Badger Infrastructure Solutions Ltd. ($BDGI)

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Badger Infrastructure Solutions First Quarter 2026 Results Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this event is being recorded May 1, 2026, and will be made available on the Investors section of Badger's website. I would now like to turn the call over to Anne Plasterer, Director of Investor Relations.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining me on the call this morning are Badger's President and CEO, Rob Blackadar; and our CFO, Rob Dawson. Badger's 2026 first quarter earnings release, MD&A and financial statements were released after market close Thursday, and are available on the Investors section of Badger's website and on SEDAR+. We are required to note that some of the statements made today may contain forward-looking information. In fact, all statements made today, which are not statements of historical fact are considered to be forward-looking statements. We make these forward-looking statements based on certain assumptions that we consider to be reasonable. However, forward-looking statements are always subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and undue reliance should not be placed on them as actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied. For more information about material assumptions, risks and uncertainties that may be relevant to such forward-looking statements, please refer to Badger's 2025 MD&A along with the 2025 AIF. I will now turn the call over to Rob Blackadar.

Thank you, Anne. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our 2026 first quarter earnings call. Before we get into the results, I'd like to take a moment to talk about safety, which is how we start all of our meetings here at Badger. With the scale of our fleet and the number of miles our teams travel every day, safe driving remains one of the most important ways we protect our people and the communities in which we work. We reinforce this through our just drive mindset, staying focused behind the wheel by eliminating distractions, adjusting for road conditions and taking the time to pause when conditions aren't right. These everyday decisions matter. That consistent focus on safe driving is embedded in our safety culture and supports the reliability and professionalisms our customers have come to expect from Badger. The company utilizes industry-leading telematics and AI technologies built into every one of our trucks to further enhance our commitment to safe driving. Our safety culture and solid safety performance record continues to allow Badger to bid and win projects across all of our end market industries, supporting our increasingly safety-focused broad customer base. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the entire Badger team for their continued dedication, safety focus and amazing customer service. The team's execution is the reason for Badger's continued success. Now on to the quarter results. The Badger team delivered another strong quarter of double-digit growth in revenue, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net earnings. Our first quarter revenue was a record performance of just over $203 million. This represents 18% of entirely organic growth over the prior year, driven by the team's strong commercial execution, capturing increased customer demand across Badger's core end markets. We met this demand through increased utilization, pricing and continued expansion in the fleet. Importantly, we continue to see this trend for the remainder of 2026, building positive momentum leading into the upcoming busy construction season. Notably, this growth is across all of our regions and broadly across all of our end markets. I will provide more detail and context on our broad and diverse end markets later in the call. Adjusted EBITDA grew 13% year-over-year to a record $38.1 million. We continue to invest in our team and branch network, positioning Badger to benefit from our competitive advantages in our most important strategic markets. We achieved RPT or revenue per truck per month of $39,000 in Q1, up 11% compared to last year. This improvement reflects the strength in fleet utilization and pricing efforts while steadily adding capacity to the hydrovac fleet. Badger ended the quarter with 1,778 hydrovacs, a 7% increase of the average fleet count from last year. Our Red Deer manufacturing plant delivered 78 hydrovacs this quarter versus 50 units in Q1 of last year, and we also retired 23 units in the quarter. We continue to see extraordinary demand and opportunities over the coming years. Accordingly, we have increased the build rate at our Red Deer plant to capture this demand and expect to grow our fleet at the upper end of the previously disclosed 270 to 310 truck build outlook for the year. Our fleet plan also includes refurbishing between 30 to 50 hydrovacs and retiring between 130 to 150 units. The scale of our existing fleet and our ability to control our own manufacturing plant allows Badger to capture continuous growing demand in 2026 and beyond. I'll now turn the call over to Rob Dawson to discuss the Q1 financial results in more detail.

