10-15 basis points we estimate per year, dropping to the bottom line.
Over the course of a five-year strategic plan, that can be pretty powerful. So those are the three ways we wanna grow the bottom line, but we wanna do it the right way. And for us, we wanna focus on building a sustainable future. We wanna do that by focusing on safety, by focusing on upward mobility for our workforce, by having representation and regulation. Now, that picture right there is of our Vice President of Sustainability, Dr. Heather Dylla, who's with us today. And we're very proud that Heather is one of the foremost leading experts on sustainability and infrastructure in our nation. She's at the table when the federal government is working with industry and state governments to figure out how we're going to build sustainable infrastructure, what are the rules gonna be.
And so for us, that's something important that our industry is moving into, is facing, and we wanna have a seat at the table, and Heather provides that to us. And we wanna have sustainable production. So for us, really, that really means two things: take care of our people and be responsible citizens, and we do that through living out our four core values. The first is family. We say we're a family of companies, but more importantly, we're a company of families. And safety is the very most solid commitment we make to those families, is we're gonna get our worker back home to their loved ones safe each night. We have to focus on that daily. We can't ever take our eye off that. The second is opportunity. As I said, we have a very diverse workforce.
We wanna give them opportunities to grow and build better lives for them and their families. And so we wanna use the growth that's coming to create opportunities for them, for upward mobility. The third is respect. As Heather's sitting at the table, working on regulations, we wanna respect our communities. We wanna respect the environment. We wanna take care of it and participate in that. And finally, is excellence. We believe that we can achieve every target in this Roadmap 2027 and do it in a sustainable way by doing things with excellence. So that's our four core values and how we'll do things right. All right? Lastly, I just wanna tell you, Ned told you, two months into my tenure, Greg moved to Raleigh, and I'd known Greg for a long time. We had worked together in CPI.
He was in Alabama, I was in North Carolina. But he moved to Raleigh. He's been right by my side the last two years, very relaxing, no stress. But he's just been a wonderful partner, and he's just done a great job navigating through working with Alan through a very smooth transition, and he is a key part of our success as a company. So I'm gonna now bring up Greg.
Thank you, Jule, and good morning, everybody. Those are nice words. Thank you. So Jule and Ned have talked about a proven strategy, right?
So Alan Palmer, our former CFO, hired me in 1993 at a predecessor company. That strategy, Charles Owens, later Ned and Alan, essentially started then. I didn't know that I was engaged in that strategy, but I was. I know now we're doing exactly the same thing now as we were then. A lot of people in this room were there right beside me engaged in that strategy. So it's not just, it doesn't just go back to when we went public, it goes back to, you know, that 1993 date when Alan hired me. So it's kind of a cool story, and it works the same. They've said there's no change, and they're right. I'm doing the same things.
Maybe I was in a little bit different position back then, but doing the same things today that I was doing then. It works, it works, it works. So let's talk about what this proven strategy looks like. So first of all, we'll talk about a track record for sustainable growth. I'll talk about a proven strategy of consistent visibility with our backlog that is only getting better. And we'll talk about our business is seasonal, not cyclical. And then we wanna show you the proven strategy and how it works in our targets and outlook. And then finally, we wanna show you the financial flexibility we have right now to be able to execute this strategy through 2027. So as Jule mentioned, we had a strong finish to the year.
I will get a little bit more into the numbers, but let me talk you through this, the little bit of this preliminary information. So, I'm not gonna start with 2021, I'll start with 2022, which we had $1.3 billion in revenue and a midpoint growth that we're now preliminary releasing of 19% is $1.547 billion-$1.557 billion, a tightened range and a raise. Net income also increased 113% to $44.8 million-$47 million. Adjusted EBITDA is up 53%, from $111 million to a range of $168 million-$172 million. And then adjusted EBITDA margin.
This slide, I mean, this part of the slide doesn't look like it goes with the rest, does it? We talked about that, the $1 billion worth of backlog that we was not inflation-adjusted when seemingly overnight, inflation went from 2%-9% in 2021. So it took a little hit on our margin that year, and then while we largely finished most of that backlog in 2022, we certainly took a margin hit down to 8.5%. But now, I'm pleased to announce that the new margin for 2023, the new preliminary margin for 2023 is 10.9%-11%, to a 28% midpoint growth. Also, a tightening and a raise from our previous guidance. So let's talk about that consistent visibility.
This doesn't show all 11 quarters, which is in the box below, but there has been a consistent increase in our backlog for 11 quarters. It's very unusual in this business. We usually build backlog in kind of the off-peak season, and then burn more than we build in the construction season. It hasn't happened. I think that speaks to a couple of things. First of all, we're growing, right? So as we grow, our backlog grows. But I think more importantly, it's the demand. The demand is there for us to continue to build into our backlog, more visibility for the next 12 months, and 75%-80% of that next 12 months is in that backlog.
It provides us exactly what we need from a revenue standpoint to know and understand what's gonna happen, as well as a margin. So seasonal, not cyclical. Jule talked a little bit about this as well. We're at a three-year run rate of 63% public, 37% non-public, private. Basically, the beauty of this model is, and all these guys in this room can tell you, that they can flip from one to the other in each of their local markets, depending on what the needs are, depending where the demand is. So that's really helpful. It continues the growth that we currently enjoy.
The seasonal side of the business from a modeling standpoint, so 60% of our revenue is in the back half of the year, 40% is in the first half of the year. And then the same thing, or similarly, is true of our EBITDA. 70% of EBITDA is in the back half of the year, and 30% is in the first half of the year. And that's primarily just related to shortening of days in our non-peak season, right? And weather that we have to deal with through that time. Okay. So we have a strong cash flow conversion model, which traditionally generated a lot of cash in this company. And growth and margin enhancement that Jule mentioned continue to drive new EBITDA dollars, so those will continue to grow.
But the way we think about this conversion model to get to retained cash flow is start with Adjusted EBITDA, then back out maintenance CapEx, which is 3.25% of our revenue. And we know that that's what it is because we have predictive models that tell us how we need to take care of and how we need to replace existing infrastructure or existing equipment within our infrastructure. Okay? And then finally, we remove interest and taxes to come up with a retained cash flow, and that's leaving 52%-60% of retained cash flow. That's what we want to do with that is invest it in high growth or high return capital investments. And then for the Roadmap going forward through 2027, our goal is to hit that 60%, moving forward.
I'm pleased to announce too, that preliminary 2023 numbers for cash flow from operations are $155-$160 million, which compared to $16 million last year, is a nice change. Now let's talk about the initial guidance for 2024. We are announcing continued top and bottom line growth in 2024, which represents a return to our normal pace of growth and fully operating our strategy for all of 2024. So remember that in 2023, discussed earlier, and Jule did too, that we worked through some of that pre and pre-inflationary backlog, which is now largely complete. So we've already talked about 2023 numbers. So just right into 2024 guidance, 15% increase takes us to $1.75 billion-$1.825 billion.
