Bowman Consulting Group Ltd. Q1 FY2022 Earnings Call

Good morning. My name is Candice, and I will be the conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Bowman Consulting Group First Quarter 2022 Conference Call. Thank you. Please note, many of the comments made today are considered forward-looking statements under federal security law. As described in the company's filings with the SEC, these statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause future results to differ from those expressed, and the company is not obligated to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements. In addition, on today's call the company will discuss certain non-GAAP financial information such as adjusted EBITDA and net service billing. You can find this information together with the reconciliations to the most direct comparable GAAP information, the company's earnings press release and 8-K filed with the SEC and the company's investor website. Management will deliver prepared remarks after which they will be taking live questions from published research analysts. Throughout the call, attendees on the webcast may pose questions for management to answer on the call or in subsequent communications, but there will be no live Q&A from the webcast attendees. Replays of the call will be available on the company's investor website. Mr. Bowman, you may now begin your prepared remarks.

Thank you, Candice, and welcome to the Bowman Consulting Group’s First Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. I'm Gary Bowman, Chairman and CEO of Bowman, joined here this morning by Bruce Labovitz, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I want to welcome everyone from McMahon Associates, the most recent addition to Bowman. This committed team of talented professionals is going to be transformative for our transportation practice as well as to our business overall. We're excited to have this transaction completed, and we're really looking forward to the great work we're going to be doing together. The first quarter of 2022 picked up where 2021 left off, generating record results for sales revenue and adjusted EBITDA. The Q1 momentum continues into the second quarter. During the quarter, we closed on a $17 million equity raise, we booked over $60 million in net new orders, and we produced record gross and net revenue. The growth was driven across every one of the markets served by our business. Despite challenging world conditions, we continue to see multiple opportunities for profitable growth. Net service billing for the quarter increased 65% over the first quarter of 2021, with an organic growth rate of 36% over that period. During the quarter, we continued with the integration of seven acquisitions that we made post-IPO, and we closed on an eighth with Perry Engineering in Tucson. Our collaborative culture, cross-selling, and work-sharing generated meaningful revenue synergies between our acquisitions and our legacy operations that positively impacted the quarter results. Continuing to execute on our growth strategy, last week we closed on the purchase of transportation engineering firm McMahon Associates, which is our largest acquisition to date. Within the first week, we've already realized over a $1 million of revenue synergy from this acquisition through a new traffic study engagement with one of Bowman's long-standing quick-service restaurant clients. The financial impact of this one assignment alone essentially reduces the transaction multiple by nearly a full term. Gross revenue in the first quarter continues to be concentrated on our building infrastructure market at just under 74%, followed by power and utilities at 14.5%, transportation at 7.5%, and emerging markets at 4%. For the sake of illustration or pro forma basis, if the demand transaction had occurred on January 1, transportation would have been about 18% of our gross revenue and building infrastructure would have been 65%. It remains the first of a number of steps toward meaningful diversification of our business by way of larger acquisitions. During Q1, building infrastructure grew by nearly $18 million, or 84%, over the same period in 2021 with nearly equal growth between commercial and residential, followed closely by public sector contracts. We continue to see healthy increases in quick-serve restaurant and commercial industrial projects along with bill-to-rent and residential inventory creation for home builders. Quick serve restaurants represent a dependable source of repeat customer revenue, while development engagements like the Amazon HQ2 project in Arlington, Virginia represent reliable long-term revenue. The demand for data centers and other industrial facility work is as high as it's ever been with pricing power remaining in our favor. Our building infrastructure clients and projects have so far proven to not be tightly correlated to interest rate movements, and we've not experienced any slowdown in activity or requests for proposals. Transportation is clearly in a transitional moment at Bowman. While down slightly this quarter over last year, we're confident that between the McMahon acquisition and the upcoming spending we expect to begin later this year and next, along with the infrastructure bill, this trend will quickly reverse course, and transportation will increasingly become a more meaningful component of our revenue over the next year. Our work on the Mile Long Bridge and Avenue projects continues to generate meaningful recurring revenue, and the Cook County Roadway construction management project is starting off in earnest this quarter. The I-35 Northeast Expansion Project in San Antonio will be gearing up for long-term recurring revenue over the next several years. I'm happy to report that Bowman was recently selected by the Illinois Tollway for the upcoming central Tri-State I-294 project. We're negotiating the contract, and I will update you on that project on our next conference call. Our power and utilities work grew 16% year over year, due in large part to increased spending on utility undergrounding and gas line engineering projects. We recently awarded a renewal in our long-term contract with Southwest Gas, and we continue to build on our long-term relationship with WEC Energy. Most of our longstanding utility clients are looking to increase their spending with us substantially this year over last. The US power grid continues to face unrelenting pressure to increase resilience and reliability, replacing aging infrastructure and integrating technologies such as electric vehicles, distributed generation, and battery storage. Spending on these initiatives is generally independent of macroeconomic conditions, and we're focused on continuing to invest and grow in this market. Our emerging markets, including mining, water resources, and energy services grew by 5% year over year in the first quarter. This increase was led by growth in renewable energy revenue followed by mining and water resources. In the renewables market, we provide a wide array of engineering services to solar and battery storage projects throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, along with a growing number of wind energy projects in the Midwest and the West. Growth in renewables-related revenue has so far been organic, but we expect to accelerate that effort through acquisition later in 2022 and beyond. Acquisition integration continues to be a huge focus for us. Our dedicated integration team is doing a great job with both the tactical and the social aspects of integration. We've added over 400 employees through acquisition in our first year as a public company, and the staff retention rate of our integrated companies thus far has been close to 97%. Above and beyond the talent we gained from the acquisitions, our dedicated recruiting team has been able to add nearly 10% to the acquired firm's workforces. Just as importantly, our integration team immediately gets everybody focused on revenue synergies, and we've already had a number of successes along those lines. Between revenue synergies and improved utilization resulting from our recruiting successes, we're benefiting from substantial post-closing effective compression of our transaction multiples. Our M&A pipeline continues to be as diverse and robust as it's ever been, and our outlook for continued strategic transaction activity remains bullish. At $28 million in annualized revenue, McMahon is well above what we expect to be our average deal size in 2022. As we've said, we expect the average to be significantly larger than last year. We're currently considering many deals in the low double-digit revenue range. We continue to focus on deals in the 6 to 7x multiple range, with occasional deals above and below that. McMahon, as an example, was priced at a multiple of 6.5 times adjusted EBITDA without any consideration given to revenue synergies. We're not directly affected by supply chain disruptions, and labor is our only real inflationary exposure. The overwhelming majority of our clients are likewise not directly affected by material supply constraints, and their demand for our services is only increasing. Across our markets, demand for engineering and design services remains strong as evidenced by growth in revenue and backlog. Pricing power remains in our favor as evidenced by year-over-year revenue growth meaningfully outpacing our growth in labor costs. Despite certain headwinds in the equity markets, we remain optimistic about our prospects for continued growth and upside in our valued proposition to our shareholders. We're raising our outlook for 2022 today, and as new acquisitions close, we'll continue to increase our outlook accordingly. Now I’m going to turn the call over to Bruce to discuss our first quarter results in greater detail.