Thanks, Rob. Our strong financial results in the first quarter reflect the strength of our business model and the continued discipline focus of our team. As Rob noted, revenue, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted earnings per share grew by double digits, demonstrating the ongoing execution of our road map of building scalability at every level of the operations. Strong performance was also driven by continued fleet investments to capitalize on increased demand across all of our regions. Our adjusted EBITDA improved to $38.1 million, an increase of 13% compared to 2025, while adjusted EBITDA margin was 18.7% compared to 19.6% in the prior year. As expected and as discussed in our Q4 release, as the rate of our growth has accelerated from the middle of 2025, continuing through to the first quarter of this year, we are making investments to position Badger for sustained long-term growth in both scale and profitability. These investments include adding new branches to capture end market growth and further densifying our presence in key markets, rolling out our Operational Excellence program to drive efficiencies across the company, the hiring and training of our field teams to support our increased truck build rate and recently, as disclosed last quarter, we are in the process of launching additional service lines. To provide more context, in aggregate, these investments impacted our first quarter adjusted EBITDA margins by about 100 to 120 basis points. Excluding these impacts, our Q1 adjusted EBITDA margin would have been approximately 19.8% versus the 19.6% in the prior year. We are very encouraged to see the underlying business continuing to show a trajectory of expansion. We view these investments as a core catalyst to reaching our 25% to 30% margin targets. Again, and as disclosed previously, while these investments are expected to impact gross margins in the near term, they will position Badger to capture growth opportunities as the year unfolds. General and administrative expenses were $11.8 million or 6% of revenue, in line with 6% of revenue in the prior year. The consistent expense as a percentage of revenue with the prior year reflects overall stability in our G&A functions. And finally, adjusted earnings per share was $0.22 per share compared to $0.19 last year. We continue to see our growth in revenue and adjusted EBITDA scaling to the bottom line. Turning to the balance sheet. We continue to maintain a disciplined approach to capital management, preserving financial strength while supporting strategic investments. Our compliance leverage ended the quarter at 1.5x EBITDA at the midpoint of our 1x to 2x targeted range. Looking ahead for the remainder of 2026, our intention is to continue returning capital to our shareholders through both the NCIB and dividends, all while remaining well within our 1.0 to 2.0 total debt to compliance EBITDA range. With ample balance sheet capacity, we have plenty of flexibility to continue investing in our organic growth strategy to support initial investments in new service lines and also to continue returning capital to our shareholders. During the first quarter, we repurchased and canceled 47,373 common shares under the NCIB at a weighted average price per share of CAD 63.27. I will now turn the call back over to Rob Blackadar for some final comments. Rob?

Thanks, Rob. So before we open it up for questions, I'd like to share some comments regarding our outlook. Customer activity remains very robust, supported by sustained infrastructure investments across all of North America and the increasing need for safe, precise hydrovac solutions continues to grow. Badger's competitive moat positions us well in this current and future environment. Our industry-leading footprint, purpose-built fleet by our own vertically integrated manufacturing plant and highly trained workforce allows us to serve customers consistently across our broad geographic base. Scale is the key differentiator. Our ability to continuously deploy equipment and crews efficiently, supporting large national and local customers, delivering safe, reliable service continues to differentiate Badger from all our other competitors in the market. At the same time, we've been very deliberate in strengthening our operating platform to capture and retain customer demand. Investments in our team, fleet capacity, branch network and systems are improving utilization and responsiveness across the organization. Our established pricing discipline and focus on execution allows Badger to balance growth and profitability. Looking forward, we continue to see long-term infrastructure spending as a meaningful tailwind for the business. Some of these long-term projects that we are currently working on include infrastructure-related projects such as airports, heavy highway projects, wastewater treatment plants, power generation and transmission projects across all of our regions, industrial manufacturing plants, including chip manufacturing, pharmaceutical, metal and steel facilities, LNG facilities and oil refining facilities and data centers and mission-critical facilities. Badger plays an important role in all of these projects by helping customers work safely around critical underground infrastructure, reducing risk and improving their productivity. While we remain attentive to evolving macro conditions, we are confident in our business model, balance sheet and the ability to execute. We remain focused on disciplined capital allocation, investing for long-term value creation and maintaining our strong safety culture and operational discipline. Finally, I want to remind everyone that we have our Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders today at noon Eastern, 10 a.m. Mountain Time. For information, please visit our Investor Relations page at ir.badgerinc.com. So with those comments, let's turn the call back to the operator so we can take questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] And with that, we will start with Ian Gillies from Stifel.

