Sterling Infrastructure, Inc. (STRL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Equity research team. This is the first day of the 43rd Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference. We're pleased to be hosting a 30-minute presentation from the management team of Sterling infrastructure. Joining me today are CEO, Joseph Cutillo; and CFO, Ronald Ballschmiede; and Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy, Noelle Dilts, who recently just joined the company. Following the presentation, there will be a breakout session in Burnham B. Thanks, Joseph, Ronald and Noel. Joe, take it away.

Thanks, [ Lee ]. And thanks, everybody, for coming. We got a good crowd, that's great. Today, we want to take a little bit of time and talk a little bit about the sterling history, the transformation we've recently gone through over the last several years. What that means in a current state and what that means for our future growth, as Lee said, I'm Joe Cutillo, I'm the CEO; Ron Ballschmiede, CFO. Both Ron and I joined the company in late 2015. And the business at the time was in -- 95% of the business-or-so was low bid heavy highway very focused, very concentrated, very high risk, very low margins and grossly underperforming. So we were brought in to turn the business around and build out a strategy to transform the company into an infrastructure service provider long term. So today, what I want to make sure that we have these takeaways and as you think about why you would invest in Sterling is we'll talk about the success of the transformation the secular growth drivers that we have between data centers, infrastructure bills and the recent activities on onshoring, which has come much faster and much stronger than, frankly, we anticipated, which is a nice thing. The opportunity we have to continue to further expand our margins as we go forward with the combination of our portfolio we have in place and some other things that we're working on. The strong balance sheet that we've had and the cash flow that this business now generates and the stock price performance that we've seen over the last several years has been very good, and as I say, we've earned it the old-fashioned way. We've kind of driven earnings to drive stock price. But we still have the big opportunity in front of us, which is the accretion of multiple. We just have not seen that kick in at this point in time yet. So as we go forward, talking about where we started with the company to go into the transformation. We've had 3 elements of our strategy since the beginning. These remain the same and will continue to remain the same as we go forward. And the first thing that we had to do is come in and what we call solidify the base. And that was turn around the base business, get it back on track, put the processes, procedures and disciplines in place so that we reduced our risk, improved our margins and started generating strong cash flow that we can invest in the transformation of the business as we went further. The second piece was focusing on growing the high-margin products that we had and expanding those across the country. And then the last piece of the strategy is around expansion into adjacent markets. And that's what's really led the biggest elements of the transformation. In 2017, we started the first step of the transformation. We acquired a business out of Dallas Tealstone. Tealstone does residential slabs at the time, was only based in Dallas. Very strong relationships with the top 3 builders. Our biggest customers are D.R. Horton, [Indiscernible], all public companies. And one of the things that we found when we talked to them early on in the process and doing our diligence was the value proposition they saw of a larger company owning assets in this space, being able to bring a one-stop shop or a broader solution to them in multiple markets. As you can imagine, they have hundreds and maybe thousands of suppliers and a lot of these suppliers are smaller in structure and skill sets and having a, I call it, a real company providing those goods and services has enabled us to expand in other markets, we'll talk about further in the presentation. In 2019, we expanded into our e infrastructure segment that we have today with our first acquisition of Plateau. Plateau site development and site selection with major blue-chip customers, Facebook, Amazon, Walmart, et cetera. We not only do the site development, but we work upstream with those customers in that site selection and help them through the process. We'll talk more details about that. At the end of '21, we added Petillo to the e-infrastructure portfolio. Petillo site development through the Northeast. So we have union abilities up through the Northeast and nonunion abilities down to the Southeast. So we can cover the entire East Coast in plus or minus a couple of states. And the last piece of the transformation in the end of last year we divested a nonstrategic asset, which was a transportation business in California. One of the things that we found in doing the turnaround and looking at our margin profile is we had several nonstrategic businesses. Myers being one of them. So we divested that. Use those proceeds to actually make an acquisition in our Building Solutions segment that we'll talk about in more detail. So as a result, at 50,000 feet, what we've accomplished through the transformation is we've significantly reduced the risk company. A lot of people, when they think of infrastructure businesses or think of heavy civil businesses, there's very, very high risk in a lot of these projects, especially in the transportation space. A good percentage of those businesses are what we call low-bid fixed price, very, very high variability on the profile, the risk are not well designed from the beginning and you assume all of