Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our investor day. I'm Andrew Shen, Director of Investor Relations, and I head up our investor relations function. Thank you for everyone joining in person as well as over the webcast. I'd like to start with a safety moment. Please take a moment to locate the emergency exit nearest to you, and in the event of an emergency, please follow the instructions of the venue staff. Please note that our statements today contain forward-looking statements as defined by the SEC. These statements contain inherent risks and uncertainties. Please see our SEC filings for further detail. I'd like to start with a moment on logistics. I'd ask the audience silence their cell phones, laptops, and tablets. If you'd like to follow along on your own devices, we've posted the presentation on our IR website.
We'll have a 10-minute break about halfway through the program. Restrooms are located in the back of the room past the end of the hall. We appreciate you spending time with us as we work towards building something special at TIC Solutions. Today's topics will include a discussion of our business, strategic priorities, and long-term financial framework. We will then conclude with 30 minutes of Q&A, then the showcases and lunch will be open after the presentation. You'll hear from members of our leadership team throughout the program, we're pleased to have the full team here with us today. With that, I'm pleased to introduce Robbie Franklin, our Executive Chairman. Robbie, please join us on stage.
All right, thanks, Andrew. Thank you, everyone, for being here today. Your support and interest in TIC Solutions, starting out with our acquisition vehicle about 3 years ago, it's pretty remarkable as I look around this room and sort of gives me chills looking at this video of sort of what we're building together. It's really exciting. Thank you for your support. Thank you for being here with us today. As I think about sort of the evolution over the last 2 years, we had an investment thesis to building another platform in the industrial services space coming off of our experience with APi and some of the success we've had with Element Solutions and other industrial platforms.
I think today really represents the inaugural communication of some of that strategy and the opportunities that exist before us. I think everyone understands we're in this generational capital cycle and we have a platform here with TIC Solutions where we're really able to capitalize on some of these trends. I'm really excited for the team to be able to communicate with you today and lay out the vision for where we see this company going in the future. We are in the process of building a unified kind of technology-forward platform with a truly differentiated market strategy to where we might have been two years ago when we acquired Acuren.
The industrial logic of this combination is really just starting to come through in our results and the wins that we're achieving in the market. I think you should really hear from each of our team members who are presenting today, but also this incredible deep bench of talent that we have in the back of the room. I encourage everybody, if you've got a moment to interact with the team, hear about the things that they're working on and really start to understand the business in a greater level of depth. All the elements of this business really lead us to be this a great long-term compounder of value. I think that really should resonate with us today. Where we are today is sort of in line with the Mariposa playbook.
For any of you who've sort of followed us, I think you'll really understand where we try to identify corners of the market with great value that are underappreciated, that eventually roll into sort of growth areas of the market that are really fundamentally exciting. I think what you'll find here represents all of those things. We're just in the early days. My family, our board, the leadership team, and all of our team members here are really genuinely excited to share the vision for TIC and tell you why and how we are gonna win. The plan that we're presenting today is one that I know we can achieve.
It's a commitment for us, and it's our guiding star, and I'm very, very excited for everyone to be to really understand the strategic plan for our business. With that, I want to hand the stage over to our leadership team now helmed by Ben Heraud. Ben Heraud has been an amazing resource for us, a great partner. I'm very excited for the entrepreneurship that's been sort of reinvigorated into our organization, the culture we are building, and he's done an amazing job so far and has all of our support. With that, I'll hand the stage over to Ben Heraud.
Thanks, Robbie. I appreciate the kind introduction. Happy to have you all here today. Thank you and appreciate your continued interest in TIC Solutions. Myself and the team are really excited to get up here and sort of talk you through where we are today as a business and where we're headed. You know, if we think about the combination of bringing Acuren and NV5 together, it really we've created a combined scaled integrated platform, and the services that we now have at our fingertips enable us to be a true life cycle partner for our clients, which is just a really exciting opportunity to be bringing together. We're also positioned in markets that have significant tailwinds.
We'll talk about four key mega trends that exist in the market in a little bit more detail, but this really positions us for long-term sustained growth, and we have some strategies around how we're gonna really position ourselves to continue to capture these tailwinds. We're gonna talk about a clear path to margin expansion, you know, through our commercial discipline, improving our utilization, productivity. As we grow, as we continue to grow, we'll get to benefit from our scale. This is a CapEx-light business, so we have very high free cash flow, and that's really exciting 'cause it enables us to invest that back into the business, both through organic growth initiatives and through our bolt-on M&A strategy. You saw it on the video, but I wanted to come back to this quickly. We shape and strengthen the physical world.
Tell had a hand in this, and we spent plenty of time bringing this together. We're really excited about having this, you know, brought out to the team. To shape really points to the creative side of the business, where we're, you know, planning and designing, and strengthen really points to our Inspection & Mitigation work. We're making the world a safer place, the systems that we work on more resilient. As we were working through this, we actually started out with the built environment. We shape and strengthen the built environment. However, it doesn't really capture everything that we do. If you look at what Geospatial does, we actually map coastlines, mountains, forests.
Physical world was sort of more all-encompassing, something that we're very excited about, bringing to the team, and it really enables the team also to articulate what we do to our clients very clearly and align as a common thread across the business. In terms of common themes as well, we now operate the business under three segments, and you're gonna hear from Alex, Kurt, and Shamus, and really they're gonna do a deep dive into all the really cool things that we do within each of the segments. I just wanted to point you to a common thread across all of these, is that we have a very high recurring revenue stream, and it's programmatic. That is obviously makes us very sticky with the clients and very long-term.
Just to use some examples for each of the segments. Within Consulting Engineering, as the engineer of record, when we work on an asset, when we design it, that positions us in a position of strength to continue to work on that asset for the long term. When a change is made, when a retrofit is done in a building or a road or a bridge, we are the ones that are positioned to continue to work on that asset for the life cycle of it. Within Inspection & Mitigation, our run and maintain business, we are nested at the site. We are there for the long term. We are part of the day-to-day operations and the decisions that are being made, and it is a very long-term reoccurring nature of the business.
Geospatial, we fly nearly 1 million miles of power lines every year. We do that over and over again for vegetation clash analysis. I could point to many other examples of recurring work that we do within Geospatial, it really does point to the recurring nature of the business in a pretty exciting statistic. Together, this platform is much stronger with these two companies. The sum of the parts is much greater than each individual business alone. You know, I would point again to being that true life cycle partner. If you could envisage a large complex facility, it might be an airport, could be a refinery, could be a casino.
Our ability to now plan and design that facility, oversee the construction, commission the systems as they come online, and be involved in the ongoing operations for the life of that asset is something that's pretty unique. When you overlay our ability to now create a digital twin of that asset, pull real-time data out of it, and use that to inform the decisions that are made on the site every day, you couldn't really point to another company that has this breadth of capability right now. Both companies have a rich history and a proven track record of growth, both organic and through M&A.
While TIC Solutions is a new platform, it is made up of very rich heritage, and I would point to all the great leadership at the back of the room here and at the front, as a testament of that. I would point to the amazing projects that we work on and the clients that we have. Again, as I said, it's a relatively new platform but comes from very rich history. We're well through the integration of the two businesses, and, you know, I'd call out Kristin and the team for doing an amazing job of getting us to where we are with that today, and it's starting to show up in real results. If we think about the two businesses, there really was very little operational overlap.
Most of the integration is actually occurring at the shared services and corporate level. It's, you know, in terms of those real results, we're starting to see it in the cross-selling. Dan's gonna be talking in detail on a bit of that soon. We're starting to see it show up in terms of actually bringing new services to existing clients. What that does is it creates a more solid platform for us. When we bring a new service to an existing client, we've pushed out a competitor, that solidifies the relationship with a client, it strengthens it, and, you know, it just makes us a more robust platform overall. I think this really paints a picture of the opportunity that we have as a company to grow geographically.
We're very densified in North America right now. Our Consulting, Engineering, and Geospatial business has almost no presence in Canada, where, you know, we're very strong on Inspection and Mitigation. Inspection and Mitigation has no presence in the Middle East and within Asia-Pacific. These are areas that we have systems in place and fantastic entrepreneurial leadership, really enables us to implement a land and expand strategy. If we think about an example of this in the data center space, the data centers business was really born out in Asia-Pacific, and you'll be hearing from Gary and Keith up here who lead that business a little later on.
We made a strategic initiative a few years ago to really push to get that business going in the U.S. Andy, who's here too, is sort of leading the charge on the U.S. side. It was really landing and expanding that capability, the relationships we had with the hyperscalers, bringing that back to the U.S. If we look at the U.S. data center business now, it is actually growing at an extremely fast clip, and we'll catch up to our Asia Pacific business, a little bit of challenge there, over the next couple of years. We talked about scale. We're a $2.1 billion business, and we'll continue to grow. What bringing the businesses together has also done is diversify the platform.
If we think of Acuren beforehand, the exposure to oil and gas was about 40%, now it's 20%. If you look at this revenue mix that we have, it's a really nice blend of services within an end markets and really points to that cross-selling opportunity that we have. As far as the revenue by geography, it just really points to the map I just showed you before. We're heavily densified in the U.S., if we look at these other areas, it just, it is a great opportunity for us to continue to grow in these regions. Here's the big reveal. You know, I think that we have a fantastic opportunity to provide meaningful value creation for our shareholders over the next 3 years.
This 31885 framework really outlines will guide how we execute on that. It points to our commitment to growth, and we wanna be, we're gonna grow to $3 billion, and margin expansion. As we grow, we have to improve our margins. Again, our focus around being a high free cash flow business and enable to us to reinvest that back into the business. Extremely excited to put this out into the public domain. Keep you guys up to date as we progress towards it. Also very excited to bring this to the team. This is gonna be a fantastic way for us to have the team rally around these goals. It will inform the daily decisions that our entrepreneurial leaders are making on a day-to-day basis.
31885, we'll be continuing to report on that, and Kristin's actually going to go through it in a bit more detail on some of the ways that we're going to bridge to these numbers. We've set the goals, now we need to execute and deliver on them. These megatrends I've been talking about, you know, we're very well positioned to capitalize on these for long-term sustained growth. If you look at these 4 megatrends we're talking about, we have multiple services that we can deploy in every single one of these areas. As far as aging infrastructure goes, there is just a huge amount of investment needed in the U.S. alone just to get things up to speed. Alex is going to go through some really nice examples, but this is work that has to be done.
It's non-discretionary. It's very resilient to a financial downturn. People need to drive over a bridge. They need to drink water. These things need to happen regardless of what's going on in the economy. Our subject matter experts are in extremely high demand for solving a lot of these issues that we're facing. 166 gigawatts, it's a number that may not mean much to many of you, but if I'd put it in perspective, 15 new New Yorks need to be built as far as infrastructure by 2030. A lot of that's from the data center demand that is coming into play, but there's a lot of other areas of the grid that are being electrified. It also points to the aging infrastructure issues that we have.
Across all segments, we have a very deep bench of expertise. We have very strong relationships with utilities, which is very hard to come by. Again, this is a service that's in very high demand, and we are very well positioned to capitalize on. An interesting statistic, 90% of the world's data was created in the last two years. That's pretty astounding, but probably not surprising with all the talk about AI and all of that. We truly are market leaders in this space as far as data centers are concerned. As I said, you're gonna hear more from the team about it, but we really do continue to be excited about our growth in this space.
We're continually bringing existing services that we have to this end market and increasing the revenue that we get per megawatt of data center or gigawatt of data center that we work on. We also have, sorry, I'll just go back for a second, a very strong focus on operations. We get a lot of questions about when will this boom end. A lot of the services that we have are recurring within the facility. If you imagine they're constantly changing out the servers, new technologies changing all the time and coming into play, and we have the technical know-how to engineer the solutions for our clients and continue to support them with these data centers for the long term. There is also a race to digitize the entire planet.
We're gonna build a digital twin of this entire planet. It's gonna constantly need to be refreshed as things change and technology upgrades. We are market leaders in geospatial. Our analytics are second to none. This work travels extremely well. For example, we're mapping the South Island of New Zealand right now. We won that work not because we're there. We won it because we had the analytics capability and the sensor technology. We're really well positioned to capitalize on this fast-growing market. We're also in a position of leadership in a highly fragmented market. This really enables an exciting opportunity for us to consolidate and gain market share and cross-sell as we bring all these different fragmented services into our large-scale business.
If we look at the different segments, just some sort of examples or comments. In the U.S. alone, there's 140,000 engineering firms. It's a very target-rich environment for our M&A strategy. Our Inspection & Mitigation business, we are market leaders in North America. From a position of strength, we can continue to consolidate that business and grow. Geospatial, as I mentioned, travels very well. That works extremely well in a fragmented market. We can move to where the work is. It travels extremely well, and we're really excited about continuing to grow that business. Combined, as I mentioned, that vision about that large complex facility, they're synergistic. Each business is driving the other.
We're laser-focused on capitalizing on these trends. If we just sort of point to three strategic areas of focus for us, we wanna continue to win in essential and high-demand verticals and markets and geographies. Really getting behind those businesses that have a lot of tailwinds and are driving our margin growth. The land and expand strategy that we talked about continuing to grow geographically and supporting that with our M&A focus as well. We need to drive profit, and we've set a target around that. There's a lot of work we've gotta do, but we see a path. You know, AI will play into it. Equipping our team with tools to be more efficient, both from a shared services perspective and through operations. Continue to work, focus on this programmatic work.