Just wanted to start on the margin side. Given the demand profile you're seeing measured against some of the investments you're putting in this year, do you think it's a base case or a stretch goal to get within to that 25% to 30% margin range this year that was previously provided at your Investor Day?

Ian, it's Rob Dawson here. On a trailing 12-month basis, we're still 100 basis points out of that range. I would expect it would be a base case to be in that range by next year. But I think on a trend basis, we would expect to be heading towards that in the second half of this year.

Understood. Maybe as you think about your customers, demand is obviously ramping up quickly. Can you maybe just share some thoughts around how they're treating, I guess, renting hydrovacs versus buying them internally, how that kind of toggle is playing out right now, just given how well things seem to be going and utilization is ramping?

Ian, I'll take that one. This is Rob Blackadar. We continue to see the end market demand and the projects being bid for the next several years to be -- and I shared this during the Q4 release in March that like something we've never seen before. And because of all that demand, there's just not a lot of excess hydrovacs that are in rental fleets and available nor are there a lot of excess trucks just available for customers to purchase. So we really, really enjoy our positioning where we are being the largest hydrovac service provider in the industry. We do believe customers have a lot of options. Some of our larger customers certainly own their own hydrovacs, and they use Badger in that same concept of when theirs are tied up or in a different area of the country or they need additional units for their projects, they're calling Badger, and we really do enjoy that relationship. But we do not look at a customer who wants to buy their own hydrovacs. If they're going to keep them busier than that 75% utilization, sometimes it makes sense for them to own their own hydrovac, and we actually communicate that to our customers. And then if they're going to use it -- keep it less than 75% utilized, many times it makes sense just to contract with a Badger or another hydrovac services provider. And it's our goal that when a customer makes that decision, we want them to be calling Badger. So hopefully, that gives you some color there, Ian.

Our next caller is Tim James from TD Cowen.

Just wondering the indication of the impact from the investments in expenses that you laid out earlier in the call just to kind of drive and facilitate future growth. You mentioned it was 100 to 120 basis points of impact in the quarter. Is it possible to give us a bit of a sense approximately how much of that related to direct costs versus G&A?

All of that, I would say, Tim, relates to not only just direct costs, but if you think about opening new service lines and opening new branches, there is revenue as well. So it's a revenue, direct and indirect costs that go into our gross margins and the relative impact of all of that. Operational Excellence at this point is still mainly an investment, and so it's a cost, but it's a combination of both of those. But we're not including general and administrative expenses when we're making that statement.

Okay. That's helpful. And then just you called out a number of industries that are driving growth or demand is very strong currently. I'm just wondering if there's any of those that you would point to as being particularly strong, maybe standouts from the rest, if there's 2 or 3? Or is it really if we kind of look across the board, they're all sort of equally responsible for driving the growth?

I apologize, I missed the very front part of what you're saying, Tim, the phone crackled. Can you repeat the front part of what you were saying?

Yes, Rob, I was just wondering if you could -- if -- of those industries that you called out as driving the growth, if there's any kind of 2 or 3 that are particularly notable in driving the strength? Or is it really that broad-based where they're all kind of equally responsible for the growth that you're seeing?

So the way I would frame it up, Tim, to give you the perspective of the dynamics we're seeing because a lot of people as of late have been asking us, I'd say, for the last couple of quarters about the data centers and all the stuff about AI and data centers, et cetera. But actually, it is nonresidential commercial construction, a tremendous amount of utility, both construction and maintenance and utility build-out. That's kind of our core base business, and that's where Badger has been the industry leader for many, many years. And what has happened or happening is some of the data center build-out that's happening in the marketplace is taking any excess capacity, not just from Badger or the hydrovac business, but you're hearing the same thing in the rental industry. You're hearing the same thing for some of the construction equipment manufacturers, a lot of the service providers, and I'm not going to name them on our call, but anyone who works in any kind of -- in our space in any capacity, the data centers have basically taken all the excess air out of the room. And so that's what has a lot of demand and will have that long tail demand for the next 3 to 5 years. But that's what's driving the overall -- like the core -- our core business is really, really strong. And then if you layer on the data center on top of that, it's like the cherry on top, it just continues to take any kind of excess capacity and keeps all of these businesses very, very busy and especially us being a service business supporting all those industries, that's where we're seeing all this demand.