Net income increases 41% to $63 million-$70 million. Adjusted EBITDA, 22% increase to the midpoint of $197 million-$219 million. The midpoint growth of EBITDA margin to 11.3%-12%. Now turn to the, financial, outlook update for the Roadmap 2027. Revenue growth, and Jule mentioned this a minute ago, revenue growth assumes continued 15%-20% growth on the top line and 50-75 basis points, annually of EBITDA. This also assumes, on the top line, a 50/50 split between organic and acquisitive revenue. So with that, 2027, revenue is expected to be $2.7 billion-$3.2 billion, net income $145 million-$171 million.
Adjusted EBITDA, 20%-27% increase, gets us to $351 million-$448 million. And then EBITDA margin increases over time, 50-75 basis points to 13%-14%. So let's talk about the strong flexibility we have for that growth. How do we-- How are we gonna get there? Well, first of all, I'm pleased to announce that, in fiscal, as fiscal year 2023 ends, we are below two percent leverage or two times leverage ratio. So that's a nice drop from this time last year of 3.06 times to approximately 1.9. So it's a good story. So I think that's where we wanna live, right? That two and a half... I'm sorry, 1.5-2.5 times, we're there now.
As we make acquisitions, certainly that's gonna lever up a little bit, but within that band of 2.5-1.5. So cash is another strong story. Obviously, talked about cash flow from operations. We are left with $55 million on our books as of 9/30, approximately. That was after essentially keeping debt flat year-over-year. Okay? So that cash was put to good use. For dry powder, so this is what gets us to 2027. Thanks to our banking partners, we have available dry powder of $448 million to handle the growth over the next three years. And then the final point I wanna make is we have an interest rate swap in place.
So on $300 million worth of term debt, we have a fixed rate of 3.6% to enjoy through 2027. So with that, next, we will hear from Nelson Fleming, VP of Strategy and Business Development, to talk about how we use all this money. But first, I think we're gonna have a take a 10- or 15-minute break.
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[Music]I will never let you down.
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[Music]The wandering heart to regulates that rhythm. One by night, the winter boys are freezing in their fountain. Above they float, along the northern seaboard. Down below, the winter boys are waiting for the snow. Bye bye empire, empire, bye bye! Shallow water, channel in tide. I can trace my history, down one generation to my home, in one of our submarines. One of our submarines. Red light flickers on a wink, air valve is a-open. Half the pressure gone away, flounder in the ocean. Say, the winter boys, drinking heavy water from a stone. Bye bye empire, empire, bye bye! Shallow water, channel in the tide. Bye bye empire, empire, bye bye! Tired solution drowning in the night. I can trace my history, down one generation to my home, in one of our submarines. One of our submarines. One of our submarines.
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[Music]Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree? I travel the world and the seven seas. Everybody's looking for something. Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree? I travel the world and the seven seas. Everybody's looking for something. Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree? I travel the world and the seven seas. Everybody's looking for something. Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree? I travel the world and the seven seas. Everybody's looking for something. Here comes the summer, ooh. That's why I'm calling, I have a plan. It's me at the corner down the street. Strolling apart, falling in the sand. I bring you iced coffee, ooh, and peach passion fruit and strawberries, too. I know I'm in love. I just can't take my eyes off you. So good to be true.
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[Music] This will be an everlasting love. This will be the one I've waited for. This will be the first time anyone-
[Music] ... me in time, and I'm so glad that you pacified my mind. This will be an everlasting love for me. Whoa! Loving you is kinda wonderful, because you've shown me just how much you care. You've given me the thrill of a lifetime, and made me believe you've got more thrills to spare. Oh, this will be an everlasting love. Oh, yes, it will now. You brought a lot of sunshine into my life. You filled me with happiness I never knew. You gave me more joy than I ever dreamed of, and no one, no one can take the place of you. Well, this will be you and me, yes, sirree! Eternally hugging and squeezing and kissing and pleasing together forever through rain or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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[Music] Hello, everyone. Everyone, we're gonna get seated and get started again here, if you can make your way back.
[Music] And the beat goes on. And the beat goes on. You've got to move it. You've got to move it. And the beat goes on. Ooh, just like my love. And the beat goes on. Got to make it last. Still moving strong. Gotta believe, baby. And the beat goes on. And the beat goes on and on and on. Just like my love, everlasting. Oh, and the beat goes on. Still moving strong, and I love it. And the beat goes on.
All righty. Welcome back from break, everybody. Greg mentioned towards the end of his presentation that we have this $448 million to spend, and I'm gonna walk you through how that's gonna work. In this next portion of the presentation, I'm gonna provide you a more detailed look at those three levers of growth that Jule mentioned earlier, with case studies that demonstrate the opportunity that's in front of us. Touching on the latter two levers, the greenfield and acquisitive. Just since inception, we have successfully integrated just under 40 acquisitions and established nearly a dozen greenfields, demonstrating a core competency that has been part and parcel to our strategy since the beginning, and is gonna continue to be as we look to achieve those Roadmap 2027 targets.
Additionally, you know, on this first one, organic, we've had great success over the years expanding organically, growing one of our platform companies, by nearly three times, through almost exclusively organic means. And to that point, organic, the first of our three growth levers, as Jule previously mentioned, that's our primary focus. And on these type things, we can increase or enhance our service offerings in an existing market by outfitting new crews, allowing us to capture more revenue and more margin in markets with outsized demand. So what we have here is a case study of a typical mainline paving crew. You know, comprises of about 10-12 crew members. It's... You know, they can generate roughly $8 million of annual revenue.
It's a modest investment, right, at a favorable multiple, you know, 3x that we can execute on very quickly, right? If the work is there, our personnel departments, led by Robert Baugnon, who's gonna be part of the panel discussion coming up, they're continuously training new foremen so that they're prepared to lead their own crew if and when the opportunity comes. Turning to the greenfields. I'll quote one of our founders by saying, you know, he used to say, "With greenfield," you know, specifically these HMA plant greenfields, "you're looking for a hole in the market." And what he meant by that was, you're looking for an adjacent market with good long-term demands and positive competitive dynamics that you can, you know, leverage your existing organization nearby to stand up a new area.
And that initial investment range we've got there, that $4 million-$8 million, that's dependent on a couple different factors. But, you know, primarily it's the size of the plant and the age of the plant that you're installing in that new location. And so here I wanted to give you some insight into what a greenfield can look like at a few different stages of development. This one here in particular has had a little bit of time to mature. This one in Plant City, Florida, all right? It's between Tampa, Florida, and Lakeland, Florida, a high-growth corridor. And we erected a used plant there in May 2017, so about a year prior to doing the IPO, and its first full year of operation was 2018.
So looking at the chart there down at the bottom left, you know, in year three, by year three, we're doing about $20 million in revenue. And you fast-forward another three years, by year six, we were doing about $40 million in revenue. This year, year seven, so fiscal year 2024, you know, we're gonna do just over $60 million in revenue. And identifying these new markets to enter, via greenfield, you know, takes vision, takes long-term planning. I've got a group of guys that really heads that up underneath me. They do a great job. And we're constantly, you know, planning and evaluating markets where this is a useful lever to grow. Moving to the final lever, the acquisitions, these ones, you know, they get all the press, but we've made some headway over the years, right? Building better markets, through acquisitions.