The more we can do repeat work with our clients, the less time we spend on business development and, you know, improve our margins that way as well. AI, we get a lot of questions about this. We really do see this as an accelerant, not a replacement for our business. Our work is highly technical. It's probably more field-driven than you actually realize, and it is absolutely safety-critical. It depends on engineering judgment, and that requires people out in the field to do that. There is a lot of regulatory oversight in this space. Our clients actually mandate the software that we use in a lot of cases, particularly in the public space, and it requires deep domain expertise. We see AI as an enabler for us to deliver our work more efficiently and also take cost out of the space.
It's not gonna replace the need for a trusted expert in the field working on critical infrastructure. One of the barriers to growth for our business is getting subject matter experts. This idea of equipping them with a tool that can enable them to do more with less is really, really exciting for us. It will probably replace some of the more mundane things we do around drafting and things like that, but we're leaning into that. We're excited about it. We're at the forefront of working with a lot of the software providers. They see our technical expertise as extremely important. And we're deploying this in a number of work streams and have already implemented it in a number of places. I've asked Dan to come up and talk about our cross-selling.
We get a lot of questions about that. What I would just say from a high level is that this is a tough task. It, it's, you know, we've gotta educate our teams. There's a lot to be done to help them understand what these new services mean for their clients. I'm really pleased with the progress that we're making. First and foremost, it starts with the culture, and we have an extremely entrepreneurial culture in the business. There is a genuine excitement from the team back here and all of our leaders in the company, the new services that we now have and the ability to bring those to their clients and be better off because of it. With that, I'll have Dan talk through the cross-selling program.
Thanks, Ben. Good day, everyone. I'm Dan Colimar, Vice President of Growth and Strategy. We have what we need today to continue to grow. We've got deep client relationships, strong technical capabilities, and trusted teams in the markets we serve. What we have been doing, and what we need to continue doing, is pushing this forward in a structured and repeatable way. We're seeing positivity in the investment focus in sorry, in the investment thesis that Robbie mentioned. Year to date, we've already hit the same cross-selling numbers that we did in the entirety of 2025, and this is driven by Acuren's ability to cross-sell into NV5 and NV5 into Acuren. 45% of our cross-selling year to date has actually come from that structure. Ben mentioned the education of our staff, but it also leads into education of our clients. That is a process.
It's ongoing, and it's not going to stop, but we're seeing an acceleration there. When we do cross-sell, we're seeing our fees actually double compared to our average fee. Historically, when we've looked at this, I'll acknowledge it was opportunistic. A client would call us and say that they needed a service, our team members would respond, but we're being a bit more intentional and strategic going forward with these 4 vectors. The goal is simple: create more opportunities for our team members to talk to their clients and offer additional services, driving that revenue upside further forward. Within the Canadian white space, we're very excited about the integration growth opportunity we have. Our Inspection & Mitigation team has a really strong local presence. They're trusted by their clients.
On the consulting engineering side and the geospatial side, we have the ability to bring services that are transportable across the border. Things like right-of-way analysis, fire protection engineering, hydrospatial and geospatial all transport really easily. We've been cross-training some of our Inspection & Mitigation team members in new services like 3D scanning, which we have a demo of outside. Our quality assurance team members from Canada, sorry, the U.S., have been transporting up to Canada, seeing whether we can upskill those labs that we have there and offer up new services. This is all allowing us to respond to RFPs that we historically might not have pursued due to a scope gap.
We're looking at those selective integration-focused acquisitions. An example project I'd like to highlight that just pulls all of this together is a project that came from a municipal client that the Inspection & Mitigation team has. They approached us, informed us about this RFP, and encouraged us to pursue. There's a good chunk of that RFP that we typically wouldn't have pursued as the Inspection & Mitigation team, but with the collaboration that we've had with the Consulting Engineering side and the Geospatial side, we're able to increase the fee by approximately 50%. What's really exciting about this is that it's doubled the total fee that we're going to be doing with that client for this year, and we can take that same logic and approach and scale it across the entire country.
The energy sector remains foundational for us as a company, where cross-selling is driven by those deep client relationships and expansion of services into our existing MSAs. We're integrating our inspection, engineering, and geospatial groups and pursuing these projects together and increasing the value of each engagement that we have. In doing this, we can reduce the reliance we have on third-party sub-consultants. This improvement in execution increases margins and drives us forward as that holistic strategic partner. Further support of that investment thesis is not just coming from our KPIs, it's also coming from our clients. Last week, one of our leaders in the West facilitated a meeting with a utility client of ours. It opened up the opportunity to talk about inspection mitigation services, which we wouldn't have had otherwise.
Now we've been given a pilot project, and the client has indicated that this could lead to a whole portfolio platform. A win I'd like to highlight is on the East Coast. It's actually the office here in New York. They've been working with a utility client for numerous years now and identified the opportunity to bring the Inspection & Mitigation team in. In facilitating that conversation, they unlocked a six-figure project that we anticipating heading towards $1 million by the end of this year. That growth is really scalable across our entire utility sector. Within the building sector, we're really excited about the ability to extend and diversify the Inspection & Mitigation team through our Consulting Engineering relationships. We're very deep in buildings on the Consulting Engineering side.
A good example I'd like to give is just on the commissioning side, which is one of our fastest-growing groups in the U.S. They've identified the opportunity to bring our non-destructive testing in to our data center clients, where they're really focused on that higher level of reliability. By bringing those services, which again, we couldn't have done previously, we're now able to increase the dollar amount per project. We've had conversations with utility clients, hospitals, airports, and universities where they've expressed an interest in this platform. We're also looking at the potential to diversify our Inspection & Mitigation team into services like testing and balancing, which historically wasn't available to our Consulting Engineering business. The lack of field staff that we had on our side made it harder for us to get out there and do this testing and balancing work.
By leveraging the field teams that we have on the Inspection & Mitigation side, we're able to actually access that work that we couldn't previously, creating that true life cycle partner that Ben Heraud mentioned. A really nice project I'd like to highlight here, and one of the leaders that brought this one in is actually in the room. On the data center side, we've typically done design and commissioning. We were engaged by a manufacturer that actually supplies these data centers with equipment to perform non-destructive testing on their ammonia piping. What started off as a approximately $60,000 project has led to a half-a-million-dollar project, and we're anticipating this getting into the multiple millions before the end of the year. I was just talking to Jeff Martin about this earlier, and he said that he's anticipating additional contracts from different manufacturers because they're seeing the good work that we could do.
Again, this speaks to the scalability of the work that we're doing and how we can drive those additional services across the organization. Within the infrastructure side, it gives us access to large, durable demand environment. Bringing teams together from our inspection, consulting, engineering, and geospatial team, we're able to prime more opportunities than we were previously. Where we do partner, we now have an opportunity to offer those strategic partners more services. It's creating a platform for us to continue growing into that market potential. On that market potential, it is significant. 35% of bridges in the U.S. need repair, which is approximately 220,000 spans. $40 billion has been allocated by the federal government already. There are estimates that that's going to push to $400 billion to repair all those bridges.
As we access that market, we will continue to grow and offer more solutions to our partners. Sample project for you here is a bridge that we're doing in Canada. Essentially, same process as the other one that I mentioned. The team identified a scope gap and identified that if we broaden our consulting engineering expertise, we were more likely to win the project. Collaborated on an RFP. We were awarded the project, and it led to a multi-million dollar win. Speaking to the team today, they've also highlighted to me that there's also 2 new RFPs that have come out that are very, very similar, and we're taking the same strategic approach and offering that scale and driving to win more work in Canada. Another one I'd like to highlight is actually in Florida.
Our buildings team was asked to inspect a passenger terminal, looking at the air conditioning systems. In discussions, we identified that there was a potential to offer structural engineering and also our inspection mitigation work. The total contract value there doubled by bringing our engineering partners in. This is something that we can take to every port in the U.S. and start to drive that forward in a scalable way. Across these four growth vectors and our continued focus on international expansion, we're able to continue driving growth, reduce our reliance on third-party sub-consultants, and help our clients through a complete life cycle partnership. The confidence I have in this is that it's not just a top-down initiative. This is built on the entrepreneurial spirit we have as a company, and with tools like our cross-selling incentive, we're encouraging all of our employees to drive additional conversations.
This allows us to identify, pursue, and win more work together, giving us a stronger platform for growth and a more integrated offering for our clients. We've started seeing the results of this already. We're very excited about the scalable approach we're taking and what it brings for the future. With that, I'll hand it back to Ben.
Thanks, Dan. I think it's pretty exciting to see the momentum that we're gaining here. You know, as we continue to enroll our staff and client discussions are being had, the work will continue to flow. It's great work to the team. We're gonna ask Alex to come up to talk about consulting and engineering. He's got a little entourage here. They're gonna go through some areas in more detail. Alex, I'll hand it off to you.
My name is Alex Hockman. I'm the President of our consulting engineering division. I have been a licensed engineer for quite some time. I started in this business in the late '70s, and I'm still practicing. I can tell you that in all these years, we are entering a very exciting period of time. Our consulting engineering piece makes up about 34% of TIC Solutions revenue. What's critical, though, is we are in a mandatory business. These are non-discretional spends. What do we mean by that? Has anybody been to Flint, Michigan? Would anybody go there today and drink the water? Can you tell me when that happened? When did that crisis occur? Does anybody have an idea? 2014, 2015. It's now 11 years, and we still recognize when we say Flint, Michigan, everybody recognizes the water crisis.
The type of services that we provide are mission critical, and they're determining whether or not a city has a great reputation or a negative reputation. Citizens demand the services that we provide. I'll ask one more question. This is like the seventh-inning stretch. Who flew in at LaGuardia Airport? Who has flown into LaGuardia Airport, say, eight, nine years ago? It was the laughing stock of the United States to enter such an iconic city and have to go through such a horrendous airport. Now they've invested money, and what's happened? The investment that's being made in infrastructure and the lack of investment that has been made over time, we perceive, we clearly understand the benefit that's received when an infrastructure spend is made.
The critical aspects that we focus on, our core capabilities span infrastructure, power and utilities, buildings and data centers, as well as environmental services. The way that we go to market, we are typically contracting with what is called a professional services agreement or a master services agreement. As a result, we have multi-year visibility on our revenue potential. We also have a deep penetration with the client and develop very strong relationships. What that allows us to do is what we say cross-sell. What does cross-sell mean? It's a way that we collaborate. Dan had brought up a case about New York City. We have a client, another major utility company. They have used us for a very particular service and generating somewhere in the neighborhood of just under $1 million a year.
We brought to them the capabilities of what we do in our power and utility market. We just won a project over $1 million for a substation. That's what takes place when we cross-sell. When the clients recognize that we've already done a great job for them, they recognize that we have additional services that we can provide. Because of the deep relationships that we have with that client, we're then able to sell additional services. Ultimately, it keeps us in contact with the client for longer through the entire planning, design, and every phase of the life cycle of an asset. As such, it even strengthens the relationship because they see us as someone who can solve their issues.
When we consider the long-term secular growth drivers of our industry, it's everything from what we demand, clean water, safe roads, safe bridges, to what we desire, a more comfortable way to travel. Every aspect of what we do is something that everybody is gonna appreciate every single day. You flip the light switch, you expect the light to go on. Rolling blackouts are not something that we tolerate. As such, we need to recognize what that means from the demand, and that demand is exactly what is creating the growth driver for our power and utility business. Financial snapshot. We generated $714 million in 2025 for TIC Solutions. It's about 47% gross margin.
When you look at the end market and the service line, really the important aspect there is what you're gonna see is that we have a very nice co-Diversification across the service lines, as well as the end markets. We're not subject to a downturn in any one market. We're able to navigate very nicely. With the sticky relationships that we have in these MSAs, we're then able to introduce additional services with a client that we already have a great relationship. Ben had already touched on the revenue by geography. One of the things that you'll notice here is that Asia now represents 10% of our operations. We talk about the opportunistic approach, the way we recognize where we have new markets to penetrate.
Asia, when we first acquired our companies that had Asia operations, accounted for 1% of our revenue, with an office in Hong Kong. The team, led by Gary and Keith, recognizes that the technical skill set they had was perfect for penetrating the data center market. As such, they've grown it to 10%. Now we're challenging our local team to grow even faster. When you hear from Gary and Keith, you'll realize it's not gonna be an easy task. The real story, the services that we provide in consulting engineering were part of the legacy NV5 infrastructure and business and technology sector. We started that operation in 2010. Does anybody know what our revenue was that first year? $20 million, right? Now we're generating $714 million. It's a phenomenal growth story.
It's the investment thesis from the very beginning was to develop great technical expertise, great subject matter experts, and many of them are in the back of the room. I invite you to engage with them, and you'll recognize the technical skill set, and you'll recognize why we win the work that we do. What are the mega trends that are driving our business? It's everything that you demand every single day. You know, we use our smartphones. What's your expectation? That it's gonna work all the time, except maybe when you're in an elevator. It's the only time you're gonna have an expectation that a thing may not work. Every other time, you expect the data when you want it. When you flip the light switch, you expect that the electricity is gonna be there.
When you consider the aging infrastructure, the lack of investment that has been made, we all see it. We all see roads, bridges that aren't properly maintained. We've all had experience with LaGuardia Airport. The demand is there. The money needs to be spent in order to keep these structures sound, safe, and it's something that the public demands. With respect to increasing energy, we had issues before the data centers. We had issues with wildfires. We have issues with weather. We have a growing population. We have an aging power infrastructure. There's a lot of demands that we have to grow, and then it's just been so much greater with the demands of data centers. We've seen a big increase in our power and utility work, but we've also recognized the services that we could provide for the data centers themselves.