Okay. That's great. That's really helpful. One more, if I could just sneak it in actually returning to my previous comment just about the 100 to 120 basis points of impact. When would you expect that to reach sort of a 0 impact? And not to say there is another obviously, opportunities for margin expansion. But this initiative that you've called out now, is it kind of first quarter of '27 when this goes to 0 or even in the second half of the year, should these impacts be kind of reduced to an immaterial weight on margin?

Tim, it's Rob Dawson. I can take that one. If you exclude the impact of our investment in the new business lines because you can imagine we won't get to a solid run rate on those within 4 short quarters. So we always plan -- assuming they're successful, we'll be investing in those continually over the next several years, and there will always be some element of margin dilution, I suspect, as a result of that. But the others, I think you're right. I think our rate of growth versus just how much we are growing year-on-year, so the acceleration of that growth it was 10%, 11%, 12% in Q2, Q3, Q4 last year, now it's 17%, 18%. That rate of growth is not going to continue to accelerate in our opinion. And so as we head into a steady velocity, a lot of these investments are going to start to level out and the impact of them on our margins will dissipate. So I think that's a pretty good safe advantage that by the end of this year and into next year, we'll start to see very good comps and a return to good growth, that S-curve on our investments will start to hit.

Our next question comes from Yuri Lynk at Canaccord Genuity.

Just wondering on the -- circling back on the 2027 financial targets. I have a 2-part question on RPT. Is $42,750, would that be then the equivalent target as stated under your new reporting structure? And if so, how do you think about RPT over the balance of this year and into next year in the context of record fleet additions?

Yuri, it's Rob Dawson here. I think you're right. It's roughly 90% to 95% of that mixed currency target that we used to go to. So if you just apply that factor to it, you get to roughly what the U.S. dollar amount is. A lot of the increase we've seen in the last year in RPT is actually region mix, higher growth rates in areas that have very high prices, but also are perhaps union or in higher cost markets. So they're not necessarily union or margin accretive, but they are price accretive. So there is an element to that in that RPT, and it's a little bit harder to forecast. But for the remainder of the year, we continue to be very optimistic about our pricing initiatives. And we're targeting to get pricing to at least and perhaps exceed somewhat the impact of inflation. And so we see some RPT growth there. You are correct, though, with record additions to the fleet, our expectation that yield -- or utilization will continue to grow is probably a bit more muted. So as we've been saying consistently, I think, for the last few quarters, our expectation for RPT growth, notwithstanding what you saw in Q1 here is that it will continue to be moderated as a result of that, but still remain very high. And I would point out that at current rates of RPT with no further growth in it, we're achieving very good returns on capital and after-tax IRRs. So we're very comfortable continuing to invest even with no further growth in RPT, but we do continue to see RPT growing, if that makes sense.

Yes. Well, that's why I was asking the question. I mean, on a trailing basis, you're pretty well at that target. And so it sounds like you wouldn't be surprised if you exceeded that target by a little bit, if I'm hearing you.

Wouldn't be surprised at all. Yes. I'd say inflation has probably exceeded our initial targets as well and RPT has moved with that, if you think about it. And that's probably the main reason why our margin expansion is still right on plan even if our RPT is a little ahead of plan.

Got it. Just switching to data center work. If you want to update us on the proportion of your revenue from that market, that would be appreciated. But apart from that, more interestingly, can you kind of describe the nature of that work? Like some of these projects are so massive that like are you sending trucks to a data center construction site and parking them there for months, i.e., getting above-average utilization on these things? Or are they just bringing you on site when you need to be and it's not any different from some of your other end markets in terms of utilization and volume?