As this map illustrates, there are plenty of more opportunities in the six states that we're in, as well as the seven states in the Sun Belt that eventually we're gonna plan on expanding into. You know, the factors motivating these privately held businesses to sell over the years, it really hasn't changed, right? It's a, I think Jule mentioned earlier, decision to retire, maybe a lack of a succession plan, or conversely, as was the case with our next slide, the desire to grow their business with a partner that fit their culture and could help them execute on opportunities to grow. And that was the case with King Asphalt and Mike Crenshaw, he's another member of the panel coming up.
In October of 2021, with 3 plants, 158 employees, headquartered in the white-hot Greenville, South Carolina metro area, King became CPI's South Carolina platform company. And like all our platform companies, you know, they have a couple different features, right? They possess a strong management team. They're operating in growing markets. They have a track record of operational excellence, and they have a competency and an ability to grow both organically as well as acquisitively. So I'm gonna take you kinda through King's story over the last couple of years here. So their first bolt-on, it happened about 9 months after becoming part of the CPI family. King integrated and executed on the acquisition of Southern Asphalt there in the Myrtle Beach area.
It was a two-plant operation that immediately put King in the two fastest growing markets in South Carolina between Greenville, South Carolina, and Myrtle Beach. And, you know, we talk in terms of types of acquisitions, platforms, and bolt-ons, and the easiest way to put it is the way they differ is bolt-ons are generally smaller, and therefore, they're great candidates to be folded into an existing operating company. The second bolt-on that King did happened a couple of months later, the acquisition of Pickens Construction. They added another plant in the Upstate that expanded their footprint further south, so they picked up some new bidding markets.
And then the next bolt-on, just a few months after that, returning to coastal South Carolina, we had a chance to build a better market with our third bolt-on there, an acquisition of one plant in Myrtle Beach that kinda helps us meet the capacity and all the demands of that white-hot market there. And then, as you guys probably saw on Monday, their fourth and final bolt-on, we added another plant in the Upstate that expanded King's footprint there, further west into Oconee County, just a small one-plant operation that took us to eight plants. And I wanna camp out on this picture here because this is what we call a Day One.
This is closing day, and these are emotional days, both for the owner, as he's addressing employees, talking about how he's talking about his decision to sell the business, introducing new ownership. A lot of these people have worked for that owner for, you know, 10, 20, in some cases, even upwards of 30 years. It's important to win those day ones, and I feel like we've developed a really nice formula to reassure, you know, employees that, you know, they've got a job, and most importantly, that we're gonna take care of them and their families. They're not gonna take a step back professionally. They're not gonna take a step back from a compensation standpoint.
It's important part of what we do from an acquisition standpoint, and this is really the juncture that the platform companies, you know, they take center stage at this point. Addressing employees, figuring out how to onboard them, putting into the right roles, and, you know, really from the point of Day One, you know, going forward, they're responsible for integrating these bolt-on acquisitions. So in summation here, within 2 years, King added 5 plants to expand to an 8-plant footprint. They went from 158 employees to over 400, and as you can see here on the map, there's plenty of white space to grow between the Greenville area and the Myrtle Beach area. So the opportunities are out there for them to continue the buy-and-build strategy that we've employed throughout the state of South Carolina.
So now I'm gonna kinda take you through a couple different types of acquisitions. What we just went through in the case study with King, and their various bolt-ons, you know, you'll notice that all those, those companies had similar features, right? They had an asphalt plant, they had paving crews, they had base crews. But and, and those are what I would really call kinda middle-of-the-fairway-type deals for us. But there's also a large universe of additional opportunities on the materials side of things. Jule mentioned earlier, you know, the, the liquid asphalt terminal in coastal Florida that we acquired back in 2019. But also, and this is the focus of these, these next two slides, there's those construction services businesses out there. And these are services-only businesses.
They're not. There's not a materials component, so there's not an asphalt plant, there's not an aggregate plant. But as this slide illustrates, this greatly expands the number of acquisition opportunities that we can execute on to build shareholder value. So I'm gonna take you through three recent examples here. We acquired a grading contractor in Wilson, North Carolina. We acquired a grading contractor in Pensacola, Florida, that also did utilities work, and we acquired a commercial grading contractor in Southern Site in Alabama. And these are all examples of construction-only contractors in markets that we're already in, and that's the key distinction about these type deals, is they're meant to support and expand our core asphalt operations and markets that we're already in, in those existing markets.
They're there to complement those ongoing operations, allowing us to capture more revenue and more margin, kinda similar to adding new crews. So in summary, there is obviously, taking you through this, there's no shortage of opportunities from an acquisitive side of things. We've got a long, long runway to grow there. We get approached every day, it seems like, with new opportunities. There's plenty of opportunities that we're trying to track down from a greenfield side of things. There's a lot of untapped markets that have the demand to support another asphalt producer, and there's plenty of organic growth opportunities. We, you know, we've got so many of them between the operating companies that we have that, you know, you've got to sequence them out, similar to acquisitions.
But our job is to help cultivate these opportunities and hopefully pick the best ones and hopefully they're the right ones. So now that I've walked you through how we grow, I'd like to turn it back over to Jule Smith to lead the panel discussion.
While they're setting up, Joseph, if you would go back to the slide showing our current footprint, the map that we had. I promised you that I'd talk about new states, and I realize I didn't hit that, and I wanted to go through that just to briefly point out, Matt-- That's good right there. So, I get asked a lot of times, "Well, Jule, when is CPI going to a new state?" And I say, "Well, we just entered 2 new states in 2 years." But they see this map, and they say, "Well, what about Texas? What about Oklahoma, Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana?" And I would just say this: we are always having conversations with people in new states, but we also have a lot of opportunity in the states we're in.
There's a lot of white space in the six states we're in, and those opportunities give us a chance to leverage not only our existing management structure and the people that are there in our platform companies. It also drives throughput through our vertical integration facilities. So the answer is, we look at both. But the one thing we're not gonna do is, just because assets come up for sale, hopscotch around and do that. We're gonna, if we're gonna go into a new state, we're gonna have a good management team, we're going to make sure that it's organized and that we can deliver excellent execution. So we will be in these states at some point in the future. I can't tell you when, but we're gonna make sure to do it in a thoughtful way. So I wanted to cover that.
So I'm excited now to introduce for you these guys, our panel, and I'm gonna get them to share a little bit of their insight. But I first want to introduce them and tell you who these guys are. Now, you just heard from Nelson, and Nelson is, in a lot of ways, like my right arm. As much growth opportunities as we have, Nelson, as our VP of Strategy and Business Development, helps navigate all those opportunities. But more than that, he also helps us focus on our strategic plan. He is the keeper of Roadmap each year, and so that grows organically from each of our area managers. They have a part in Roadmap.
If you looked at—it's a long document, but the area manager for Bob in Pensacola, Matt Carden, he's got his part of that roadmap, and so it's built up organically. So Nelson is extremely important in making sure that our strategy is being executed on, and we're looking at these growth opportunities. Robert Baugnon, our VP of Business Development, right here. I've known Robert for the better part of two decades, and a lot like Greg and I, Robert came up through the operating companies. He's been in the trenches as my VP of Personnel. So that is a tremendous advantage as we navigate attracting and retaining a workforce in an environment where generationally, the workforce for our industry is shrinking. Robert's job is to turn that to be a competitive advantage for CPI.