Everything from design, commissioning, retro-commissioning. We try to touch every aspect throughout the entire asset lifecycle. Does a couple of things. Number one, we have visibility of a revenue stream. Number two, by staying there, we're always in front of the client. The deeper that we strengthen those relationships, the better the client recognizes all the services that we can provide, and that makes the cross-selling or the collaboration that much easier. Our Power Delivery Group, Jeff, you can answer this one too. We started with a handful of people, and now it is one of our largest segments in the industry. What we've recognized is that we could not just approach our power and utility companies with a single service. We needed to ensure that we had a deep service penetration and offering throughout the entire life cycle.
When you recognize some of your neighborhoods, you may have seen them undergrounding the power and utility lines. They may have had old wood poles. There's a number of services that are necessary that an engineering firm evaluates, designs. The power lines just don't go underground by those guys that you see running these machines. It has to be designed. We have to recognize what other utilities are there? What kind of spacing do we need? Your expectation is that when you see those guys working, eventually they're gonna leave, and you're still gonna have power in your house. There's a number of engineering activities that need to take place to design how to properly do the undergrounding, how to even replace overhead poles. What we have done is build out a service that has a touch point throughout the life cycle of every power utility.
From the time it leaves the power plant to the time it hits the meter, we have touch points. Another interesting thing, you know, you're gonna hear from Kurt has one of the most outrageous geospatial platforms around. How did we actually enter into geospatial services? Anybody know? This is like the seventh-inning stretch. It can be a little bit participatory. We acquired a firm called SkySee, generated under $1 million a year. What happened is we recognized in our power and utility market, we had to fly these the lines, the company that we were using was being used by some of our competitors. As a result, when we needed them, they would say, "You know, we got a little bit of backlog. You have to wait." What'd we do? We bought them.
We recognized the power that geospatial services can bring to our traditional engineering services. We're now a multi-million-dollar UAV business. Acuren has a legacy business, and what Kurt's gonna present is at a much higher level. It's recognizing how we can be opportunistic, how we can grow operations, how we can integrate and be able to provide even a better service. In this case, the service wasn't necessarily better in terms of the quality, but the timing was. We were able to have a control, and that's the benefit of the collaboration that we have in a cross-sell. We're able to control every aspect. We're not relying on a subcontractor. Why do we win? We win because we have the technical skill set. We have in our services what is called a quality-based selection. The acronym is QBS.
We win projects without ever negotiating a fee. In a quality-based selection, this is mandated by almost every state, we first have to show our technical skill. We have to show how we're going to approach the project. We have to show the staff, the subject matter expert. We have to show our past experience with similar projects, then we're awarded the project. The next phase is negotiating the fee. It's like going to a restaurant. You eat your steak, then you negotiate how much you're going to pay, right? It's a very different model, as a result, we don't have the same price pressure.
What the government requires is that we have a audit, and that audit gives us a multiplier so that we determine how much time we think it's gonna take to do the project, and we get to charge our multiplier. Ultimately, that's how we develop the fee. The way that we win the project is purely by the skill that we have. By having these multi-year MSAs, we are getting deeper embedded with the client. We develop the relationship. They recognize our technical expertise. That technical expertise can be one that travels, or it could be a very localized niche expertise. With that, we are then able to win the next project, the next similar project, or the next multi-year MSA. The great advantage to this is it creates a very nice moat. It's a very high barrier to entry.
If you wanna come into one of our areas where we have that level of expertise and set up shop, great. In 5 to maybe 10 or 15 years, you'll be able to compete with us. It's a incredible moat that allows us to be able to preserve the relationship and build on that relationship to cross-sell. With that, one of the most notable projects that's gonna happen here in New York City, the incredible development that's taking place on Fifth Avenue. Does anybody know where Fifth Avenue is? Pretty iconic area. From Central Park South to Forty-second Street, there's a major thoroughfare that's taking place, and Joe is the leader that helped us win this project, and I'd like him to discuss it.
Appreciate it, Alex. Let me give you some context on Fifth Avenue and its importance to New York City. The 21 blocks that we're talking about here between Bryant Park and Central Park represent about 5% of New York City's tax revenue, or on an annual basis, $6 billion. The roadway itself sees more pedestrian traffic than any other road in New York City. I invite you to take a walk down there Saturday afternoon and see for yourself, experience the overcrowding on Fifth Avenue. As Alex talked about with regards to utilities a little bit, there are a number of utilities underneath Fifth Avenue currently that were put in in the 1800s, and they're still active. Talking about those mega trends and the utilities upgrades that need to happen over the next few years.
This project is gonna be about addressing a lot of those utility issues that are on Fifth Avenue. It's also gonna be about addressing this pedestrian situation. We're gonna be reducing Fifth Avenue, taking away 2 lanes of traffic. Right now, it's 5 lanes, and it's vehicle-centric. We're gonna create what's gonna be sort of the Champs-Élysées of New York City, a new destination or a premier shopping destination for New York City to reinvigorate Fifth Avenue. How did we win a project like this, I think is probably an important discussion because we wanna land a lot more projects like this. For NV5, that story started about 3 years ago. We won another project here in the city called the Reconstruction of Lexington Avenue.
It was a design build project. It was New York City's first design build project, or I should say, the New York City Department of Design and Construction's first design build project. That term, first, you'll hear a lot from our New York City office. We're well connected to the New York City agencies, and when they're looking at pilot projects or they're looking at innovative solutions, they very often reach out to us. On the reconstruction of Lexington Avenue project, we started off how you would start off a normal city project. We did survey using LIDAR scanners, standard scanners. We used record documentations, and we started creating a base plan for which to develop the new project on top of. We took it a little bit further. We were a little bit innovative here.
We got the city to allow us to dig test pits all along the corridor, and we took a LIDAR scanner, we inverted it, and we dropped it into those test pits and scanned the underground. We took that additional information along with the information we had already collected, and we created the first sort of digital twin for Lexington Avenue, a BIM model of public infrastructure. The city hadn't had something like that before. Typically, at the end of a project, we hand 2D plans out to the contractor, and that's what they build from, and that's what the city has as a record as well.
Now they have a full BIM model of all of Lexington Avenue, and it allows them to understand where all the utilities are, what their relationship to each other are, what their relationship to the surface is, how deep they are, and to the adjacent buildings, and they know all that without putting a shovel in the ground. We took that successful pilot, and we had a conversation with the city when Fifth Avenue came out, explained to them the importance of developing something of that magnitude for Fifth Avenue, and that, along with our expertise on capital infrastructure, we were able to secure this incredible project. To put this project in context and against Lexington Avenue, Lexington Avenue was a $30 million project. Fifth Avenue is a $300 million project.
It's a huge advance in the effort that's gonna take from our part and from our design fees associated with this type of project. We look at both these projects, though, as building blocks, not as individual successes. What if we could take this understanding of building 3D collaborative digital models for corridors, and that becomes citywide? How much time would be saved in maintenance of these streets, in expediting construction, in knowing where things are before we're actually digging the ground? How much impact would that have to tourists and to workers and to people visiting the city and being bothered by construction all over the city? We see this as a starting point, and we're gonna take it from here and go a lot further. With that, I'll hand it back over to Alex.
Thank you, Joe. When we look at our growth, what do we see? That we've already penetrated some great markets, and really, the intent is to continue to grow and build out those markets. Our long-term strategy absolutely aligns with the mega trends of the industry. When we look at acquisitions, we clearly recognize that they need to add value to this investment thesis. When you look at the tailwinds that we have within an industry, they're talking about the upgrade that's gonna be necessary for our power and utility to go until 2050, and that might even be an optimistic estimate. We have phenomenal tailwinds with great visibility in our markets.
On top of that, the data centers just started popping up, and our data center growth is also quite remarkable, and we see a lot of visibility with respect to not just the construction of the data centers and the design, but the ongoing operations and maintenance, commissioning, and retro-commissioning that takes place. As you look at the map, one of the things that you might recognize immediately, you heard about Acuren, you heard about Canada. All that white space to the north, that's Canada. We have nothing there. There's a huge opportunity for us to grow our consulting engineering operation into Canada and be able to provide those services to the clients that Acuren has already built. Perhaps what's most interesting, for those of you that have followed us for quite some time. One more question.
In 2010, how many offices did we have? Anybody know? 4. We started with 4 offices. It was a strategy. The strategy was to acquire firms that had phenomenal subject matter experts, that had these master services agreements and professional services agreements that would allow us to continue to grow. When you look at what we've accomplished since 2010, and when you look at the still white space that we have, we need a lot more in Texas, where Acuren is very strong. We have a lot more in Canada. When we look at the Mid-Atlantic states, there's still a huge growth potential for our industry, and we look to take advantage of that. We mentioned data centers, and with that, I'm gonna turn it over to our data center experts, the gentlemen that actually broke us into the market, Gary and Keith.
Thank you. Click, click, click. Awesome plan, shaking your hand. Thank you. My name's Gary. I lead the Building Solutions International business, and I'm from Hong Kong.
Hi, my name is Keith. I lead the International Planning and Design business, and I'm also based in Hong Kong. For context, Hong Kong's our regional headquarters for our international business.
We do about $18 million in data center right now, and that's 80% of that is from our APAC stronghold.
For context again, we work with the eight of the top 10 hyperscalers in the world.
I'm gonna take you through a journey on how we capitalize on this mega trend. $300 billion is the amount of capital flowing into data center infrastructure right now. That's gonna balloon to what Ben Heraud have just said, $1 trillion. In context of, you know, how much processing data that's going into data center every year, that's 24 MW. Sorry, GW. That's about 3 New York City that's get added to our world every year. Just imagine the amount of equipment, the amount of infrastructure, the connectivity, and the power that is requires. 27% CAGR is what's happening in APAC right now. We've got insight because we've got this client relationship because they disclose their pipeline to us. We're seeing no signs of this slowing. What we're seeing is not a cycle.
It's a structural reprogramming of the global economy, I wanna demonstrate this through my journey from Hong Kong to New York. I started, you know, I, we, as we all do, we take a Uber to the airport, the automated gate was scanning my face. Next, I have a electronic boarding pass which I scan, my biometrics, then from that automatic process, I probably think my biometrics is tagged to my boarding pass. Now, at immigration, I've got a digital IT, which is an application on my phone. I scan that, my face gets scanned again, probably my biometric get refreshed again. When we're walking to the boarding gates, I get a notification from the app. Airline says the boarding gate have changed, we go to the new boarding gates. My face gets scanned again.
During boarding, the airline probably notice that I'm on the flight. During the flight, I use the Wi-Fi to do some work on our cloud platform.
In that 16-hour flight, I've logged into the same Wi-Fi. Ask AI to script the script today. I've asked AI to improve it. I've asked AI to read it back to me so that I can hear it.
At the U.S. immigration, long gone are the, you know, days of the, you know, the stickers on your passport. I've got a app that shows my visa. Again, my face gets scanned again. How many times my face gets scanned? Probably five, six times. I enter into New York. As a tourist, what do I do? I take loads of photos, and then I upload them on the cloud, share them with everyone. I process some of it using the, you know, erase from Apple Intelligence. That all is changing. That, our life has now changed, and I don't think we're going back in time. Behind all this requires a massive digital infrastructure that needs to be planned, designed, maintained, optimized, and that's where TIC Solutions comes in. Let's look at where capital is flowing into right now.
North America being the biggest market, followed by APAC. You can see from the color of the shades is our penetration in this market, and you can see in APAC, we're very strong, mature market for us. What's more interesting is the lighter shades. In the U.S. and other regions, these are our runway. These are basically our white space that we can grow into. What we're doing in this region is that we're scaling up a proven playbook where the demand is accelerating way beyond the local supply. Our clients are not really asking for just normal suppliers right now. Strategic supply chain is the word that our hyperscalers client look at. What they're looking at is a partner that can replicate quality across all geographies at speed.
As a, as an example, we recently got work in Osaka where our client, where in that typical place, Osaka, Japan, where that typical place, it will take two or three years to just get the design going and another two or three years to build it. We did it in under a year. We completed the design in a year, That's the speed that we're talking about.
Speed to market is very, very important to the data center client right now. From another example, we've started a relationship with one of the biggest hyperscalers in Singapore. From that grew into Jakarta, Osaka, into Seoul in Korea. We're having conversation of working in Australia, and they really want us in the EU as well. How do we transform this or how do we make sure that we capitalize this mega-trend into great business opportunity? We've got about 700 mission-critical engineers, these are not general engineers that we are deployed in this sector because it's booming. These are data center engineers. These are power system engineers. These are certified data designers. These are CFD modelers. These are commissioning specialists.
This creates a very high barrier of entry because our hyperscalers client have their playbook. It's very, very controlled in a way that they do want their standard to be met. This creates durable revenue stream for us. When our hyperscalers sell services and products, it's a global service, and it's a global product. What they want is continuity in their design. They want the same design mentality. They want the same commissioning rigor throughout the service, throughout their life cycle supply chain. This is where when they built the data center in Dublin, they want us to replicate that in Singapore, in Seoul, in Jakarta, in Malaysia, but with local adaptation. This creates repeatability for our work. We're embedded in these MSAs. Once we get in, we tend to stay in.