Yuri, it's one of the most interesting dynamics. We've certainly had other large projects historically here at the company. And I'm coming up on my 5-year anniversary. And certainly, earlier on in my 5 years, we would have a large project or 2 or -- and we'd have interesting dynamics. But the way we're covering these now is -- and it's just as you're suggesting, they are beyond just like a large project. It's more of like a mega project, and they're happening in multiple states, multiple contractors. There are a few dominant GCs or general contractors that are doing a fair amount of them, but there are some other one-off contractors doing the work. But what happens is we will get asked early on in the project to bring out a handful of trucks. And we gladly and happily take support and take care of our customers on those projects. They then watch what we can do and the effectiveness of how efficiently we can move on those projects and start moving dirt around their utilities that they're starting to stub in. And then as they start to get closer to the foundations being built and then the foundations, they start ordering more and more trucks. And then there becomes a tipping point for Badger. I don't want to give -- I don't mind sharing a little bit, but I'm not going to give you all of our secret sauce because we know competitors listen to the calls here. But at some point, once you get beyond about 10, 12 trucks, you start to park the trucks there. And most of the GCs realize the value of having a hydrovac services company such as Badger that can support all the trucks they need on these projects. We will then have a location very similar to they have laydown yards for rental yards inside of many of the data center projects that are now giving Badger some opportunities to park trucks there, more efficient for the customer, more efficient for Badger and allows us, just as you're suggesting, to continuously keep the utilization high on those trucks. It also allows us to sit down with the customers and show greater efficiency. As I said to Ian's question earlier, there is really strong demand and will be for the next few years for hydrovacs. And so because of that, we want to show our customers as much efficiency. So by us having them parked on those projects and working directly either with the GCs or some of the key subcontractors out there, we're then able to keep our trucks more efficient, and we will advise a customer if 1 or 2 of our trucks is not being utilized as much because we could repurpose those trucks on a different project. But the one thing that's very interesting about Badger's positioning, especially in the next few years, there's no one who has the fleet size and scale and scope that we have. And so for a data center project to say, I want to take 20, 30, 50 trucks, and they do use them -- many of them for multiple months. And so far, we've had a few because it's a relatively new phenomena that have gone over a year, and we expect more to go over a year. It's a pretty interesting phenomenon. You asked kind of -- and we've shared the last couple of quarters because we've got a lot of questions about how much of our business are we really putting into the data centers. And Rob and I were actually looking up historically how we've grown to where we are. We started off and it was in that 5% to 6% range about a year ago. And gradually, as last year went along, it -- we had moved that to that 7% to 8%. And then I think it was last quarter, it was that 8% to 10%. And we're right at that 10%, 11%. And as I shared before, and I'll continue to share it, our goal is not -- we could easily put many, many more trucks on all these data centers, but we don't want to abandon all of our local customers and local markets. And so for us, we like our positioning being in the upper single digits, low double-digit range, and that's working for us right now. So that's where we are. And we -- as I was suggesting to a previous question, it really is taking up a lot of the excess kind of air in the room regarding utilization and capacity. So it's a very interesting dynamic these days. If you want to add?

I would add one thing. And your question was specifically about how a data center project would work. But that approach that Rob was talking about of going upstream to the -- like the head general contractor and/or just the one down, the large subs and being in front of the project when the project is being planned for, that works for all major projects. So we're seeing that across all of our verticals. And as Rob said, on an LNG plant, on a new refinery, on a large arena job, you can insert large project here, we're the only company that would be able to provide all of the hydrovac for that project over its life, and we can demonstrate how that can be an efficient cost-saving matter for them to do in a coordinated way rather than down into all the deep subs. But we can also have trucks available in our local markets and do both hand. So that's really our competitive advantage in that regard.

Our next questioner is from Krista Friesen, CIBC.

Maybe just to follow on some of the comments that you just made, some of these projects sound like they're a little bit longer term. Are you able to discuss what sort of visibility you have or kind of give something comparable to a backlog number?