For him to have the knowledge and to understand what it makes, what it takes to make a successful workforce, the mindset of the people that work in, at asphalt plants and on grading crews, is a tremendous advantage for CPI. So we're gonna be talking a little bit about the workforce. But then these two guys in the middle, they're the two newest platform companies to join CPI. First, Mike Crenshaw, President of King Asphalt, who Nelson just showed you, has not had a very laid-back first 2 years at CPI. So, but his team. You know, I met Mike in May 2021, where he reached out to CPI and said: "Hey, we-- I'd like to talk to you.
And so I went to Greenville and started meeting with Mike, and we would ride around, and I just got to know him. And what was so impressive was, not only was that company located in the dynamic area of Greenville, South Carolina, but that was a company of character. Mike cared about his people. He led them well, but they had, he had such a great team. And I said, "You know, that's the company that can fill in this hole for CPI in South Carolina, we can grow with." And it's happened exactly like that. And so, we're really excited, you know, with the growth we've had in South Carolina, I promised Mike we'd give him at least a month or two before we do another acquisition in South Carolina. And then finally, David Ferebee.
You know, we, Ferebee Corporation joined the CPI family of companies just this last December. So David's gone through his inaugural voyage-
Absolutely.
And just finished up, and I promised him before the first year was out, I would have him on the World Wide Web in New York City, and so I've delivered on that promise. So, but for Ferebee Corporation, David is from Charlotte. He and his family founded that business in Charlotte. They're experts in that market. It's a huge growing market, and so to have someone like David Ferebee, whose business is just so strategically located, they have a great team that knows that market, and David is just... you know, he's a native, and that is a huge advantage. So, guys, I wanna just start out and ask you a few questions, just to help share a little bit about what, what our, what our secret sauce is.
So first, Mike and David, I wanna ask you, why did you choose CPI as an acquirer for your business? What about the opportunity to join CPI as a platform company appealed to you?
I'll go first. You know, we were looking for someone that would really take care of our people. We had seen some acquisitions locally that had not gone so well. The cultures of the company had been destroyed. People had left the companies. The last thing we wanted was to get involved in something like that. We really wanted a company that we knew would take care of our people, had a great culture, and would allow our people to grow. So, it was really important for us to be able to see our culture continue, our identity continue, and to be able to give our employees opportunities to grow.
Okay. David?
Now, we again, we're a small family-owned, basically, the principals were my father, my brother, and I. And we've been in business about 38 years, and none of our children or family members were interested. And so, we were looking at how to transition the business and from the succession side of things. And so, we'd been approached several times over the years, but we started researching and pulled up CPI. And again, it just one of those things where it seemed to fit for us, in that you had somebody who understood our business, was not gonna come in and recreate the world that we live in, especially for our employees, similar to that, so you don't have just a huge defection.
Because we're all fortunate, like I said, the people asset that make our business strong, and key people have been with us for a long time. But, based on our conversations and meeting, there was just a comfort level there that we felt moving forward would make the best sense for us, and it has, and that's where we are.
Great.
Can I add something?
Yeah, go ahead.
One other important part we had was, you know, we did have such a good leadership team. The fact that we could still continue to run our business locally was really important for us.
Yeah.
And that's something that CPI allows, so.
Yeah.
Right.
That was a big part of what appealed to me back in 2010. All right, Robert, so I said—I told them what your challenge was. So how are you managing the generational loss of workers over time in the construction industry, and how are you gonna turn this into a competitive advantage?
So, we have to be creative to say the least. You know, we joke around about, and you hear about the aging workforce, but, you know, we literally have employees from 18 to 80. You know, we have a significant advantage over other companies because we're able to take, you know, with our size and scale, take those employees that are maybe at the twilight point of their career and use that experience and knowledge to our advantage, put them in training roles, put them in roles where they're mentoring and helping to grow these younger folks. I mean, this point in time, we're in high schools. To that point where we're chasing and attracting employees, trying to find them in high schools now.
That's a different type of model that we have to feed. We have to feed a different kind of emotion there. Now, we're looking at growth, and how am I gonna grow, and what's my path? And putting together formal programs. I think Nelson mentioned it earlier, with these paving crews and stuff. We're putting together formal programs that are documented with specific steps to train and grow foremen. We saw this coming a number of years ago. We've got to build these people up ourselves. There are no foreman trees out in our yard, so we go shake, and people just fall out. We've got to build them ourselves. And then, you know, we get this key group of middle management that we really need to hold on to.
You know, by incentivizing them through long-term incentive programs, stock reward programs that incentivize them for staying with us and holding on, that helps us align that key management group, the middle managers, with the company's goals. We're gonna take advantage of everything that we can, you know, bring to bear and hold on to these employees, cause without them, Nelson over here can acquire all the companies we want to, but if we're not holding on to these people and taking advantage of their strengths, you know, we're not going anywhere.
Yeah.
... Yeah, the yellow iron's valuable, but the people are where it's all at.
That's right.
All right, Nelson, how do you source deals at CPI, and how do you work with the platform presidents to assess opportunities and to be effective in their state?
Yeah, you know, the, my favorite part of my job is the acquisition side of things, is just a highly collaborative effort, and that is the case from a sourcing standpoint as well. I see a lot of opportunities. My department sees a lot of opportunities that come in, those inbound leads that, you know, maybe a seller's decided to get representation. We see all those opportunities in our region of the country, but more often, and throughout our history, it's been, you know, relationships that these operators that have been operating in their states for, you know, 20, 30, even 40 years in some cases. You know, they've developed relationships with people in their industry, just either through competing with them, through just getting to know them through industry associations.
From a sourcing side of things, we've got a lot of people that are on the lookout for deals, that are able to help source, and so we see a lot of opportunities from that standpoint.
Okay, great. All right, Mike and David, so you've talked about what joining CPI meant for you and your families and your partners. What did it mean for your employees, joining CPI and your workforce?
Well, again, a seamless continuum, continuity of leadership and management. Again, CPI brought to the table, again, the resources and capital and, you know, expertise from other companies. But at the same time, we—the employees, again, were number one in that transition. Again, we were very careful in trying to be discreet and not get people upset or wondering a lot of questions and so forth, because, again, we didn't want that to occur. And, knock on wood, I think we did a good job of that, and we had very little fallout from that from an employee side of things. But at the same time, what happened, I think from day one, the benefit side definitely came to light in the healthcare. Again, we were, you know, a smaller group.
With a larger group of CPI, we were able to offer better healthcare and again, comparable savings plan, 401 and so forth. And again, the concept of you weren't losing your, you know, benefits in any shape or form, we were gonna operate just as we had before. So that was a lot of comfort in the employee side of things. And again, the savings plan with some of the stock options that you incorporate, a lot of people have taken on to that, where we didn't have that option before. So we just broadened the base of the things that we could offer to them, and they were as good or better than what they'd had before. And I think that came across as a very positive.
Great. Mike?
I agree with David on the confidentiality. That was huge for us. We did not want to get our employees upset. We didn't want to lose employees leading up to the sale. We were able to keep it quiet till the day of, which was extraordinary in today's markets. It was really important for our people, though. With CPI, with a lot of family companies, there's like a plateau of how far your employees can grow.
Yeah.