Long gone are the days where we have to predict resource and know how many people should we hire to meet the demand. Because of the importance of supply chain right now, our clients see us as strategic partners. They disclose to us the construction pipeline, and some of these are actually, most of these are 24 to 36 month out. This gives us great visibility for us to scale up the resource and protect our margin. In some cases, well, our client would pre-allocate us on these works quite far out. In one particular cases, our client give us 5 years construction backlog that is triggered by demand. The only ask from them to us is that, "When we run, you run with us." They like, you know, they like us because we run fast.
Looking at scope and services, we start with design and commissioning, and then we start layering different service on top of this. Structural, civil, technology, QA, QC. The which Keith will come into, the dollar per contract keep increasing. From data center, we're going upstream and downstream. Upstream, we're going into the substation, we're going to the optic fiber network, and we also into cable landing station right now. This work that we're talking about is durable, it's repeatable, it's programmable, and it's expandable, and this creates a very high growth, high margin business.
Well, I wanna talk, I wanna talk about the current boom of AI adoption, and how does it mean the power intensity and what does it mean to revenue and margins for us? I'm an electrical engineer. I've been designing data centers for the past 15, 20 years. 15, 20 years ago, a sizable data center would be probably the size of this room, 2, 300 server racks, and be drawing around 300-500 kilowatts. For those who do not know a kilowatt, 300-500 kilowatts is probably about 300 hairdryers. Right now we don't measure that anymore in hairdryers. We measure that through cities. How many cities are we building? That's the scale of how it's grown from 15, 20 years ago till now.
Just recently, with the AI adoption, power intensity grew 3 to 8 times more intense. Same room, it'll be 3 to 8 times more intense because the GPUs are getting, you know, more power hungry. These AI data centers are very power hungry. Just in the U.S. alone, we are projected to use up about 12% of the U.S. annual power consumption. U.S. being the leader of the market, it will probably be the same globally. This is projected to grow as well, 15%-20% a year for the next few years. What does that mean to TIC Solutions?
Not too long ago, our typical contract would be under a million dollars, and right now we're seeing that to be multi-million dollars, and they're coming in an accelerated pace for us.
We're not talking about AI data center. The new word is AI factory. These are 200 acres sites, that is a amplifier of what I just said about durability of revenue, but also expandability, land and expand.
The beauty of us is that we are not tied to a fixed price construction risk. We don't have that risk. We are not tied to any EPC risk as well. What we do is engineering hours and expertise. The more hours we put in, the more expertise we put in, that would mean more revenue for us. It will increase our margins. It's a very simple business for us. This slide will just tell you about the life cycle of a typical data center development. It's from the plan, design and capacity and operation and site optimization phase.
What I want to point out is that in a data center field, engineers is at the forefront, so we are lead consultant and all the specialist service get wrapped under us. This give us a very good luxury to look into different business and select those that we want to in-house, whether organically or we use them to feed our M&A engine, which Kevin will come into. This is very good because rather than qualifying a candidate during due diligence, we have worked with them before so that we ensure that our M&A engine is fed with quality candidates.
Right. On this slide, we'll talk about our service penetration across the region and across the segments and across the whole life cycle from planning up to design, operation and optimization. If you just look at the first row, which is construction and engineering, Consulting Engineering, you can see that we're pretty embedded, and the shades are pretty dark and the white space and the gray space below that in Inspection & Mitigation and geospatial, that reflects our untapped opportunities. I think we'll talk about, with the efforts that Dan has mentioned just now, we're seeing some proof points that this is happening. In the next short term couple of years, I think those gray will be populated by a lot darker shades.
We've done it before from 1% to 10%. We are very confident that we'll either continue our trajectory or even beat it. With that, back to you, Alex.
Thank you. An honorable mention goes to our asset digitization. It is a very up-and-coming market for us. It's a very nascent technology. David Black is here in the room, he is actually demonstrating this particular technology. One of the things that's so fascinating is that we can do everything from the large infrastructure projects, water plants, all the way to, in this case, an example, we won 2,000 stores. We've already completed 1,000 stores, this is allowing our client to be able to have a digital twin of their operation. The beauty of it is that it is a recurring revenue stream as well. What they do, they'll take this data, they AI enable it, ultimately the physical work that's done on site is something that we need to do, we're demonstrating that. It'll be demonstrated right after the meeting.
When we talk about AI, it has been the talk of the town, right? Everyone's concerned, "What is AI going to do for our particular industry?" Recognize when we submit a set of drawings to build a bridge, to design a road, that has to be signed and sealed by a licensed engineer, not an AI stamp. What we have recognized is that throughout the process, there are ways in which AI-enabled technology is absolutely going to be able to help us. When it comes to actually having a licensed technician, a licensed engineer on-site inspecting the construction, where the help comes is in terms of collecting the data. For us, when we look at what it can do in our back office operations, it's an absolute margin accelerator. Right now, we have about 10% of our staff working in administrative, marketing roles, some financial roles.
One concept is we need the A players because there's a lot of the work that we're now gonna be able to pass off and have it done through artificial intelligence. In terms of our core business, it's very solid and it's very sound because of the technical expertise that you need to have, the credentialing that you need to have, the past project experience that's absolutely required in order to win a project. When we look at our engineering delivery, again, it's not going to design the roadway, it's not gonna design the bridge, but it can do certain things relative to QA, QC that's incredibly important. Some of the work that we do in data centers, they're with the hyperscalers. Give me an idea of how many pages you think an average contract might be. 200 is common.
We have some contracts that go over 1,000 pages. You know, I was talking to somebody that was legal for a large EPC, and they told me an acronym, RTFC. Has anybody heard that? It stands for read the contract. Now, if the contract is hundreds of pages, realistically, how can you do it? We have an AI tool that I've loaded up a contract that's over 1,000 pages. It gave me a risk register. It allowed me to recognize what we had to do for notifications, which situations created force majeure, what we had to do to notify the client when that came up. In terms of what it's gonna be able to do relative to our productivity, relative to mitigating risk, it's absolutely a huge potential. Obviously, all of that is just geared towards how we can drive margin expansion.
In closing, I think everybody will recognize we're in a mandated business. We have a great recurring revenue theme, as well as visibility for long-term revenue. The quality-based selection means that we're not having to compete in that low bid environment. We have a lot of room for geographic expansion and a long history of delivering on our commitments. In absolute closing, from $20 million to $700, I look forward to bringing consulting engineering to over $1 billion to meet our $3 billion dollar target. With that, we're gonna actually allow you to have a 10-minute break, and then I'm gonna ask Shamus Sullivan to come up, who runs our Inspection & Mitigation division.
Okay, thank you. My name's Shamus Sullivan. I'm the President of our Inspection & Mitigation business. I'm proud to build on our legacy Acuren platform and our connection with NV5. Prior to this role, I was leading our commercial effort in Canada and across our segment, and I bring that focus to the role. I focus on growth and on contracts and commercial pricing. I have a 20-year history with the company, primarily in Canada, but I've relocated to Houston. Houston's an important market for us, not just because that's where the headquarters of some of our largest enterprise customers are, but also, it's where we have opportunity. We have a region that has high growth potential, and we are hyper-focused on the Gulf.
The team is very focused also on connecting with our consulting engineering and geospatial businesses. They bring high-value technical expertise that we are able to work behind. Geospatial brings very high-quality analytics and service expansion to our customers. Today, I'm gonna go over what we do, why we win, some of the impact examples that we have, and how we support the TIC framework of 31885. INM is our foundational field-based tech solutions platform. Like Alex mentioned, consulting engineering, our work is non-discretionary. It supports regulatory insurance requirements for our customers. It's core to protecting the uptime, the safety of their assets, and to extend the life of those assets. We use certified labor in high-consequence environments, and we turn data into insights that our customers use to make real decisions about.
We're the largest North American platform with 5,500 technicians working in the field, and our core service lines are non-destructive testing, inspection, rope access, specialty trade labor, and engineering and lab work. The platform delivers $1.1 billion, about half of the TIC Solutions revenue, 28% adjusted gross margin, and we have 6,700 total employees. We have lower margin than the other segments, but we benefit from a structurally lower overhead as a specialty labor business. We're concentrated in inspection. That's often where our workflow starts. We start with inspection, and that inspection data, whether it be radiography or ultrasonics, often drives more inspection or mitigation or engineering work. We have diversified end markets, but the commonality across those end markets is that they're asset-heavy.
It's something that we share with Alex as well, is that the consulting engineering end markets are asset-heavy. We're very mature across our North American platform, which supports our share growth and drives differentiators like relationships, density, and breadth of services that we have. For our customers, and I mentioned it, we really protect uptime, safety, compliance and extend their asset life. The operating expense for INM at our enterprise customers is small, 1% to 2%. That does create some pricing resilience, but that OPEX spend compared with a pipeline spill or an unplanned outage or a compliance issue production loss is outsized. The low OPEX and high consequence often allows us to be embedded within our customers' facilities.
The recurring run and maintain work, you know, the 45% of our work is very much supported by the call-out and outage work at those enterprise customer sites, and those enterprise relationships allow us to create higher margin, expanded services at those facilities. Ben mentioned the mega trends that are supporting our business, and the two that are most important for Inspection & Mitigation are the aging infrastructure and the energy demand. Same markets as our other segments, but different stages of the asset life cycle, where Consulting Engineering will work upstream on a bridge, we will perform the inspection or perform the mitigation work on that asset. Some proof points that U.S. refineries are on average 40 years, 40 years of age, and they're running longer and harder than anticipated, creating reliability issues.
45% of U.S. bridges are over 50 years of age. That age plus the increased utilization creates more risk and more work for us. Our inspection data really drives insights. That drives decisions whether to repair, replace, monitor, extend, redesign, decommission assets. The Inspection & Mitigation segment holds a very critical point in that life cycle, but also the data position. That's how the work that we do makes the platform cyclical. The inspection work leads to our Consulting Engineering work. The Consulting Engineering work leads to inspection, leads to mapping the asset, and it's how we create a more lifecycle partner for our enterprise customers. Just wanna go over a few of the reasons why we win. Scale and density is very hard to replicate.
Our inspection businesses must be local. I describe local as being at the facility. Our certified labor needs to be where the issues happen, and that's why our enterprise customers embed us within their facilities. We support the decision-making process at their facilities. When we're not embedded, we have 130 locations to support those customers and 5,500 technicians to deploy. The density improves our response time, the access to labor improves our utilization and our win rates with customers. Our national presence really supports our local efforts. Other important reason why we win is our workforce and our safety performance. They're core advantages for our business. Certified labor is scarce.
Training creates capacity, and we have invested in training platforms in-house, non-destructive testing, rope access, field engineering services, visual inspection. It creates career paths for people at the organization where they can go from a trainee on day one with no experience to a senior technician or president of the segment. We can have welders get another ticket. They can become an electrician and also a rope access technician. It just drives us to be deeper embedded within our customer sites, but also allows us to give real career paths for our technicians. Safety has become a commercial advantage for us. We have to operate safely to operate in high consequence environments. Our reportable injury rate of 0.11 is 21 times better than the construction industry average.
It becomes a real proof point. It's something we rally around when we're working with our customers and when we're bidding work, is that we protect their assets, and we protect our people. Lastly, the breadth of services creates wallet share for us. This is critical to the cross-selling effort that we have with the other segments. We have over 100 inspection and trade and engineering services, but the value really isn't in the count of them. It's how we sequence them. Inspect and diagnose and engineer and it creates one partner. It simplifies the customer experience, it adds less vendor complexity, and it allows us to capture more wallet share. It's a proven strategy that we have executed at our enterprise customer sites. Procurement's a little different than Alex.
We get a quality-based selection, QBS, quality-based selection, but we also compete on price. Where we see the most advantage is to have customers expand the categories that we're, that we operate in. It's the same strategy that we're employing for geospatial and consulting engineering and bringing them into our largest enterprise customer sites and allowing them to bring expertise in. We're very growth-focused in 3 key areas: higher value services, priority end markets, and improving our wallet share. For higher value services, drones and robotics improve our data capture. Rope access is high value and low penetration across the U.S. especially. Lab and NDT and specialty engineering expand our margins, but each one of them have clear customer value. They support safety and uptime and better data, better decisions.
There's Acuren value in each of those as well. They're technical, differentiated, and outcome-driven. The mega trends are supporting our priority end markets the same as the other segments. Power, utilities, infrastructure. Aerospace is an under-penetrated market for us, but we have certifications in-house. We're NADCAP certified in specific offices, and we're expanding that NADCAP certification to others. The geographic white space is built on credibility. We're not entering those markets cold. On top of that, we're layering a commercial engine. We are very commercially focused on converting lead pipelines into qualified leads, into actual opportunities and wins for our organization. Talk briefly about a couple of them, about rope access and then drones.
The cardinal sales sin of saying better, faster, cheaper is hard to get away from when you're talking about rope access. I say safer, faster, cheaper. You change out one word, it sometimes helps. We played an early role in the North American deployment of industrial rope access. I was fortunate to be a site manager when Acuren purchased a small company, RAD, and we had rope access people show up at site. We didn't quite know what to do with them at the time. We thought they would go out and inspect and when they did get up on a rope, put an inspector on a rope and up to inspect something, you realized insulation had to be removed. When insulation was removed, we noticed there was electrical heat trace there that we couldn't modify.