Terrific. Thanks, Gary. As you mentioned, the first quarter was a record-setting quarter for Bowman. Last week marked the one-year anniversary of the pricing of RPO. I'm extremely proud to say that we've successfully navigated the transition from private to public and completed the year of firsts. Last year in Q1, we were still a private company, so comparisons to that quarter and periods which include that quarter are still a bit like apples to oranges. As compared to Q1 2021, gross revenue for the first quarter increased 65%, or $20.7 million, to $52.5 million from $31.8 million. Of the nearly $21 million increase, $7.6 million was from acquired revenue and $13 million was organic, representing a 41% organic growth rate on gross revenue. Net service revenue, which we refer to as net revenue, a non-GAAP metric, increased 65.2%, or $18.8 million, to $47.7 million in the first quarter compared to $28.9 million for the first quarter last year. Of the nearly $19 million increase in net revenue, $8.6 million was from acquisition, and the remaining $10 million was organic, representing a nearly 36% organic growth rate year over year. Gross margin for the first quarter was 51.5%, as compared to 49.2% in Q1 2021. The improvement of gross margin over Q1 last year is principally a function of lower non-cash stock comp expense, but also improved utilization, a mix of business, and a bit of pricing power. SG&A was 43.5% of gross revenue in the first quarter compared to 40.1% for Q1 2021. As I mentioned earlier, this comparison is not necessarily meaningful since we were still private at this time last year and did not have any of the costs of being public, and we had lower non-cash stock comp expenses. What is notable is that SG&A as a percent of gross revenue is trending down relative to Q4 last year and last year as a whole. We continue to be focused on reducing the rate of growth of SG&A relative to revenue; we expect SG&A to fall as a percent of gross revenue as we continue to build scale. Net income before tax is relatively flat year over year, with net profit for the first quarter up 50% to $1.5 million. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter was up 81% to $7.4 million, representing a 15.5% adjusted EBITDA margin, an increase of 1.3 percentage points over Q1 2021 and 3.3 percentage points over the full year 2021. Adjusted EBITDA is a non-GAAP metric that adds non-recurring adjustments and non-cash expenses to EBITDA. As of March 31, the company had approximately 12.6 million shares outstanding, which includes all the shares issued in the secondary offering and roughly 2.1 million shares of unvested restricted stock included in that number. As of today, the company has approximately 13.2 million shares outstanding, which includes shares issued in connection with the McMahon acquisition and roughly $2 million shares of unvested restricted stock included as of March 31. Our net debt was negative to the tune of roughly $7 million, and adjusted for cash, our ratio of adjusted EBITDA to total debt was approximately 1.4 times. We currently have approximately $23 million of cash on our balance sheet and zero outstanding on our $17 million line with BofA, which was recently approved to be increased to $25 million. That leaves us with upwards of $35 million of deployable capital for growth after accounting for working capital needs. As such, we believe we have sufficient liquidity for the near term to continue our M&A program. Gross backlog on March 31 was $173 million, up from $167 million at year end. We expect roughly 85%, or $150 million, of that backlog to turn during the next 12 months. Backlog was approximately 65% building infrastructure, 18% transportation, 15% power and utilities, and 2% other emerging markets. Pro forma for the addition of McMahon effective January 1, transportation would have represented roughly 29% of our backlog, and building infrastructure would have been roughly 56%. As indicated in yesterday's release, we're increasing our top-line guidance to net revenue of $185 million to $200 million and increasing our adjusted EBITDA guidance to $25 million to $29 million. This adds the impact of McMahon to the top and bottom line with little or no change to the outlook we issued just a few weeks ago back in mid-March. As is our policy, this guidance only includes acquisitions closed at the time we issue the guidance. It does not suggest the results will be evenly distributed throughout the year and does not contemplate additional acquisitions we expect to close this year. As new acquisitions are closed, we will update our guidance accordingly in the subsequent quarterly conference calls. Before I turn back the call to Gary, I'd like to mention that we will be at the B. Riley Securities International Investor Conference later this month in California. If you're planning to attend the conference and you've not already done so, please schedule a time to meet with us one-on-one. I'll now turn the call back over to Gary for concluding remarks and Q&A.