With Construction Partners, there is no plateau. They could start out on a crew and end up one day running the company or even working into the CPI realm. So that was important for them, being able to allow them to grow. We had such a young group, so eager to grow, but they were just kinda reaching that plateau, and this just opened a whole new door for them. So really excited about that.
Great.
Also, one thing, too, is, you know, it allowed them to grow. It allowed them to grow, our company to grow, and we could, you know, we could vertically integrate into other services that we had never even thought about. So that would help our, our whole company become stronger.
Yeah. Great. Yeah, I remember one of the times I was walking around with Mike in the summer, and of course, when you're just talking to the owner, you're sort of like, you're the insurance guy, the bonding guy, right? You can't go out on the crew and say, "He's from CPI." But, we were watching a big cement reclamation project, and Lloyd McAmis was the guy running the crew, and now with this growth, he's the area manager-
Right.
For the Upstate region, and just a wonderful, sharp, smart guy, but just created a tremendous growth opportunity for him. Robert, what's your approach to a new acquisition to help the platform companies make it a successful integration? What's important to that process?
So I've participated in a number of these acquisitions, both as the local representative, when I was with Fred Smith Company, before Jule decided to make Mike's life busy over here. At one point in time, when I was with Fred Smith Company, we completed four acquisitions in 10 weeks. It felt like we were doing an acquisition about every two or three weeks, so we were standing in front of a new group of people each time. The key and the most important step is that first Day One. The Day One is where you get to make your first impression, and you get one shot at it.
If Mike's making an acquisition, and it's got 20 people, and his guys don't walk in with a positive attitude and are pushing and selling what they're gonna bring to the table, and they lose seven people... That's, that's incredibly destructive to that operation. The most important part of these acquisitions, I mean, we buy assets, they're asset acquisitions, we're buying the equipment, we're buying the sites and the plants, but equipment and sites and plants don't have free will, the people do. And if we don't sell them and we don't convince them that this is good for their families, that's on us, and we can't do that.
The equipment manufacturers will sell us equipment all day long, but last time I checked, when the lowboy shows up with a new bulldozer, there's not a carton on the back of the machine that says, "Operator enclosed." Doesn't happen. We've got to hold on to those folks. So making that sales pitch that day, selling the benefits, selling the culture, talking about the growth opportunities, that is the first and most important step. I always used to take the approach that when that new employee went home that day, went to go see his wife and said, "Crazy thing happened today at work. We got bought. Our owner sold out, but I think it's gonna be a good thing for us. You know, our benefits, the benefits just got cheaper. They're really good.
Looks like I'm gonna get a little extra time off, a little more vacation, a little PTO. That's good for us." So I want them walking home with that in their mind, not, "Man, what happened today? We got sold." If we've done that, if that's what's happening, we haven't done our job. So that Day One piece and making that first good impression is the most important part. And then after that, it's as both Mike and David have said, giving people the opportunity to grow. The size and scale that we provide and the opportunity... You know, Mike's guys have grown significantly over the years. As they've added on these operations, it's given them the opportunity to take a larger piece and take a larger role in the company.
And that, that's an amazing thing for these operating companies.
Right. Nelson, what are the sellers' goals and priorities? You work with them all the time.
Yeah.
How do you approach meeting their needs?
Yeah, a couple things have already been mentioned on this topic, but obviously, you know, right off the bat, you know, they wanna know that the person that is across the table from them, they can trust. The confidentiality aspect of things is crucially important, and then just the fact that, you know, they're worried about their people, right? Those people that have worked for them for such a long time, they're their work family, just as much as their regular family. No different than you or I. You know, you probably see the people you work with more than your families, day in and day out. But there's two other points that, you know, that I think resonate with sellers, that hopefully we articulate and communicate throughout the process, which is the locally driven model, decision-making at the local level.
It's a local business, as we've kind of elaborated throughout this presentation. That is an aspect of things, whether you're a platform or a bolt-on, that really resonates with sellers because they realize the importance of knowing the local market, the relationships they have there. And then I would say that the second point is that, you know, you wanna make sure that they wanna make sure that they're dealing with somebody that has the know-how from an acquisitive standpoint. There's not very many companies in our space that acquire businesses, and I think it's crucially important that throughout the process, they feel like they're taken care of. You know, for the most part, you're really only selling your business one time, and it's an emotional process.
Part of our job and part of my job throughout that process, from the time we start discussions to the time we close, is to shepherd them through the process of selling their business, and I think we do that better than anybody else in our industry.
Great. All right, final question. Mike and David, you've heard me and Nelson up here talking about opportunities, but what do you see now that you've joined CPI? What do you see as opportunities in your marketplace and state moving forward?
Well, I think Charlotte, again, is and our general area, is poised for, you know, extreme, you know, great growth here in the near term and long term. And so we, as being a new member, already looking at organic growth within our market, and we see a lot of positive signs then. And again, we're just trying to figure out what makes the best sense for everybody. But the growth and the upside in our market, we feel, is very strong, and we look forward to that and trying to, you know, move forward with that.
Well?
You know, for us, I guess I talked about a little bit this last night, you know, our state is super strong right now. There's a lot of people moving to our state. Our Myrtle Beach market was recently published as the number one place to move to in America. Greenville and Spartanburg in the Upstate are in the top 15 places to move. So both of those markets are exploding from a commercial standpoint. That's housing and commercial buildings, large tilt-up buildings or warehouse-type buildings, but also the DOT. The DOT's been very fortunate to increase their funding the last six years through a gas tax. They've been able to catch some extra funding from the Feds. So both are very strong right now for us in South Carolina.
A lot of the counties, they're passing. They've either passed or trying to pass 1-cent sales taxes to increase the funding for the counties. So we're seeing real growth in all three areas in our area right now. As far as future growth, I mean, you know, the Columbia area is a very good market. Charleston market is a very good market. You know, down toward Augusta, there's a lot of room to grow in South Carolina, and we look forward to it.
Great! Well, thank you, guys. I know, you know, you guys, the market hears from Greg and I a lot, but I'm excited today that you get to see that there's a whole team that really makes this happen, and it's experts like these guys that really make CPI successful. So give them a hand and thank them. Thank you, guys. We're gonna take about a couple-minute break, about a 5-minute break, and then we'll have questions and answers, and Greg and I will be up here to answer those. All right? Thank you.
[Music] It started all in early September. My God-given little became a little older. Talk of I seeing my broken heart. Hold on, easy teardrops, you got a long way to go. Did you get older doing nothing today? Don't you wanna stop complaining? If one is easy, then hard is two. No one knows where you're heading to. Once my private collection always betters on you. No consolation prizes. Spit out your lies and chew more. Cut off your head, that's it. If you look like that, I swear you're looking for it. I thought about this for a long time. I never had the chance to try to make it better. My heart is waiting for a new you, and there is no other option on the schedule. Love like ours should never die with years. Once you start, it can never go backwards.
[Music] 'Cause dark is one, the bright is two. No one knows where we're heading to. No matter what it takes, never give up on you. Oh, I want you to change it all. I'm gonna make it better. No consolation prizes. Spit out your lies and chew more. Cut off your head, that's it. If you look like that, I swear I'm gonna love you more. No consolation prizes. Spit out your lies and chew more. Cut off your head, that's it. If you look like that, I swear I'm gonna love you more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more. Well, I know when you're around cause I know the sound, I know the sound of your heart. Well, I know when you're around cause I know the sound, I know the sound of your heart.