Maybe we inspected it and the spool was bad. We had to replace the spool, we need a pipe fitter. That evolution created our one mobilization multi-skilled approach to deploying that service. It really changes the maintenance economics for a customer. There are sites today with 100 rope access technicians on them, specialty trade services flexing to 400 during outages. The customer value, again, is clear. Lower downtime, lower access costs, total spend reduction. Our Acuren value is very clear. It's a broader scope. It's differentiation from our competitors, and we get to go deeper with our enterprise customers. It's the same approach we're using to bring CE and Geo to our largest enterprise accounts.
There's a clear ROI for our customers. We are a market leader in this space, especially in Canada. You know, North America is under-penetrated in comparison to Europe. 5%-10% in the U.S. versus 15%-20% in Europe. We have begun to deploy across the U.S. We've strengthened our commercial team when we strengthened our technical expertise in ropes in the U.S. We are beginning, we've seen early proof points of customers willing to open categories to allow us to bring rope access and other segment services to their facilities. This is a bridge that Dan actually mentioned earlier in a recent win in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A 4,000-foot suspension bridge with a 50-year life cycle that is nearing its end.
We engineered an access solution, a 10-year agreement and scope of installing a platform that is modular, reconfigurable. The reasons I discussed why we win, our scale and our depth and our local capabilities are all true for this scope. The scalable It really becomes a scalable model where we can look at complex technical recurring work and it's really tied to the mega trend of the infrastructure growth. There's a few people here today, Jake and Mitch, who have a rope demo outside. Jake was instrumental in putting this bid together and working with the cross-selling team to make sure that we put our best foot forward. I'd encourage you to chat with him today. Drones and robotics are key to our I&M service expansion.
They expand our reach, safety, productivity, and improve access. Not just height, we can access confined spaces, energy, hazardous spaces. They're faster, visual inspection and geospatial data, they are a tool. The drone or robotic crawler, the value is in the workflow, the interpretation of that data, the decision, and driving more productive technicians. We're operationalizing that with utility transmission lines. You heard Ben speak about the 1 million miles of transmission lines that we fly every year, our customers have geographic challenges and cost sensitivity and overutilized assets. We use drones to detect hotspots, damaged hardware, pole and structure issues. Kurt's gonna speak a little later about the vegetation management program around utilities.
Combining our drone deployment team with Kurt's technical expertise around vegetation management, again, creates a broader scope of services that we can offer for our utility customers. Again, we also have Eileen with us here today, and she's out performing a drone demo. I'd encourage you to speak to her. She's deep within the utility space. She's been able to expand our reach with utility customers, and we see further growth. Couple things, just to address some of the questions that we get around robotics and AI concerns. As I discussed, drones and robotics are really tools for us, and they're not replacements. These facilities are complex. Assets, access, materials, conditions, they all vary greatly. The tools do extend our reach and our productivity, and we embrace them because they drive enterprise value for our customers, but also for us.
They strengthen our customer relationships when we continue to do the right thing and drive costs down. They do enhance our inspections, but the field execution of that work remains critical, remains the same. AI in particular is already driving some near-term results, but long term, we see it as strengthening our data and AI-assisted analysis. I mentioned earlier we sit at critical decision points with our customers when we hold a data position. We have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of digital radiographs and LIDAR scans and all sorts of data points that we are now able to analyze at scale that we couldn't analyze before. Today, we're connecting data points. We're standardizing our workflows. We're deepening insights for customers and improving the interaction with customer platforms and inspection data capture.
As simple as telling our customers that they need a permit center-200 yards in a different direction to save 15 minutes per employee. Longer term, we know it can drive productivity and decision support layers for our technicians. We have a goal and a plan to create a recurring asset intelligence layer across our data to capture, connect, convert, and decide and help customers drive better decisions at their facilities, pushing us deeper into their enterprise accounts. AI is gonna touch many points of what we do, but we firmly believe that field data and inspection judgment does remain critical. Margin expansion is a focus for our segment, and it's daily, and it's metric-driven. In a specialty labor business, revenue by technician and utilization, pricing, total capacity of our workforce are critical.
We have pockets of excellence and sharing across Canada and the U.S. and strengthening our local teams is important to us. The Gulf Coast, in particular, has been an aggressive focus. It's a $200 million region, and we believe we hold less than our fair share. We've restructured that region. We have, rather than focused on service-based delivery selling to every customer, we have customer-focused leadership now pulling in every service, with smaller operating teams. Over the last six months, we've seen continuous margin improvement out of that business. When you layer on the commercial excellence and expanding our revenue opportunities, capitalizing on the short-term leads and the long-term enterprise accounts, we're driving results. It's not heroic. It's discipline. It's daily.
There's practical actions to scheduling people better, gaining more billable hours, and less rework. Our commercial effort and our commercial team is now focused not just on our regions where we're looking for recovery, but also in our high-performing regions, and we're looking to drive more automotive containment work and manufacturing depth. In summary, the INM business is resilient, recurring, mission-critical, and it's combined with all non-discretionary. We benefit from aging infrastructure and the increase in energy demands and the mega trends Ben spoke of. We have a hard-to-replicate mode. Their scale, our breadth of service, density, local labor, safety history, and the deep relationships with our customers, create barriers to entry.
We're focused on high-value services and priority end markets, geographic expansion, where we, where we can see growth and margin expansion through metric-driven daily focus. I'm proud of the work that I&M does within the TIC sector and look forward to supporting the 31885 framework. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Kurt.
Thanks, Seamus. I really appreciate that. Good morning, everyone. My name is Kurt Allen, and I have the honor of being the TIC Geospatial reporting leader. Just so you know, I've kind of been in and around the geospatial profession for the last 35 years. I've had the opportunity to watch how technology has driven mapping to geospatial. Anecdotally, I find that a lot of people don't really know exactly what geospatial is, so I wanted to take a minute to kind of go through that. You know, I go to a cocktail party or go sit on the sideline of a youth sports event, and they always ask me, you know, "What is it that you do?" And I, you know, other parents, and I say, "Geospatial," and I get a blank look.
I usually then follow up with something like mapping, and they, they start to get it. I wanted just to take a minute to kind of talk about it, and I think that Joe gave a perfect example when he talked about Fifth Avenue, about how he was really using lidar to scan, both above ground and below ground utilities. Why was he doing that? It's 'cause he needed that level of accuracy to understand the relationship between those features that he was collecting. Each of those features have a location. Location is the difference between geospatial data and other data. Time sometimes is also a discriminator when you talk about it. The time it was inspected, the time it was collected, the time it was last updated.
That information gives users the ability to understand hidden patterns and relationships, and it allows people to make smarter data-driven decisions. Who are we? We really have the ability to acquire, analyze, and answer the most complex geospatial challenges that clients face. From an acquire perspective, we have a fleet of fixed-wing aircraft, vessels, drones, trucks. All that capability, as well as being able to task satellites or be able to use satellite data from existing collection as done by satellite providers, all that gives us the ability to be able to have multiple platforms in which we can deliver the information to our clients. Sensors. Nobody in the business has a wider array of sensors than TIC has.
Hyperspectral, thermal, sonar, geospatial, geophysical, all that kind of information, we have that ability to be able to provide to a client in which we can actually be consultative with them and be able to say, "Hey, here's the right platform for the right with the right sensor in order to be able to do your project." They appreciate that capability. From an analysis perspective, we've been doing machine learning for 30 years. AI is kind of a new term, it really was machine learning for a long time when we talked about remote sensing. We also have the world's leader, the world-class ENVI software platform that more than half a million users around the world are using to be able to do image analysis, and that capability is second to none.
From an answer perspective, we have more than 200 people that are involved with enterprise GIS to help our clients manage our data and be able to answer the complex questions that comes with enterprise GIS. It gives us and our clients, we've become a safe choice for them from a selection perspective. Who we are, we're about 14% of the TIC's revenue. Our client base is spread pretty widely between the commercial, the federal, and the state, and regional marketplaces. We have demand drivers just like the other segment. You know, the federal government, it's budgeted. You know, we follow the money. I'm gonna talk about that a little bit more in a minute. Utilities are regulated, and our services are required.
Natural resources, they're secular, not cyclical, in the way that services come. Finally, as the physical world becomes more digital, consulting, engineering, and I&M need us. They need our information. When you look at the end markets there, and the snapshot, just real quickly, in 2025, we earned $298 million in revenue at a 52% gross margin clip. If you look at the end market revenue, if you followed us for a couple years, you can see that our commercial part of our business is expanding rapidly.
Some of that is a result of some of the headwinds we had last year in 2025 with our federal marketplace, but really, really excited to see the expansion in commercial. Most of our revenue is from the U.S., but we are expanding into Europe, Canada, and Asia. We have 4 geospatial offices in Europe currently, and we have 3 in Asia-Pacific. Megatrends, I think Alex spent a lot of time on the megatrends and stole all my thunder. Really we have end-to-end workflows for clients within each of these megatrends that are listed here. With government and defense, especially defense, we're seeing an uptrend and a lot of requests, a lot more requests coming from not just the U.S., but especially from Europe.
In the infrastructure area, aging infrastructure, there is just a huge demand to digitize the physical world, number one, but also be able to manage and visualize assets, that's an area that we are expanding into. In water and natural resources, it's unfortunate, but our services are used for search and rescue and for mitigation services from natural disasters. You know, we were instrumental in the L.A. fires. We were instrumental in the Kerr County flood that happened in Texas, we are currently instrumental, you know, in really the recovery efforts for a lot of the hurricanes that happened in the southeast over the last three or four years. Finally, Ben kind of talked about the million linear miles of transmission line that we pick up every year.
We're using LIDAR in order to be able to help them manage vegetation. Increasing energy demand means there's going to be more of that in the future. We're about 1,500 employees. We've done work in all 50 states. We've completed projects in all 7 continents. Our software has been to Mars. If our software is also used by a lot of medical device manufacturers. If you ever need an MRI, I hope no one does, but if you ever do, just realize that our software is being used to do that. I wanted to spend a moment to talk about 2 projects that are ongoing right now.
When I said you know, when I mentioned that the federal government has a budget and we follow the money, what happened is last year is people know about DOGE, knew about some of the federal headwinds we had, but we followed the money. We paid attention to what this administration's priorities were, and we positioned ourselves for one of the largest projects we've ever undertaken, and that is really there's a real push right now for to find and extract critical minerals around for our country for national security reasons in particular, but certainly for everything from your iPhones to electric vehicles and batteries.
That we are following the money in terms of being able to do work, project work for the U.S. Geological Survey on land, but now they also are looking at the marine environment. We were able to successfully be tasked with doing collecting sonar data in the middle of the Pacific. That sonar collection was about the size of Louisiana and the average water depth was about 6,000 meters. Just in case no one knows if not anyone doesn't know about sonar, but maybe you're a movie buff, you know, you think of The Hunt for Red October with Sean Connery when he talks to his executive officer and says, "I need to determine the range to target.
One ping only, please." If anybody has seen that movie, one ping is a sound pulse. We're using sound in order to be able to get that return, in order to be able to understand what's on the seabed floor. We did that whole area in terms of collecting multibeam data to be able to get good mapping information. We also use remotely operated vehicles 5,000 feet deep, 5,000 meters deep because the closer you get to the sea floor, the more accurate the data is. They wanted sample range areas because all this information that I'm collecting for our client, in this case it's NOAA, all that information is going to be put into the public domain because they are planning to lease the mineral rights for this area.
I think that this is an opportunity that's gonna repeat itself, and I think we're uniquely positioned to do that. Finally, if you looked at the left of the slide, you can see what they call, what we call core samples. We did core sampling as well, and being able to pull up things from the seabed so that scientists could look at what was in the seabed and to be able to determine what's really down there. They had nickel, magnesium, and cobalt is what they'd picked up. They come in nodules, and you can see, like, a big rock there.
They're about this size typically, and that is pure critical mineral as opposed to when the land, when you're excavating critical minerals, you might have to take, you know, tons of fill before you just get a little of the critical mineral. It's a real difference maker. By the way, they also got some paleontologists very, very excited because we found Megalodon teeth in the core sample as well. This project is with a western utility. We've been doing work for them for years.
I wanted to talk about this contract because we get this work sole sourced to us currently. That is because we're the only firm that can acquire and process 150 linear miles of transmission lines twice a year, each time within 90 days of collection. Within 14 days, we give our client what we call rapid reporting or a first look at the preliminary data in order to be able to understand where vegetation needs to be trimmed. They use it to prioritize their crews to go out and trim vegetation. Then in 90 days, we actually give them all the final deliverables.
The quality of our data and the scale of really what we undertake is why this work is sole sourced to us. Why we win, I mentioned really kind of that end-to-end solution that we have, the breadth and depth of our capabilities. We also have some additional discriminators I think that I wanted to mention. Number 1 is we're a safety-oriented culture. We are what we call IS-BAO certified for our vessel, for our, excuse me, for our drones as well as for our fixed-wing aircraft. IS-BAO is the gold standard for safety management in the aviation marketplace. We're the only ones that are stage 3 certified currently, that is amongst all of our competition.
It's a huge discriminator, especially when we're working with utilities because they have to approve and do an audit of our safety management plan before they allow us to do work. Secondly is we own our sensors and our aircraft. That's a big discriminator as well. We also have in-house maintenance, which allows us to improve our efficiency and reduce our downtime. Big difference. From an analysis perspective, I mentioned the 30 years of deep learning experience as well as the ENVI analysis tools that we have. We are known for our advanced analytics. We have a reputation for it. Finally, you know, the decision tools we have for GIS, it's world-class.