Yes. So Krista, you are speaking my language. We have been in my -- like I said, coming up on 5-year anniversary here shortly, we've been contemplating how we would view backlogs. And if you remember when -- I think I mentioned early on in my tenure, Krista, a lot of our business was being figured out this concept of a day before, a few days before, maybe a week before, and it was very transactional and you just -- it was really hard to forecast revenue. As we start to work on these larger projects, we now are starting to see the concept of a backlog, but we still have, I would say, at least half our business that is more still not day-to-day, but a few days out to a few weeks out, it's not as last minute as it had been historically. I don't know if we're ever going to get to a true backlog such as some of the larger general contractors are able to report that backlog. The one thing, though, that we are starting to zero in on, and there's more to come on this. I would love to give you the scoop, Krista, but it's not quite fully baked yet. But we're starting to look at all of the business in a lot of the project reporting services such as Dodge and PEC and IIR. We're starting to look at what percentage excavation makes up of those projects and then what percentage comes hydrovac and then what percentage does Badger have as a market share. And in a weird way, we're backing into revenue forecasting that way. And it's actually starting to work, but it's pretty rudimentary at this stage, but we believe possibly by the end of this year, beginning of next, we actually will be able to start sharing not just the amount of total addressable market because we're seeing some of the GCs and the large utility services contractors talk about their total addressable markets and how they are viewing those. And we believe Badger is going to be able to give a lot more clarity and that would probably give you -- it may not be a full backlog such as some of the GCs report, Krista, but it will give you a lot more clarity going forward. So anyway, it's a very good news story. We're getting closer and closer, and there's more to come on that. But I think you'll start to see that later in the year or beginning of next.

Yes, that would certainly be great. And maybe just on a separate note, you're guiding to the top end of the build range. Any concerns or worries around the supply chain and being able to source everything you need there?

No, we have not had a problem at all. And even as we have increased the truck build range, not the range, but the guidance that we're giving out that we're moving to the higher end, all of our truck chassis manufacturers and all the suppliers for all the tool in the back, the hydrovac tool in the back have been able to keep up with us. And -- but we do, do a tremendous amount of communication with our suppliers. They have weekly meetings just to make sure they know what we're looking at, what we're thinking and how we are pushing for more and more growth on our manufacturing. And so far, we've had really good support from our manufacturers, and we anticipate that continuing.

And our next question is from Roman at National Bank Capital.

I'm sorry, can you hear me? Yes, I had a quick question in terms of RPT. Obviously, it accelerated to 11% from previous 8%. Is it possible to get a bit more color in relation to pricing versus utilization, just sort of directionally speaking for the metric?

Yes. So what we're seeing is -- if you remember, RPT is an amalgamation of utilization pricing and the truck volume, the number of trucks we have in the fleet and growing into the fleet. We're seeing that the larger driver of the 3 so far has been our utilization. And we saw, as Rob was suggesting in his commentary, solid pricing. And as he suggested, at a minimum, we focus on we're at least keeping up with inflation, and we think there's actually some upside above that. We're not really expanding beyond that at this moment because, again, for competitive reasons. But the main driver of that has been utilization. We think it will continue to be. And keep in mind, though, as we have increased that truck build guidance for -- and we said that we're going to be going to the higher end of the range, that will also start to see some RPT opportunity on the actual truck volume componentry. And you got to remember, Roman, one last thing to just keep in mind, the RPT and pricing and everything, we're coming -- and we're just reported and coming off of our Q1, which is our most seasonally slow quarter. especially as it relates to pricing. So we think the team in the field very, very focused on making sure that we're pricing for the projects we're working on correctly and giving a very fair price for a very high level and good level of service and everything we offer to the customers. So -- but yes, as Rob suggested, there is some opportunity in RPT, and we'll see how that continues to play out in the back half of the year.

Okay. That's super helpful. And then just a broad question around free cash flow. I mean, obviously, right now, you're sort of in this build cycle because there's so much opportunity available. But how should we think about this maybe when it comes to like medium-term objectives? And any parameters you could provide that would be super helpful.