[Music] Well, I know when you're around cause I know the sound, I know the sound of your heart. Well, I know when you're around cause you know the sound, I know the sound of your heart. I can't believe how soon got you late. Oh, baby, won't you come again? She said, "I've got a problem with your shoes and your jeans." Good morning, move in. I never thought that you were straight. Now I'm wondering. You're so conceited, I said, "I love you." Why does it matter if I lie to you? I'm incredibly kind with you, so don't you tell me that you just don't-
[Music]...
Hello, everyone. Back to our seats? Yes, I am. I wish I could do the flicker lights thing like the-- Okay, everybody, we're going to get started with the Q&A session. If you can get back to your seats. Thank you.
I didn't have to explain what we did.
Appreciate the questions, yeah.
In fact, the very first day, he was like, I have-
A session now and restart our webcast, and our first question is going to come from the esteemed Andy Wittmann.
Yeah, thanks, Rick. So, where do I want to start? I guess I want to drill on the acquisition side and had a question. Your company has been for 20-plus years very focused on paving. And there's a book that I read in business school about the hedgehog theory, about doing one thing really, really well. I think that's been an investment point that's resonated with at least some of your investors.
So the idea of going into grading or striping or traffic management is new, and so I guess, Jule, how do you get comfortable that the risk that you take on with these newer businesses that are obviously adjacent, but the risk that you take on with those, and that the margin profiles that you'll get from those, fit with, with what investors have come to expect from your financial performance?
Yeah. No, great question. And, there are all the services are not the same, Andy, and so let me explain that. So you mentioned traffic management, striping, and grading. Okay, so here's the big difference in those. If we were to buy a striping business or to buy a traffic management business, there's not enough in those businesses happen, the jobs happen so quick, that for us to make it work, we would have to either travel around to different states or go to our competitors and say, "Please hire us." That's not gonna work out so well. Okay? So those are not businesses that we're looking to add. We'll subcontract that out for the most part or self-perform that internally. For example, traffic control, that's pretty simple.
We can self-perform that, but we're not looking to vertically integrate to those services. Grading and utility work is not new. In fact, when I met Charles Owens, Fred Smith Company was very heavily into the grading and utility business, and that was a big part of what we did in North Carolina. So those services are ones you can do and be completely at home, completely within your projects and in that market and allowing you to bid more work. So there's a big distinction there. So, as we've looked... Now, the reason that's sort of new is 10 years ago, if you wanted to start a grading operation, heck, probably five years ago, you just hired the people. You just went out and bought the equipment and hired the people. That's a lot harder to do now.
Robert's good, but he's not that good, right? So, for example, PLT Construction in Wilson, North Carolina, once we entered that market through making an acquisition of Rose Brothers Paving, we had the asphalt. That was a new market. We had the asphalt capability. But there wasn't experienced grading crews and utility crews that we could put to work in that area. So when PLT Construction approached us and we talked to them, it was a chance to make an acquisition there that simply fit under that management structure. We're not going out and try to get competitors to hire us. We're not traveling. They're working as crews in that market, duplicating what we've been doing in Raleigh, North Carolina, for decades. It's the same thing in Panama City, where we made the GAC acquisition in March 2022 with Bob.
Bob was already doing a certain amount of grading and utilities, but doing that acquisition gave him the ability to go after more projects and do more revenue. So it, you're right, not everything makes sense, but adding those services that can fit within that umbrella and don't get us chasing and doing things that are not in our core concept, those are the vertical integration of services that make sense for us.
Okay. If I could just do one follow-up, maybe this one's for Greg. The margin target, I think, is interesting. I think, you know, it's obviously attractive growth that's implied there. Just in order to just build a little bit more confidence, I guess, in that, I can see the SG&A leverage as, you know, visible. You guys have done a pretty, very good job, I'd say, of managing SG&A in your public company years. But just on the gross margin side, do you expect that, like, pricing will be a contributor? Do you think the overall terms and margins that you can, that you can earn on your jobs will improve over the years?
Or, what are the major cost buckets that you feel like you can lower as a percentage of revenue, as you address the gross margin side of the equation?
Yeah. So, I would answer that with a couple of ways. First of all, yeah, I think we're gonna continue to see margin pricing expansion in this high demand that we're seeing. And I think the other ways are the three levers that Jule talked about, right? The building better markets. You know, each market has some opportunities. Vertical integration, we just talked a little bit about that, right? And then, you know, the scale, which you've kind of talked about. I think all those things are in play to yes, expand that pricing margin.
Hey, good morning, guys.
Hey, Tyler.
Tyler Brown, Raymond James. A couple questions. So Jule, like, there's a lot of growth that's planned over obviously the next few years, a lot of organic, a lot of M&A. Just kinda curious about the technology, the human capital in place. Do you feel like you have the systems and you have the human capital in place to scale at such kind of a speed over the next few years?
Yeah. Tyler, that's something we talk a lot about, and it is not something that you can take your eye off the ball. So, when Ned said that we and every company, you know, identified the next man up, right? Well, that's true, and that's sort of the man that we're or woman that we're developing to be sort of the future leaders. But to be successful in executing roadmap, it takes a lot more than just that person. It takes developing future foremen. It takes developing future estimators, future plant operators. And that's something, you know, two years ago, I started talking about, is, Hey, we see growth coming, and we have to invest now in the organization to do it. And you saw last year growing 42%, and this year, almost 20%.
We saw it coming, and we had to get ahead of the curve. But the reality is, if we're gonna stay ahead of the curve, we've got to keep running. And so that's part of the challenge that Robert's looking at, and he's working with all these platform presidents, is: How do we develop people? Like you heard me talk about Lloyd, right? So yeah, Lloyd's done a great job for Mike in Greenville, South Carolina, of allowing Mike to go out and grow the business, and then he's added Anderson, South Carolina, now he's adding Walhalla. But at some point in time, we have to develop people to help Lloyd, right? And so it is a constant thinking, how do we be proactive and not reactive? Because if we're reactive, that's when the margins are gonna start to suffer, right?
If we can't integrate these businesses, if we can't manage it effectively, and we just grow to grow, but we're not managing it well, well, the top line is gonna grow, but the bottom line is not. And so that's a challenge that we know is there and we're dealing with every day.
All right. No, that's great. And then coming back to margins. So, I've spent a lot of time looking at DOT lettings, and one thing I've been surprised by is just how much information obviously is there, tabulated bid data. So you actually touched on it earlier in the presentation, but I'm curious about technology when it comes to bids. And I know you talked about AI and data science, but I'm curious about how that helps you.
Yeah.
Or do you have kind of some projects in place to help you with market intelligence, just getting better on bids, and maybe part of the margin story is a little bit of that as well?