Right now we're working for most federal agencies in the U.S., but we're also expanding into Europe, in particular, with NATO, the European Space Agency, and a number of ministries of defense. Okay. Everyone wants to know about AI. AI is no longer optional for geospatial organizations, so our clients are all looking at it in a big way. The true transformation ahead, though, is not about embedding AI into isolated tasks. It's about accelerating insight and scaling operations to support more confident decision-making. GeoAI is specific. It's multimodal, it's multi-scale, and it's consumed across disconnected systems. Clients require architecture, not add-ons. We're developing GeoAI to become part of an operational backbone and to orchestrate data and workflows across systems and to be able to have informed decisions.
Agentic AI goes beyond assistance, and we believe we're the first to market with products that can plan, orchestrate, and execute workflow autonomously and coordinate across systems. We have developed GeoAI agents on both the desktop and the enterprise. Just really briefly on the desktop. We have IDL Agent, allows us to do supervised vibe coding. ENVI Agent allows us to open the total addressable market for ENVI. You don't have to be an imagery scientist with a PhD in order to be able to do it, because we're using a conversational interface and or a large language model in order to be able to get at our ENVI tools. The big news is GeoAgent, that is 'cause it's an orchestration platform.
I look at GeoAgent, and I think we're the only ones doing it, and that is, it sits on top of your systems of record. That's the way to think about it. Anthropic has developed a standard called Model Context Protocol or MCP. Think of MCP as a handshake to the systems of record, in which it can, in which using that standard, we can connect to those systems of record. Because in a geospatial environment, you may have geospatial data in a lot of different systems, or non-geospatial data that you wanna relate to. You know, you look at a, an Esri or an Autodesk.
They're going to be Right now, they're currently using AI to improve tools and to make their software more efficient, and Alex's team is gonna definitely benefit from that during their day-to-day usage of the software. They're not looking across their systems. They're still in their black box. We think we're the only ones that are coming out with an orchestration platform to be able to allow you at, through an LLM, through a conversational interface, to be able to get at different disparate datasets. Finally, in GeoIQ, the way I describe GeoIQ is I call it, I basically call it the ability to be able to do spatial reasoning from it.
if has anybody used an LLM and asked a really complex question, and you just watched the dial spin for 2 minutes as it's trying to figure out how to give you an answer? Okay, that's 'cause it's scraping the entire internet to try to give you that complex answer. What GeoIQ allows us to do is act at speed because it targets the data lake that you're trying to pull information from. That's especially important for you when you think about the Department of Defense in particular. They have so much data, okay? One of our clients is the Army Geospatial Center. Their primary mission, or one of their primary missions, is mobility. They wanna be able to have mobility for the warfighter, and that, in this case, it meant tanks.
They wanted to understand, can I move across this property or this soil type and be able to get my Abrams from point A to point B in a manner that is beneficial to the warfighter? Can that tank cross this bridge? Well, if their data lake, which is so huge, they can't get that answer very easily. GeoAgent gives them the ability to be able to do that, then with GeoIQ, it targets it and be able to give that kind of answer very quickly. If you think about the person who's asking that question, it's typically a 19-year-old analyst that just has some basic training in terms of how to do that. We can now, with confidence, be able to get them that answer.
What we're doing is, really, and this is the point I wanna make about GeoAgent in particular and GeoIQ, is this, the deployment is services led, and it's not plug and play, okay? We're dealing with complex data lakes from major clients, and we're focusing initially on our existing clients. They're all trying to get AI-ready. They're all shopping right now. The reality is, we have to go from readiness assessment to implementation to deployment in order to be able to get that done. The good news is, the good news is those opportunities are gonna be very large. They're gonna be spending. They're not. Forget the software SaaS part of the or the subscription part of it. Really, it's gonna be services led.
The only thing we have to be patient about is the sales cycle is gonna be longer because on the federal side or on the state side, we have to deal with budgets. On the commercial side, you know, certainly they have to figure out exactly what they want, and from an AI-ready perspective when they're ready to pull the trigger. But interest on GeoAgent is extremely high. We just did a workshop the other day and had more than 400 clients on that workshop, so I'm very excited about where we're going with this.
Finally, we need to automate our workflows internally, we are. It's still early days yet, but we're in the process of really looking for repetitive tasks where we can use AI to improve our efficiency of our workflows. We believe that's gonna really drive margins for us over the next couple years. With that, I'm gonna let I'll summarize real quick, but I'm gonna get Kevin lined up. Three things I wanted to leave you with. Number one is because of the breadth and depth of our services and our full stack capabilities, clients appreciate it. Our sophisticated clients really appreciate it. Secondly is the mega trends that we discussed, you know, across defense, infrastructure, natural resources, and energy.
You know, they demand digitization and really we just like civil engineering or consulting engineering, we're gonna be there for them. Finally, we believe we're first to market with GeoAI capabilities from an orchestration platform and we think we are going to stay ahead of the crowd and be able to implement what we say we're gonna do. Thank you.
Thanks, Kurt. Great job. My name is Kevin Woit. I'm the Vice President for corporate development. Over the next few minutes, I'd like to walk you through our approach to M&A and how we use it in a disciplined, structured framework to drive long-term value creation for the business. M&A is a core growth engine at TIC Solutions and it will be a critical component or contributor to driving our 31885 framework. You heard a lot of my teammates talk about the importance of M&A in their business segments, it is really critical aspect to our business. To fuel our growth engine, TIC Solutions plans to deploy $100 million-$150 million of capital annually to execute transactions in 1 of 2 broad categories, those being bolt-on acquisitions and platform acquisitions.
For me, I'm extremely excited to hear that obviously, 'cause of the role I fill, but I think my teammates are also very excited about that plan. With respect to bolt-on acquisitions, think about strengthening what we already do. Increasing size, scale, density, being able to integrate quickly because of the low complexity of the transactions. On the other hand, platform acquisitions are all about expansion, new services, new geographies, new end markets and generally new growth pillars that are gonna move the business forward and continue to evolve that business. Whether a bolt-on transaction or a platform acquisition, they both serve the same purpose which is driving the growth of the business and long-term value creation. What does an attractive M&A target look like to us? You know, how do we evaluate it? How do we prioritize it?
We start with a really basic question which is how does that target, how does that opportunity make us a better company? We answer that question through three strategic lenses which I think you've probably heard a lot of my teammates talk about it as well and I alluded to on a last slide, but it's capabilities and markets and geographies. How do we get better at where we operate? How do we get better with the clients we serve and how do we get better at what we do? That's really what we're looking to establish is what a target or opportunity brings to us. How do they strengthen the platform? How do they add strategic value? Once we've established this, we apply a screening criteria and we look to prioritize the efforts based on fit essentially.
We're looking at now this next stage of establishing the fit within the organization. First we look at strategic fit. You know, how aligned is the target and opportunity with TIC Solutions' work profile? Low CapEx requirements, highly recurring work, highly visible revenue streams, technical in nature, mandatory, non-discretionary. Those are sort of the, you know, work profile that we're looking for. Also, in that strategic fit we're looking at how does the target or opportunity align with the strategic segments, strategies and businesses that have been talked about in the previous slides. You know, you see on the charts here to the right there's some recent M&A focus areas, but at a high level it really is, I think Seamus's slide had a really good example of it.
It showed that it's focusing on accessing or strengthening or expanding high value services, priority end markets and geographic white space. When we think about the geographic white space we've heard about bringing CE and Geospatial into Canada or focusing CE opportunities in the Mid-Atlantic and Texas. From a end market perspective it's really about being able to take advantage of those mega trends we talked about entering high demand markets like utilities and data centers. From a service side it's about the high growth services that we offer. Think Rope Access, digitization, building Commissioning, things like that. That's establishing the strategic fit. The second part is our cultural fit. We're looking at the cultural fit of the business.
We're looking for businesses that are well run, strong teams, great leaders who are willing to stay on beyond the transaction. That they would like to be part of the next stage of that growth of that business. We go a little bit further than that as well in the sense that we look for a culture of caring that exists in these organizations that we're looking to acquire. A culture of caring to us is pretty simple. It's do they care about the work they do? Do they care about their clients? Do they care about their employees? Do they care about doing a good job? Do they care about competing and winning each and every day in whatever arena that might be? To the extent that that culture doesn't exist it's generally not an acquisition we're interested in doing.
The third and final sort of fit or screening criteria we look at is internal integration capacity of our teams. When I meet with our operations teams, I often talk about executing M&A from strength. What I mean by that is we will allocate capital on a priority basis to businesses that are performing well, have strong leadership and high-functioning teams that can not only integrate a business, but they can also take advantage and execute on the commercial and operational synergies and strategies that have been identified through that process. That really hopefully illustrates to you our disciplined approach to evaluating deals, how we prioritize them to make sure we're working on the right deals, and really, as we say, ensure that we're doing the right deals, not just any deals. Grab a drink of water here.
Okay, from, I wanna shift to sourcing and execution and talk a little bit about our advantage here. I talk about it in the context of it's rooted in our one team approach here. M&A is centrally coordinated within our organization, our operations leaders are heavily involved in the process, especially the sourcing and execution side. This generally works because we act really as one integrated team. Our leaders are very active in their markets. They have deep knowledge, and they're often able to identify, validate, and shape opportunities well before sellers are even thinking about selling and largely before formal processes have begun. That one team model creates early access to potential sellers and opportunities, and it allows us to have stronger insight into the operating business.
It allows us to build relationships early with those sellers and for the long term. Through this process and this sort of collaborative process between operations and corporate development and M&A, sellers increasingly view TIC Solutions as a strategic long-term home for both their employees and the business as a whole, and they view us less like, you know, just another, I'll call it like strategic buyer or, I mean, financial buyer. When closing our one team approach strengthens our ability to win the deals we wanna win regardless of the sourcing channel that they come through. I'll try to be briefer on this one. This is all about the proof. We've talked about our process and how it works, and I have two sets of data up here.
The data on the left illustrates our track record over the past five years of executing deals at attractive multiples while maintaining focus on margin accretion. The data on the right is representative of the deals that have closed in 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, and it just is a example of how those acquisitions are strengthening our platform across those three strategic segments that we talked about. Additionally, we have closed or have a number of targets under LOI today that are expected to close in 30 to 60 days, which will bring our planned capital allocation for basically halfway through the year up to over half of our planned target deployment for 2026. Why does all that matter?
I think it's pretty straightforward, is that this really illustrates that we have a repeatable, reliable engine that can deliver results, and we have a strong looking forecast for '26, and it gives us a high degree of confidence that our M&A engine is gonna be able to help deliver on our 31885 framework. My last slide here talks about, you know, I think probably a lot of people have heard this. Closing a deal is the easy part, how you integrate it is where the value is really created. We truly believe this as well. Integration is a extremely important aspect of our M&A process, and it's widely held throughout the organization. We have four sort of strategies here in terms of how we integrate.
The first is we use a custom playbook but a consistent process. We make sure that we're driving priorities, accountabilities through that playbook, and that drives consistency in our integration results. Secondly, we leverage our platform. We scale infrastructure systems and our expertise to allow the leaders of the acquired companies to spend time in front of clients, employees, where that time really matters. The third item here is about customer expansion and cross-sell. Like you heard a lot of my teammates talk about this. Every deal we do has some strategic value rooted in the commercial collaboration opportunities that exist in the combination. Mobilizing that strategy within the first month is absolutely essential to unlocking the value of the transaction. Finally, from fourth item, I've talked about this earlier, we use a one team approach.
We are lockstep with our operations partners. They're involved from the beginning right through to the end, and obviously they're involved in the integration aspect. Their team really lays the groundwork for operational alignment through this process to drive performance and long-term results with the combined businesses. Stepping back, I hope I was able to illustrate to you that our organization is committed to deploying significant capital to fund our M&A growth engine. We have a discipline and structured framework to ensure we're doing the right deals. We employ a one-team approach, which we believe is unique, to provide us a sourcing and execution advantage so that we can execute on the deals we really wanna do.
We have a track record and strong forecast that gives us high degree of confidence that we're gonna be able to continue to drive long-term value creation and growth for the business. Finally, we have a really detailed process for how we integrate businesses and not only preserve the value that we've acquired, but unlock future value. With that, I'd like to turn over to our CFO, Kristin Schultes, who will walk you through a financial update.
Thanks, Kevin. Nice job. Kevin, we're going to have a fun and busy next couple of years with this. Good morning, everyone. I'm Kristin Schultes, CFO of TIC Solutions, and over the next few minutes, I'm going to connect everything that you heard this morning from our amazing leaders to the 2029 financial performance framework. I have tremendous confidence in this team's ability to deliver, for three reasons. 1, we have clarity on where we're going and how we're going to get there. 2, we have momentum. I hope you heard that this morning. In fact, I could feel it. The momentum we have in this business is real. Lastly, we're leading with discipline, both operational discipline and financial discipline. 31885. $3 billion in revenue, 18% adjusted EBITDA, and 85% free cash flow conversion. Quick story.
Some of you may know I spent a number of years at APi Group, including time during its formative years as a public company. At the time, we were growing and learning together, at the time there was their first investor day as well, where they also set a framework, a three-number framework. Happened to be 13/60/80, which is forever ingrained in my mind. Coming out of that investor day, that three-number framework started showing up everywhere. It showed up in conversations, it showed up in written communications, it showed up in Teams meetings and in hallway conversations. At the time, it felt both aspirational and maybe even a little repetitive. The reason I bring that up is because it worked.