Thanks, Bruce. This morning, we announced the addition of Raymond Vicks to our board of directors. I'm very happy to have Ray join us on our upcoming journey. I want to thank him for his service to the board over the past year. I want to thank everybody here for delivering a fantastic quarter. We all continue to work diligently every day to deliver disciplined growth and return to our shareholders. This includes many of the fantastic professionals working here at Bowman. Ownership has always been part of our culture, and today more than ever, the alignment of interest between employees and investors inspires us to succeed. Thanks. I will now turn it back over to the operator and open it up for questions.

First question comes from Brent Thielman of D.A. Davidson.

My first question is regarding the strong start to the year here. Is there anything to be aware of that might have had an unusually strong impact this quarter, specific programs or contracts? As a seasonally slower quarter, if I annualize, that gets me to the midpoint of your guidance, frankly, a little bit above that. So, I just want to ensure I understand all the moving pieces in the quarter and what we should be thinking about for the rest of the year.

Brent, there isn't one particular contractor or client that made the quarter strong. It was just a strong quarter for us. It's the culmination of a lot of hard work in business development and acquisition strategy. There’s really a very balanced portfolio of revenue that makes up the quarter. We think that's a positive—there isn’t one anomalous thing that impacted it positively.

I'll just reinforce that, Brent, it is spread all over. There are not any big rocks that are not sustainable. We were not terribly seasonally weather affected generally; it was a more mild winter in a lot of our markets, and as we become more geographically diversified, we are somewhat less impacted by winter weather on outdoor work.

Okay, fair enough. The next question is just on gross margins, which seem to be fine in new contracts. How do you feel they are capturing the cost increases we've seen, including fuel and labor? And how are you monitoring that as new workflows enter the backlog?