Yeah, absolutely. So, when Nelson first came to work from CPI after getting his MBA, one of the sellers nicknamed him Boy Wonder. But then in the last year, Joseph, where's Joseph? Standing right there. That's the real Boy Wonder, right? So the amount of technology and the intelligence that is now starting to be at the fingertips of our folks. The folks, Greg and I are not in Raleigh bidding work, right? That's happening out in Florida, in Valdosta, Georgia, and Dothan, Alabama. Those are where it's happening. So to give those folks the technology... So it used to be, if you were bidding, and you're right, you can look and see what's coming up with the DOT, and you can see, okay, how much work has your competitor won? Because this is a relative market share business.
We're not worried in Huntsville, Alabama, that someone's gonna come from Atlanta and surprise us. We know who our competitors are in Huntsville. But it used to be you'd have to ride around in a truck with a legal pad and sort of figure out, okay, how much has our competitors gotten through with these projects? How much work do they have on hand? And you sorta guess. Well, now, the ability to have all that information at your fingertips, how much work have they won? How much work have they got left to do? What did they bid historically? What do we have on backlog? What do our crews have? And to start to compare that, that's just information that we didn't have five years ago. So when we talk about building better markets, sure, part of it's just-...
Having fewer players and building relative market share, but part of it also is just being smarter in those markets and using that. So, technology is something that, you know, all industries are benefiting from, and ours is no exception. But we need people like Joseph to make it happen for us old guys. So.
Hi, Kathryn Thompson, Thompson Research Group. Thank you for hosting this today. Just circling back on the construction services business and the opportunity that, on the M&A side. First stepping back and looking at the big picture, what is that of your percentage of your revenues today? Where do you see it in 2027 as a mix? And, what's the total addressable market, for the states in the, in the areas where you currently have a footprint? And how does that differ? Sorry, there's a lot of questions. How does that differ when, when you look at some of the surrounding states that you may migrate to?
Yeah. All right, Kathryn, I don't wanna look like the politicians at debates, just answer the question they want to answer, instead of the one that was asked. I don't know the dollar amount of the total addressable market of the commercial and the public market. I will say that construction services, projects we build, is about 70% of our revenue.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Where selling FOB, asphalt, and aggregates is about 30% of what we do. The construction services, what that allows us to do within the market we're already in and the management team we already have, allow us to go after more revenue and to capture more margin on the jobs we were gonna do anyway. So if we had to sub that work out... So, where's John? So John, with Wiregrass in Alabama, Huntsville is a booming, growing market. Well, they have asphalt plants there. They can really do the paving work, but to get a job that requires grading and utilities, they would have to sub it out, and so that margin is captured by the subcontractor.
So you saw in May of this past year, with the acquisition of Southern Sites, us starting to take a step toward being able to do those turnkey construction services more in Huntsville. Well, that does allow us on the projects we would win anyway to capture that margin. But more than that, it also allows you to bid other types of jobs that you might not bid if you weren't capable of doing that. Now, you won't see us go buy an acquisition like that in a place where we not already are. We establish a local market around an asphalt plant, but really, even more important than the asphalt plant is the management team, the area manager and his folks in that area. That establishes the market.
So when we buy one of these construction services companies, it's really to enhance a market we're already in, that we have a management team. We're not gonna just hopscotch, you know, somewhere and buy a grading company, that we're not there with a team doing set up the way we know how to set up.
Okay. Thank you. And one follow-up question. Just could you expand on the opportunity with the import terminals? Some of the most recent investment, what does this mean for margins? What are future opportunities for that? Thank you.
You want to take that, the margin question?
Yeah. So, well, I think we touched on it a little bit, the liquid asphalt terminal earlier, when we entered into the Gulf Coast market. We talked about that was a 20-30 basis point lift across the company. What's interesting is that was 2018. Now, 2023, 2024, we're talking about adding another liquid asphalt terminal. It's actually now operational. We're still saying 20-30 basis points. So they're a very enhancing model for our business.
I would say, you know, it also shows the point I made about expanding in the states you're in or nearby has benefits. So when we decided to build that asphalt terminal in Huntsville, Alabama, we felt like that we had enough mass of asphalt plants in North Alabama that it made sense. But we didn't know we were gonna be in Nashville, Tennessee, when we decided to build that terminal. But that's just more throughput, that it makes economic sense for us to supply our own liquid asphalt. So as we add and make acquisitions near these vertical integration facilities, it just helps drive throughput and improves the economics of those.
Yes, sir.
Hi, Justin Hauke with Baird. I wanted to ask, I guess, about the capital deployment in the five-year plan. You guys are at 2x leverage today. The forecast is to kind of stay there. You're gonna grow EBITDA $200+ million over that timeline, so that's $400 million of capacity there. Plus the... You used the term, the retained free cash flow versus-
Mm
... actual free cash flow, and so I assume that's gonna be reinvested at that 50% rate. So you've got maybe another $200 million or so of kind of retained free cash flow, so maybe $600 million. So is that kind of the economics of what you're thinking? You know, it's $600 million or so of capital deployment fully deployed into the growth initiatives, and that kind of gives you that $200+ million EBITDA expansion, so you've got that kind of return profile, or is there any of that capital that, you know, goes, you know, is returned in the, the five-year plan, or is it just growth?
Yeah. So, you know, first of all, so the retained cash flow, the way we describe it, well, the reason we describe it the way we describe it is because we are actually, we are deploying that 50%-60% in growth opportunities. But absolutely, as this company continues to generate cash, we'll deploy that in growth, deploy that, you know, in growing that top line as well as that margin line.
Yeah, just to add to that, clearly, as we generate cash, as Greg showed, you know, from operations, as we execute on this roadmap and grow and do acquisitions and invest in organic growth, we're gonna use that cash for that, and that's, so some part of these acquisitions are not gonna use all debt. We're gonna use more and more cash to do that, which helps that leverage ratio get lower in that range than the upper range. So, you know, in this interest rate environment, that makes a lot of sense.
Mm-hmm.
So... All right. Brian?
Yep. Oh, Adam Thalhimer, Thompson Davis. Of the 300 private companies that you said are kinda in your footprint, private asphalt companies, could you guess, you know, what percentage have you already reached out to or are in some kind of phase of discussion with?
I would say as a percentage, it's not a high percentage. I mean, there's a lot of family businesses. You know, the way this works, Adam, is we talk to a lot of people, and I feel like if someone's gonna reach out to CPI, I'm gonna take the time to go talk to them and meet them. Not all of them are strategic fits, it doesn't make sense, and you can ascertain that, but you start to build a relationship. And some of these are relationships that our platform presidents have been making for years and years, just being in the industry in that area. So you build a relationship, and you get to know them, cause a lot of these sellers want to know, "Okay, I'm not ready yet, but what would this look like?
How would this work?" And so, you know, you just have to build a relationship, move at their timing, and you just see what happens. And, you know, a lot of times we'll have acquisitions that are ready, but we want to be able to integrate them well, spread them out. So Nelson will work with them on what's a good time frame that fits. But I would tell you, there's still a lot of sellers that I've not met yet that, you know, I look forward to meeting in the future. There's a lot of family businesses that... You know, in our industry, the unique thing is most of these family businesses started in the 1950s, or they were small companies that Eisenhower Bill allowed them to grow dramatically.