It united the team around objectives and goals, everyone knew that the work that they were doing on a daily basis either helped put us in that direction or not. It drove decisions. Quick APi fun fact: The TIC team and the APi Group team just were awarded the first project that they collaborated on together just last week. Both the project team shared with me that without the collaboration that we were doing together, neither team would have won that scope of work. Very exciting. Anyway, I'm very excited to rally the TIC team around our own three-number framework: 31885. Let's get into it. I'm gonna cover 3 things this morning. I'm gonna double-click and deep dive into the financial performance framework metrics.
I'm gonna touch on the NV5 Acuren merger integration and how that's progressing. Lastly, I'm gonna speak about our capital allocation deployment framework. Tying this together, you can see from a revenue growth perspective, we're going from $2.1 billion to $3 billion. That represents an 11% CAGR based on our 2026 exit. We spoke today about the growth we have from the tailwinds and the mega trends that we mentioned: aging infrastructure, increasing energy demands, data consumption, and the digitization of the physical world. These goals are achievable, and we touched on that today. At the same time, we plan to expand margins by 320 basis points, from 14.8% in 2025 to 18% adjusted EBITDA in 2029. This is gonna come from mix, pricing, and operational discipline.
Lastly, with our 85% adjusted free cash flow metric, we have both opportunity and flexibility. Now let's double-click on the revenue growth. This is balanced between M&A and organic growth. You can see here that from a consulting engineering perspective, Alex touched on this, we're planning on 7% to 9% organic growth within that business. Strong end market strength within infrastructure, data centers, and also focus on higher margin work. In Inspection and Mitigation, Shamus touched on the Inspection and Mitigation recovery in the U.S. He talked about growing through higher service lines, expansion in higher service lines and end markets. Kurt touched on using our proprietary technology to support the digitization efforts throughout the world. Dan also did a great job of touching on the upside and early momentum we have from a cross-selling perspective, which all provides upside for our business.
On the M&A front, I'm very excited and confident in our ability to deploy capital between $100 million and $150 million per year. This will really help accelerate our organic growth story. Next, let's look at margin expansion. 320 basis points, 14.8% to 18% in 2029. This reflects multiple levers working together. In the near term, we have an opportunity to focus on improved utilization within all three segments. Our technicians and our indirect costs can be better utilized in I&M. Our engineers can improve utilization within Consulting Engineering. Kurt mentioned this as well, but our data capture fleet, we have an opportunity to improve utilization with that business as well. The tuck-ins we're pursuing are immediately accretive to this business, and the technology enablement opportunities that we have are real.
Alex spoke about the contract review opportunities to use AI in the contract review process. We're using that today. The finance team is using AI to more quickly apply cash from a cash applications perspective, we're continuing to drive opportunities within the supply chain and procurement efforts within the business. Structurally, we're also seeing an improvement in our SG&A leverage. You can see that we released earnings a couple weeks ago, we're right at the precipice of being able to scale this business. Lastly, our synergy capture plan has another 50 basis points of margin improvement to be had. Let's touch on integration. Integration is something that's near and dear to my heart.
Not only is this a key contributor to our margin expansion goals, it's especially important to me for 2 reasons. 1, this isn't just a project. It's not just 1 and done. We're truly building something for the future. The people, the processes, the systems, they're setting us up for what's next, the next bolt-on, the next transformational opportunity, whatever it may be, sets us up. Secondly, the team-building aspect. Integrating 2 businesses like this is not easy. It's very hard. There's a psychological term called shared adversity, and I imagine my team in the back here that's here is smiling when they hear the word shared adversity because this is something that what we're doing together is hard, but it brings us together, and it sets us up for the future.
Simply put, we feel that integrating businesses well is a true differentiator for this business. I'm excited to say that we've actioned nearly 70% of our planned actions with regard to this merger integration. We're ahead of schedule. We'll be at a full $25 million run rate, savings rate by the end of this year. The system conversions, planning is in the planning phase. We'll move to execution later this year. In addition, we're tracking opportunities that could provide potential upside to this in the area of real estate consolidation, procurement, and additional headcount reductions. The third pillar of our financial performance framework is cash generation. As you all know, TIC is a high cash flow, low CapEx business which drives flexibility and opportunity for our business.
We are actively working on levers within the business to continue to drive efficiency with the way that we capture and collect cash. In fact, I'm proud to say our team shaved 8 days off of our DSO in 2025, there's still more opportunity to be had, especially in the area of contracts and cash applications. Additionally, as we continue to grow and scale, we'll spend less money on cash interest, and that will continue to improve cash conversion. Our model reflects $500 million worth of cumulative adjusted free cash flow during this period.
If you take the cash we have on the balance sheet today, along with this cash generation, if we spent nothing, sorry, Kevin, but if we did, we'd have $1 billion in the bank, and that represents over half of TIC's market cap today. Let's talk about the framework, capacity and framework. It's important to note that our North Star with regard to leverage is 2.5 times or less. You can see on the left here, we'll have $1.5 billion in capital capacity during this period between the cash we have on hand today, the cash we're gonna generate, and additional flexibility in our leverage. Real opportunity. We're gonna continue to focus on deploying that capital in high-return areas of the business to accelerate our organic growth story.
In addition, we're gonna continue focusing on accretive M&A. From there, we will be opportunistic with share purchases and repayments. To wrap up, we are transforming this business. We have reset the foundation. We're excited to grow by winning in high-demand end markets as a true lifecycle partner for our clients. The margin expansion opportunities that we have are already underway in creating value. The cash that we're gonna generate is gonna create meaningful opportunities to accelerate that growth. Our 2029 framework is not aspirational. It's outcomes that are already in motion. I'm confident in this team's ability to deliver. I speak for all of us when I say we're committed to leading with discipline, accountability, and looking for ways always to raise the bar. Really excited to rally the team around 31885. Thanks everyone for being here.
Great job, Andrew, pulling this together for us, our true leader. Another thank you to Robbie and the Mariposa team. I'll look forward to connecting with you during demonstrations, and with that, I'll turn it back to Ben for closing remarks.
Great job, Kristin. Kristin said it, but I'll say it again. I think the enthusiasm from the team and excitement, I hope you can see that come through. I really hope you have a clear understanding of the business and all the great things that we do and why we have a very high conviction about achieving these targets that we've put up here. We don't have any other special closing statements. I did wanna leave you with, oh, actually we do, sorry. I did wanna leave you with a few closing messages. You know, as we've talked through the segments, and you've heard on the cross-selling and the M&A strategies, we'll point to each of the segments. Consulting and Engineering, we're in mandated, non-discretionary, high demand work. Our backlog is growing.
We're very excited about the growth that we're seeing there. In Inspection & Mitigation, we have had some challenges. They have been concentrated in the Gulf region. You heard from Shamus Sullivan some of the work that he's been doing, and I'd encourage you to have a chat to him, and Jacob also, who's leading the charge with that. They've done amazing work and we are very excited to see that get back on a growth path. We're on the front foot. I think culturally, just the fixes that are being made there, we're seeing people come back in and, you know, the other parts of the business, continuing to grow, and we're very excited about it. Geospatial, extremely interesting business, isn't it?
We're about finding Megalodon teeth on the bottom of the ocean. My daughter would love to explore that. She asked if she could get her hands on one, actually, but we'll have to talk about that. Look, highly scalable business that really supports the other parts of our company, and together, the power of this platform is just much greater as a combined thing. AI, it's an accelerator, it's an enabler. It's not gonna replace our work. We are heavily focused in the field. Our high degree of expertise in very heavily regulated markets mean that this is something that we can use, especially with our subject matter experts being in very high demand. For us to use that as a tool to continue to grow our business is something we're very excited about.
Kevin did a great job talking about the exciting things we have with the M&A. We work in extremely fragmented markets. It's a target-rich environment for us, where we have a proven track record of doing this. Great leadership to receive those new acquisitions and help them integrate and continue to grow the business. With that, you know, we have our demonstrations out there, and I encourage you to get with that.
Q&A. Q&A.
I know. I know. I'm going to say that. Thank you very much. I'm well aware we're going to do Q&A. After we're done with Q&A out here, we're going to do the demos. I know you've already spent some time out there, but I encourage you to talk to our team. These are real experts in the field. With that, we'll open up the Q&A. Is there a slide that says Q&A? There you go.
Thank you, Ben. I didn't mean to freak out. Everyone, we will have 30 minutes for Q&A. We want to hear from as many of you as possible, so we ask that you try to keep things moving and keep your questions brief and tight. Please wait for the microphone, and before your question, please state your name and your firm. Who would like to start? Could we get a mic over here, please?
One here.
Hi. Thanks, everybody. Stephanie Moore with Jefferies. I really appreciate the presentation today and all the additional color. You know, I think what was very clear was there are clear structural, as you pointed, mega trends driving demand for your services. I think you outlined you're well positioned to win, and these are critical services in a lot of instances. I guess the follow-up question I have to that is it does come, like you're a bit at the mercy of your customers. Like the work needs to be done, but maybe you're not necessarily the one driving those, the work.
Maybe just as, that could be a wrong assessment, so I'd love for you to address that, but also address how you're comfortable in making sure you can deliver consistent results, in the backdrop of there's a lot of demand there, but maybe you're not necessarily in control of when those services are performed. Thank you.
Yeah, we sort of we talked a lot about the mandated nature and that this work needs to be done. I think that that is an absolute driving force. Our Look, at the end of the day, it, we can come up with all the strategies we want, if our clients don't agree with that, they are pointless. We are laser-focused. You know, we have a heavy sell or do a model. We are deeply entrenched with our clients. We need to be outward-facing all the time. With that sell or do a model, we are very focused on those client relationships. We're deeply embedded with those, we work with them over and over again. Yeah, we always position ourselves for the next project with those clients.
We take a programmatic approach to that. I think that that's why we're well positioned to capture these tailwinds in the market.
Next question, please. Right there in the back.
Charlie Rose with Cruiser Capital. The question I have is labor intensity. Can you talk about what your goals are in terms of revenue or EBITDA per employee? How do you elevate the productivity of the company? Maybe talk about it by segment. Are there certain segments of the business that lend themselves to more automation or more computerization or AI, please?
Yeah, if we sort of point to each of the different segments, and I'll let Alex , Kurt, and Shamus sort of pile on a little bit here too. Within consulting and engineering, I mean, we see that as probably one of the biggest areas to move the needle with AI. I mentioned earlier eliminating some of the more mundane things that we do, and equipping our subject matter expertise with enabling them to do more. Some of the work we do is time and materials with multiples, as Alex Hockman talked about. You know, our revenue per head, you know, tends to be fairly tied. Other parts, like the data center work, is fixed fee. The more that we can command a better fee through our value proposition, we can increase our labor per head.
You know, we have done a lot of offshoring, as well. In the past, you know, that has brought our revenue per head down a little bit. We pay much less, you know, we can't command the same amount of fees. Within Geo, we have a lot of opportunity to move the needle. If we think about flying a plane, it's 30 people for every hour that plane flies. The more that we can utilize the equipment, as Kristin talked about, as an enabler for us to grow. There, Inspection & Mitigation is largely, you know, hourly, and I think a big focus of Shamus' has been bringing down the overhead and, you know, driving the needle that way. You know, I don't know if you guys want to add a little bit to that?
Yeah, I have a practical example. When a lot of the work that we do is corrosion survey based, so taking radiographs. The faster we can take those radiographs, and the faster we can process them and drive value for the client, the quicker we're done a corrosion survey for the year. We have examples where we've dropped customer price by 80%, so it allows them to do more corrosion survey, but increase our margin at the same time by incentivizing our technicians and incentivizing the customer and us to do faster work. We see that consistently with our largest enterprise customers. They're looking for value outside of just the labor price.
That's through a velocity-
Yeah. If you look at AI enablement and using that to support modalities and support the analysis of those images, we can accelerate that.
Are there some commonalities to the APG situation, to the, to this situation in terms of labor productivity and that we should be benchmarking, please?
Yeah, that's a good question. I think the way I think about it is in inspection mitigation, the biggest opportunity we have for margin expansion is to focus on the higher margin end markets and service lines that Shamus mentioned. Our rope access business was up 10% this quarter. Our engineering and lab work was up double digits this quarter. Focusing on those is really the driver of margin expansion. Turning to CE and geo, with more fixed fee work, the focus is on project execution and driving margin expansion that way, which aligns with the project-based side of the APi business.
We'd like to get a few more questions from a few other folks. Why don't we do, Andy?
Great. Andy Wittmann from Baird. I guess just a question on the CI business, or the Inspection & Mitigation business. You know, there's a lot of information that you're always collecting, that data needs to get back to customers. How important is a software platform to delivering those results efficiently? Is that in the plan? How much do you have today, that helps deliver these results? It seems like this is a big area where there's actually probably a lot of cost tied up and a room for automation, particularly with the advent of AI. I was just hoping somebody could talk about that and where you are today and where you are going maybe in the future. Thank you.
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of work that we do over and over again. We need any efficiency that we can gain out of, you know, software and tools to enable us is gonna be a needle mover for the business. Maybe Seamus can give an update on what we've been working on there.
Yeah. We're quite focused on it. We developed an internal tool, Aries, in the past. We found that with the advancements in AI, the ability to develop that program and advance it is just exponential. We are collecting data digitally today through digital radiographs, phased array. Collecting that data and then analyzing it and turning it back to the customer to drive deeper insights is critical to our future position and to drive deeper enterprise relationships with the large customers.