Brent, I anticipated that question. We have really probably hundreds of pricing agents out there, seller-doers, and we counsel them, we coach them, and we listen to them. Our customers are experiencing price increases all across the board—materials, fuel, labor—and we are coaching our folks because we're feeling a lot of pressure to increase our labor prices. Our customers are expecting it, and our team is receptive to the coaching. They’re out there and we were able to get our pricing up for what's happening in the marketplace. This inflationary environment is new to everybody. Fuel, in particular, is not a significantly large component of our costs on a regular basis; the majority of our work is done from inside an office. So, while we are seeing increases across the board, we are not overly impacted on fuel pricing specifically.

Yes. Okay, fair enough. Why McMahon Associates? Why was that the right kind of large transaction to expand transportation for you? What did you especially like about this business?

Great question. It was geographically correct more than bite-sized, but it was a comfortable size for us. It was the appropriate stretch. We really liked the culture—similar to ours. They have a strong ownership culture, with lots of stockholders that have been there a long time, and are very receptive to taking the next step along with us and growing with us. It's congruent with our strategy of growing our transportation practice. They have some great clients, including work for Florida DOT, which we do, and they own the design side with some really complimentary clients. As we started to do due diligence, we noted the way they've grown the organization was very professional—quick, accurate, and organized information provided to us. It was easy to plug in, and confirmed our expectations right within the first few days with a seven-figure traffic study deal we secured from one of our longstanding clients.

That's great. Maybe just the last one, and I'll turn it over. Considering this is a larger deal, I assume there's a little more integration to it. Do you take a step back here in the short term and focus on integration, or are you still targeting additional deals this year?

The deals will continue to come. We have built a very robust dedicated integration team. We’ve got strong integration bandwidth. While there’s a lot to integrate with McMahon, we’ve got the bandwidth, the team, and the machine built to continue to integrate. McMahon is not going to slow us down.

A couple quick questions. You've talked in the past about some end markets such as power infrastructure, mining, water, and renewables. Can you talk about the activity this quarter and the pipeline of work that you see on the horizon?

Yes, those are still the smaller parts of our business. We definitely saw good growth in renewables over the course of the quarter, a little bit of a decline in water resources, and strong activity in mining. But as a collective, they represent less than 5% of revenue today. According to our pipeline, they are a focus of M&A activity. I don't see anything in the short term that would significantly change their contribution to revenue.

I'll expand a little on what Bruce is saying. Our focus on renewables is strong; we've seen organic growth in that area. On the mining front, we're looking at several relatively smaller but meaningful acquisitions. Our paradigm is expanding on mining to include aggregates to serve the highway and infrastructure market as that market is really heating up due to the infrastructure bill.

Can you talk about inflation risk, particularly labor inflation, and how quickly you can react to that and pass that along to maintain your margin profile?

Yes, it's a great question, Alex. We are finding that our clients are expecting price increases as they are getting hit from all sides. They are not resistant to it; our team is learning to push that. The market seems receptive. So far, we are able to increase our pricing in response to the increasing costs of labor. We're optimistic about continuing to navigate through this, and we don't have meaningful contracts from the past that have rates that are out of the money on labor. We are in a somewhat real-time pricing environment for much of our work.

Today, we are fairly low leverage. The impacts of rising interest rates aren't currently consuming a lot of capital. As we grow, we expect debt will be a component of what we do, but we’re not looking to lock in a large amount of capital that we don't need immediately. Rate movements will simply be a cost of doing business for us, but we won't be highly leveraged to the extent that it poses a significant drag on our capital structure.

Just one more on cash flow—particularly solid this quarter. What are your thoughts on how that flows through the rest of the year?

Yes, I think we're reaching a stride there. Our operating cash flow is expected to be strong. We still consume cash for investment activity and may not generate cash from investments unless they turn to revenue. However, growth will generate cash, and our aim is to convert adjusted EBITDA into cash at a healthy rate moving forward.

There are no further questions at this time. Mr. Bowman, I turn the conference call back over to you.

Thank you, Candice. We'll wrap it up this morning. Thank you everybody for listening in. Thanks, Brent and Alex, for thoughtful questions. I appreciate everybody being on the call, and thanks to all the Bowman employees for their hard work, and to the investors for the trust they put in us. It's not misplaced; we're working hard to build value here. Good morning, everyone.

That now concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect your line. Have a great day.