So from the '50s to now, I see this over and over. They've made a lot of money. They've really built a great family business, but now I'm usually sitting across the table from two brothers or, you know, a grandad and sons, and they're wondering what to do. You know, like what David said, Dave and Chris said, "Look, our kids, they're all in New York making a lot of money. You know, they're, they're, they're not interested in this.
Mm-hmm.
There may be multiple heirs that, because you can't split these type of businesses up, it makes sense for that family to turn their wealth into cash. And so we look forward to just meeting them and talking to them and giving them, you know, a picture of what joining CPI looks like. You know, for me, that was an attractive picture, and so I'm able to communicate it clearly, what it would look like. And so that's just something we have a long runway to keep meeting those families.
Okay. And then for Greg, I have some clients who are kind of hyper-focused on ROIC, return on capital as a metric. And given the projections you made out to 2027, I would think ROIC gets better, but do you have any numbers you can put around that?
Don't have any numbers that we can put out around that, other than, you know, we're typically look at ourselves from an ROCE standpoint, just so we understand where we are and what return we're providing. And we're in the double digits and moving past that in the next year or so.
Brian?
Yeah. Hi, Brian Russo, Sidoti. I was wondering if you'd just follow up on the liquid asphalt terminal topic. You mentioned the Alabama terminal that's now operational. I suppose the barriers to entry are extremely high in terms of permitting, you know, and greenfield development for those facilities. Just maybe elaborate on your, you know, the competitive advantages. Are you possibly one of only a few at the bidders table that have that vertical integration? Or maybe you're one of the only bidders with the vertical integration. How are you capturing-
Yeah
... that, you know, 20-30 basis points of margins?
Yeah, Brian, I'm glad you asked that because that gives me a chance to make a very important point that I neglected to make. I'll get to the barriers to entry in a minute, but I first wanna say an important key part of our vertical integration, whether it be aggregates or liquid asphalt, is we pass those materials along at market price. So the construction side of operation experiences no benefit from us being vertically integrated. We're not going to give that away. So that margin capture is simply buying it wholesale instead of retail, but we pass it along at retail. So it makes no difference to us on the construction side of things at the bid table, which allows us to capture that 20-30 basis points for that asphalt terminal and at our rock facilities.
As far as barriers to entry, you know, that varies. Clearly, there are some places. It'd be much harder to build an asphalt terminal than others. It's capital intensive, but then when you build it, you've either got to sell it to someone else or use it yourself. And for us, we have the throughput to use it ourselves, so we don't have to worry about selling it to a third party. And so that's really what makes it. There's more economic barriers than permit barriers, but that's what allows us to do it and be successful. All right.
Hi. So Nandita Nayar on for Michael Feniger at Bank of America. So, my question is, you know, the baseline now is like, you know, there's no government shutdown, but, you know, there's still a lot of turmoil in D.C. If we continue to kinda like, you know, get more continuing resolutions, could you, like, help us understand if, you know, the impact, if any, to any of your like, to funding, to basically to your states?
Yeah. So I can. I'm sure you can imagine that Friday afternoon, I was preparing to answer how we would deal, how we deal with a government shutdown. And I'm glad they, you know, passed the law. But the reality is, the good news for us is, if there is a government shutdown, the federal highway programs keep funded and they keep working. It doesn't mean that it wouldn't be painful in other areas, and clearly, we don't want that. But the reality is, for us, the FHWA, Federal Highway Administration programs and the funding to the states is so advanced that any short-term government shutdown really would not affect us.
Gotcha. And my second question is, you know, CPI is at, like, 3. You'd imagine it's gonna be like 3-4 going forward. It's gonna be a standard. You know, wage inflation, you'd imagine, is gonna be higher than that. Just how is, like, CPI's business model structured so that, you know, you guys can price projects in front of that?
Yeah. No, great question. So, for us, our model is really a pass-through model. You know, we our estimators are working out there in those, 70 areas. They're just estimating the cost as it is, putting it in the bids, and if we're competitive and win the bid on bid day, then we do the job. But when we do the job, we have to live with the cost budget that we bid it with, and hopefully, we've done a good job on that, so all the margin translates to EBITDA margin at the bottom line. So you saw in the summer of 2021, when inflation took off, we clearly didn't have it all covered because we had never seen that.
So as we bid the work now today, and we have since that summer of 2021, we're covering the costs and cost escalators and inflation we expect inflation in our bids. Moving forward, even though CPI has moderated down, we don't—we're not expecting inflation in the construction industry to go down to that level. What I mean by that is, our demand for labor is higher than the normal labor market. The price of cement is gonna be higher than the price of eggs because there's so much demand in infrastructure going on right now.
So we are still very diligent in making sure that we're putting in a reasonable escalator in our bids, because we know that for the next 5-7 years, there's gonna be a lot of work, and so that's gonna continue to have a reasonable amount of inflation in construction. All right, we have time, I think, for one more question. All right, Todd?
Yeah.
Here it is. Well, we use this mic, please.
Oh, oh. Thanks. I'm gonna ask maybe a two-part question. One is on the state funding. I know a lot of states' funding is really healthy, but not all states are created equal, I guess. And I'm curious, like, what states maybe don't have the funding or you maybe have some concerns about funding? And then on the other side, lots of reshoring work, as mentioned today, and you can't read the paper today without reading about some reshoring project. But it's hard to tell, like, on a granular basis, what it actually adds up to, you know. So I'm curious, like, is it really... Is it significantly impacting the business at the different platforms? And,
Yeah.
Any of that color would be great.
Yeah. So on the state funding, you're right, all six of our states, we're blessed to have healthy funding mechanisms, and that's, that's a good thing. It's the lifeblood of, you know, just the maintenance programs there. I don't really have any big concern about our states, in any particular one. Obviously, Florida is the strongest. I mean, it's just crazy how much Florida is growing. And so for them to be able to pass a $7 billion supplementary infrastructure bill, just shows you the growth they have. So not all of- as you said, not all of our states are created equal, but they all have healthy funding mechanisms.
Just in last month, our six states received $1.2 billion of reapportionment, where the states that don't use all their money or the federal programs that don't use it go back to Washington, and it gets reapportioned out to the states that use their money. And so we would—our six states got $1.2 billion of additional funding in the August reapportionment process. As far as reshoring, you know, that's a phenomenon that just really is getting going. And just, I think COVID accelerated. Businesses worried about their supply chain, worried about the uncertainty, and wanting to get to a more certain environment. And so we've just seen, whether it be electric vehicle manufacturing facilities, distribution warehouses, just all kinds of facilities.
We see businesses moving and picking, I mean, sites in rural North Carolina, rural Georgia, Huntsville. It's just, it's really added to the commercial landscape. You know, clearly, there's not many office buildings being built right now, but the business, industrial construction has more than made up for that. So it's just... And you really, you know, I'm no expert, but you hear that this is gonna take a decade or more for the amount of reshoring to happen. So I think it's gonna be a tailwind in the commercial economy. All right, well, we have lunch that's being served. We hope you'll stay with us for lunch, but I just want to close. You know, Greg and I both just appreciate you guys coming to our Analyst Day. It's our first one.
We're excited to share with you, you know, just our strategic plan and how we see the next five years playing out. We're excited about the future, and just the fact that the model that this company was founded on just continues to work, and it's got a great environment to work for the next several years. So thank you for coming.