Could I get Jeff right here?
Thank you. It is Jeff Martin with Roth Capital Partners. I wanted to dive into the opportunity as well as the challenges in geographic expansion, particularly in Canada, with no infrastructure, engineering, and no geospatial presence. How do you envision that from both an opportunity and a risk perspective?
Yeah, I mean, M&A will definitely be a tool. You know, we have the exchange rate sort of works against us in terms of leveraging our expertise from the U.S. into Canada. At the same time, we have fantastic leadership up in Canada that we're absolutely gonna tap into as we look at M&A opportunities, which we actively are. You know, the deep bench of expertise that we do have in the U.S., while the cost of it doesn't travel well to Canada, the sort of the track record and the resume absolutely does and will support, you know, the businesses that we acquire up there. Their Geospatial travels very well. In fact, our planes are certified to fly up there.
We're exploring a number of opportunities with the entities that we now have at our fingertips up there. I think that that's a lot more sort of scalable side that we can grow more easily without acquisition.
We have a much more targeted approach to capital allocation as we think about Canada. We know there are certain service hubs that we want to have the capabilities within, and we know the type of services that we wanna add the bench for. I don't know why this is working.
Sorry. Regardless, we have a very refined list of sort of our target universities or tuck-ins by nature, and it's complementary to what we already do in the U.S. We know we have the SMEs already in the U.S. It's just about getting the Canadian labor force to execute on.
Next question, please. Let's do Alex.
Thank you very much. Do you see the capital cost of AI and drones and technology, to become an accelerator to consolidation? When we think about your M&A targets and goals, is there upside if that capital cost increases for particularly smaller private competitors?
Sorry, I didn't really fully understand the question. The, the capital cost of the equipment that the Okay. I mean, these are all tools that we see as, you know, you heard Seamus talk about robotics. Obviously in Geospatial we have acquisition tools. It's, for us, it's really how do we get our hands on the data and then do something meaningful with that. You know, we definitely want to focus. We talk about our strategy around this 85% free cash flow, maintain a low CapEx operating model. The equipment that we have, we want it to be fully utilized and then we'll outsource beyond that.
Yeah. I think scale builds moats in general. As we become early adopters and early winners with the adoption of those technologies, yeah, it should unlock opportunities for those who cannot keep up with the investment needed and the know-how to implement those tools.
Next question, please. let's do Brian Beers.
Hey, Brian with Thompson Research Group. You talked about recurring revenues today. I mean, you have MSAs, some of your work is mandated, some of it's just done because the implication of failure is so high that you would do it anyway. I guess, what does recurring revenue mean to you? Like, how do you define it? Is there any differences between the three segments? And is there a proportion of the business that you would classify as recurring versus non-recurring? Thank you.
Recurring for us, it's either repeat work with the same client, it's repeat work on the same asset, like the million miles of power lines that we fly. In some cases, the software revenue that we have is recurring from a subscription perspective. You're right, it is different across the different segments, but it's absolutely sort of what we see as forecastable. It's, you know, with the data center work that we do, they sit us down and say, "This is our plan for the next 5 years." It's, you know, very heavily forecastable and repeat.
Let's do Josh Chen.
Thank you. Josh Chen with UBS. If you look at your organic growth targets by segment, which of those targets do you feel like will require you to kind of stretch the growth rate versus the historical, and which of the targets do you feel like it's right in line with history? Then kind of relatedly, how much of that 7%-9% growth in CE is what you're embedding for data centers? Thank you.
Yeah. I think the target that we've set is a high conviction number. I think mid-single digits overall is an okay number, but it's not overly exciting. You know, we talked about the cross-selling momentum that we have. That really we see as upside. Consulting engineering, our backlog's up 14% year-over-year at the moment, which would indicate that we feel pretty good about the numbers that we put in there.
Tomo.
Thank you. Tomo, JP Morgan. Like to ask about the pricing power by segments, and if you could talk about out of 320 basis points to get to adjusted EBITDA margin 18%, how much you bake in from the pricing. If you could talk about before and after acquisitions, NV5 and Acuren, how much, like, do you assume the pricing power evolving for the opportunity, please?
Yeah, I mean, if sort of you look at across the segments or the entire business. We talk at TIC Solutions as a whole, it's a very diverse set of end markets and services. What we're extremely focused on is really getting behind and growing the ones that are going to help us grow the margin as a business.
Yeah, it's actually an interesting question, right? When you look at it from our public client, typically, as I mentioned, it's QBS, the rate discussion doesn't happen until after you are awarded the contract. In order to do that, we have to have a FAR audit. The FAR audit looks at all of our overhead, it applies that overhead relative to the hourly rate that anybody's gonna be working on the project, even if they're a salaried employee, it just takes their annual, divides it by 2080. Then we negotiate based on the level of effort that it takes. With our private clients, it's a very different scenario because we're not tied to FAR.
What happens is, as we start to grow our platform and have the ability to offer multiple services, it provides a much easier way for our clients to contract for a wide array of services. In fact, we don't have to be as competitive when they're just asking for a bid sheet, because now you're providing a wide array of services that we can get in front of the client, let them, help them understand what the benefit is from using us across all of our service lines, and then we don't have the same level of price competition.
Tomo, from a segment perspective, Alex's group, CE, has the highest opportunity for pricing power, followed by Geospatial, and I&M being the most price sensitive and least opportunity for pricing power. That said, if you go back to 2024, Acuren exited that year at a 17% adjusted EBITDA margin. You know, our plans are to get back to that, where we were there, and then look for opportunities to continue to scale from there.
Back to Stephanie.
I guess just 1 follow-up to that question. As you look at the mid-single digit total company organic growth target, could you break that out between what's embedded from a revenue synergy standpoint, if any, pricing, you know, pipeline conversion, kind of contemplation, conversion, that's contemplated in that? Any breakout would be great.
From a growth perspective, which was described on the revenue slide I showed, the assumptions are that CE outpaces or grows the highest, followed by Geospatial and then I&M. From a price versus... Sorry, can you ask that, say it one more time?
Is price versus volume in the mid-single digits. What is the benefit from revenue synergy across.
Okay. Yep. We have very little of revenue synergy baked into this plan. Like Ben Heraud mentioned, you know, 5% is our high conviction number, and the cross-sell momentum that we do have, which Dan Colimar explained, is exciting. We're in the early days, that would be upside for us.
Price versus volume?
Price versus volume depends on, depends on the segment. Roughly split.
Andy, please.
Andy Wittmann from Baird. Just back on in Inspection & Mitigation. The power and utilities part of your Inspection & Mitigation business is actually pretty small. There's a lot of spinning things, there's a lot of hot things, there's a lot of things under pressure. All these things lend themselves to recurring revenue inspection and testing. This seems like an opportunity to me. Is it to you? How do you break into this market? Can you do it organically, or are there areas of M&A here? Given the power dynamics and the growth that is potential here, I think it's of particular interest.
There's something sort of interrelated with data centers actually. Obviously, getting power to the data centers is absolutely paramount. There's LNG requirements, they're leveraging that to generate power. We've actually got a strategic initiative around how we can leverage the hyperscaler relationships that we have and bring I&M in on that work where there is deep expertise to support. We do see that as an exciting opportunity. Utilities in general, as we talk about cross-selling, one of the absolute strategies is to leverage the client relationships we have in one segment and bring in the others, and we're absolutely doing that.
Okay.
One from the gentleman in the blue. Yeah.
Hey. of the 320 basis points-
Sorry, could you state your name and firm, please?
Oh, yeah. It's Tariq from Balance Capital. Of the 320 basis points of margin expansion, how much is organic versus the accretive M&A?
From a... Like I mentioned with margin expansion, 320 basis points, it's fairly spread across all of the different levers. M&A is a piece of it. If you think about the capital deployment that Kevin and I mentioned, if you think $125 million is, you know, roughly $17 million-$18 million of acquired EBITDA each year, and those businesses are immediately accretive. Would have a fairly low impact on that the margin expansion goals relative to the other levers.
We also have service lines and businesses within the platform that do better than 18%. Getting behind those and continuing to grow them will be accretive to the overall business as well.
Adam? Adam?
Right. Yeah, right there. Adam.
Hey, just a follow-up question on the projection. Do you contemplate any of the NDT business coming back, the winning back some of the customers you lost and the call out work? Is that contemplated in your guidance? Anything in terms of mix shift, like on the lab or the aerospace side, is that included in your guidance or is it also upside to guidance?
Yeah, I'll start, Seamus, you can add on. I would say, I mean, as was evidenced by the growth rates for that are built into the model, the 3%-5% is fairly conservative. It assumes holding ground with our existing clients and starting to win some back. In terms of, you know, there's definitely upside in terms of increased opportunity to win new, increase the rate of winning new sites. The run maintain work is 40% of the work that we do. That nested work creates pull-through revenue in the areas of, you know, call out and turnaround. You know, we have a tremendous amount of confidence in Seamus's leadership and the team's leadership and see a lot of opportunities to, for upside to the 3%-5%.
Right. Just follow up. Because you historically grew 3%-5%, you went sort of a through a trough period where energy and petrochemical and refinery was all weak. Like there, presumably there should be sort of a cyclical rebound in those end markets too, right?
It's not fully baked into the projection.
Okay.
I think is what you're getting at.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yes.
Keith Rosenbloom. Just Kristin, quick question on understanding the 2028 guidance. You said cumulatively, you expect $500 million of adjusted free cash flow between here and there. In 2028, at $500 million effectively of EBITDA, your guidance is for $450 million of free cash flow in 2028. Is that correct?
Just to be clear, it's 2029.
Oh, 2029. Excuse me.
We're working as hard as we can. Your question is on the $500 million of free cash flow.
Yeah. Just to basically put the math in perspective, you're saying that you're gonna generate $500 million of free cash flow between now and then. In 2029 itself, you're gonna generate $460 million of free cash flow.
No, we have roughly $450 million of cash on the balance sheet today.
Yeah.
We're gonna generate another $500 million. If you look at the two together, we'd be at $1 billion of cash if we didn't deploy any on M&A.
Well, I'm just doing $3 billion times 18% times 85% free cash flow conversion. Isn't that number $460 million?
Yeah.
Yeah. That's just EBITDA less CapEx on the 2029 number is what you're getting at? It's the $540 less the CapEx assumption on the conversion. In cumulative, yes, it is $400 and something in 2029, which adds up, and then you have all the M&A cash outflows that come out too.
In 2029, are you saying you're gonna generate $460 million of free cash flow or is it something different?
The 2029.
No, to be clear, the metric does not include cash interest or cash taxes or net working capital, changes in net working capital.
Yeah.
Josh.
Maybe a quick follow-up on data centers. I guess based on that chart that you guys showed, is there a reason why your strength was much more in Asia, and especially looks like South Asia and Southeast Asia? I guess what will give you kind of the conviction to be able to move into other geographic markets within data centers? Thank you.
The team's really proven their ability to grow into new regions, and they've been doing that for a long time in Asia Pacific. We had the technical expertise out there when we made a strategic initiative. The team did a great job of building on the relationships that we had with the hyperscalers. Then we leveraged those relationships back to the States. We were doing some work, so we had the expertise, but you really need to get to a critical mass before these large clients will take you seriously, and we're now at that critical mass. We also get dragged by our clients. They are asking us to be in places and we sit up. We want to support them. Europe's a good example.
They're asking Gary to fly in and fly out there, as we get set up. It's an easy argument when our client's asking us to be there. We'll support it.
I think we have time for 2 more questions. Chris, up front.
Great. Thank you. Min Cho from Texas Capital Securities. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about your lab testing services. I know you have, like, 37 labs right now, and this was a good growth driver in the last quarter, but what is your outlook for that portion of their business? How important is it, and is this growth going to be mostly organic going forward?
Seamus?
Yeah. Our lab testing business is highly connected to the manufacturing market, and we've seen that expand especially this year with additional opportunities with manufacturing, automotive, aerospace customers. It's a high target area for us, both commercially, acquisitions and organic expansion.
We also do in lab work in Alex's group.
Yeah.
Which you talk about as well.
Yeah. We're in Seamus' group, it's predominantly metallurgical testing. We do concrete, asphalt, soils. Anything related to infrastructure improvements, construction related testing.
I believe, Chris, did you have a question?
Yeah. Chris?
All the way at the front. No, at the front.
Thanks. Chris Moore from CJS. Just one on M&A, you know, given how important it is to the growth strategy. I know historically when NV5 did acquisitions, oftentimes they would kind of leave the company alone for a while and then start the integration process. How soon after acquiring a company, you know, are you starting to integrate the back office systems? How soon before working on improving margins, things like that at this stage?
I'll probably just talk from the lens of NV5 and why, you know, things have maybe changed a little bit, and I'm really excited about our approach to M&A, and Kristin, and the level of sophistication that we have. I mean, we move very quickly. You know, we have a pretty tried and true playbook that Kevin went through. And really initial focus is to getting that back of house stuff integrated, but, you know, the team integrated with operations as well. Kristin.
I would tell you that integration starts before we close. It's important to us that the seller and the business knows what's changing and when, and that planning starts before close and then immediately after close. Our playbook has a 60-day milestone, 30-day, 60-day, 90-day milestone. Again, integration is something we take very seriously.
I think we have time for one last question. I don't think we have any questions. That's our 30 minutes. Thank you all. Back to Ben.
Thank you, guys.