I'm sorry, Roman, I missed the very first front of that with a little shakiness in the feed again. Can you repeat the first part of that question?

Yes. See, I'm just referring to how should we be thinking about a free cash flow inflection trajectory as right now, obviously, you're in a build cycle. But I guess when should we expect free cash to come in?

I think just on a look back, we increased our discretionary free cash flow. If you were to split our growth CapEx in units versus retirement CapEx units, we're generating significant discretionary free cash flow and have increased that number by about 150% over the last 5 years. So we do generate a significant amount of discretionary free cash flow. In 2025, our all-in free cash flow is about flat. So we were able to fully fund the organic growth that we delivered last year within the funds generated by the business. This year, with this increase in the pace of growth and the investments we're making in new service lines, we are leaning back on the balance sheet, and we intend to be that to be the case, certainly for all of 2027. If the market conditions that exist today continue for the next 2 or 3 years, it might be a few years before we get to all-in net free cash flow. But as we've always mentioned, I would always -- with the balance sheet capacity we have and the strength in our balance sheet, we have more than enough capacity to make these investments. And the returns we're getting on these organic investments, particularly at the level of risk you get for an organic investment in a market we already occupy relative to, say, mergers and acquisitions or moving into new geographies or new regions. We're very focused on ensuring we can capture that growth and think we have the balance sheet and the capacity and capital to continue doing so.

Okay. Super helpful...

All the free cash flow is secondary, we think, to the growth and the opportunities we have right now.

And our last questioner is Trevor Reynolds from Acumen Capital.

Just a couple of quick ones. I think most have been answered. But the tariff, you did kind of highlight what the impact was in the quarter. Is that in line with kind of the guidance that you provided for the year in terms of expectations?

Trevor, it's Rob Dawson here. Yes, the range that we provided on tariffs, what we're experiencing on the ground for tariffs is in that range for sure. I would expect the tariffs currently to be in that $70,000 per truck range at the moment. We think there's opportunities as we get better reporting and accuracy on our U.S. content for things in addition to just the chassis, we could start to get that a little lower. But right now, I think it's fair to say about $70,000 a unit is a fair guess. Our range had us paying quite a bit more than that, but we're in the midpoint of that range, I'd say.

Okay. Great. And then just remind me on the fuel costs, is that pass-through pretty immediate under your new structure? Like is there much of a lag there?

We had already set up during COVID and at the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, a fully reflexive billing process to capture fuel surcharge changes in the moment. So we haven't skipped a beat in any instance that's occurred in the more recent case here. So yes, the answer is yes. There's been flow-through, and it's happened immediately.

Great. And then just last one. Obviously, Canada, not as big a piece of the puzzle as it used to be, but major projects being contemplated? Are you guys at the table in Canada as well? And how do you guys kind of see that playing out over the next few years in Canada?

Yes. Trevor, this is Rob Blackadar. Yes. So we have watched Canada, I'd say, in third and fourth quarter of last year and certainly into Q1 this year. We have been very pleased with the activity we're seeing starting to open up in Canada regarding some of our end markets and what we're covering. All of the projects that are being released, both the government and then some of the military work as well as very, very encouraged by some private investment happening in Canada. We are watching our Canadian business really revitalize for the last, I'd say, 6 to 9 months. And the prospects going forward for the next couple of years, as you're suggesting, look very, very solid. And if you follow any of the Canadian contractors, very similar, a lot of the projects that they're working on, we actually work for many of them. And so as they're seeing some uptick and uplift, we're obviously the beneficiaries of that as well. And we really enjoy the relationships we have with a lot of those large contractors, and we really enjoy supporting those guys. So anyway, very encouraged by what we're seeing in Canada as well, Trevor.

And that appears to have been the last question. So I will turn it back over to you, Rob Blackadar.

Thank you, operator. So on behalf of all of us here at Badger, we want to thank our customers, employees, suppliers and shareholders for your ongoing support that drives Badger's success. Operator, you may now end the call. Thank you.

Thank you. This concludes today's event. Thank you for your time and participation today.