that. So we've -- we'll talk in detail on the segments of how each one works. We've improved bottom line growth significantly. One of the things we never talk about is we don't talk about revenue. We don't care about revenue. That sounds strange, but we don't care about revenue. We care about profitability and cash flow. Now the good news is our revenue has grown at about 15% compounded annual growth rate, so it's not real bad for not caring about revenue. But our bottom line has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of about 65%. That's what's important to us. That's how do we get a better return on every dollar we bring in, created a tremendous amount of shareholder value. Stock was -- our first equity raise was at $4 a share in 2016. Today, we got $51 a share. So we've had a nice little run on the stock. Again, our opportunity is not only the continued growth on the bottom line, but this multiple accretion that's sitting out there. And we've built a really nice platform for future growth. Not only within the segments we have, but we now have a platform that we'll look at adding incremental segments as we go forward in the future. So the 3 segments we have today are infrastructure which is a little over half of our total revenue. Transportation Solutions, which is about 1/3 of our revenue. And the last one is Building Solutions. So in e infrastructure, again, what we do is site development and site selection. So as an example, it's not uncommon for one of our top customers to come to us and say, we're looking at expanding north of Atlanta as an example, okay? And there's 4 properties or 3 properties that have enough acreage that we could put a sight on. And they're physically located, close enough to a major highway. The one thing that is different in every one of these projects is the site time, the site development, the time and the costs associated with it. If you're Amazon or you are Facebook, you've built hundreds of these warehouses or hundreds of these data centers. They know down to the penny, how many screws are in that, how many shelves are in that, what the robotics needs are. All of that is very, very repeatable for them. The one piece, they have no idea what it's going to be, and how much it's going to cost and how long it's going to take is the site development side. So we will work with them, go to the sites and come back and say, site A is going to cost $80 million to develop to the point you can put a slab on it, and it's going to take 6 months, okay? We commit to them. Site B is going to cost you $30 million, but it's going to take 2 years, and they'll say, why is it less than take 2 years? Well, you got to get special permits for water. There could be wet lands on it. Who knows what it is, right? There's different scenarios. And sites too have some scenario with it. And they'll come back and say, "Okay, we want to do site A, you said 6 months, $80 million." Yes. So they go now to the general contractor that's doing the total bill and they hand the general contractor, the terms and say on June 1, Sterling is going to start. They have 6 months and $80 million, whatever that price is to complete the project. So now we work for the general contractor, okay? We've built relationships. We are, at the end of the day, an insurance policy for these buildings, for these projects. So this will be a multi-billion dollar project, of which were $80 million. But if we're one week late on completion, this project will finish 6 months late. Just with the snowball effect that the trades and everything else that goes down. So our customers are buying an insurance policy, which is us because we've never missed a date on completing a project. We've got more horsepower than anybody on the East Coast to do these sorts of projects, and that's the value proposition that we have for them. The end markets are -- historically have been data centers, e-commerce distribution centers and then what I'll call general warehousing and we'll do a stadium, one-off projects, hospital, those sort of things. Over the last year, we've had the emergence of the taking on of onshoring and the rebirth of manufacturing. To put it in perspective, not only have these projects come faster than we ever anticipated but they are significantly larger than any of the historical projects. And what's great about this business, unlike the transportation or highway business, larger projects are not riskier. They're actually higher margin and have higher opportunities for future growth and upside with them. So the larger projects are more important to us than whether it's a data center, a manufacturing facility or a warehouse. That's irrelevant to us. okay? Our end customers -- biggest customers are Meta, Amazon, the Walmarts of the world, et cetera, et cetera. And again, our biggest advantage for this is just our share horsepower. To put it in perspective, we just recently announced a Hyundai SK Battery Plant in Georgia. This site is 400 acres. We will move the equivalent of 5 Mount Everest efforts in less than 12 months at this site. You go out there today, we have 200 pieces of the biggest Caterpillar equipment they make, and it's a symphony of yellow iron that is coordinated down to the second of what we put in a load and when a truck crosses another truck. It's unbelievable, but logistics that goes into the sort of site development with the move that sort of thing is what it is. There's nobody else that can do that job. There's one other battery plant going on right now in Georgia to put it in perspective, it takes 3 other contractors to do that work. And that job is probably half the size of the one that we're doing. So that's the competitive advantage we have as we go through. If we look at kind of the overview and the financials, we've seen very strong organic growth. We've seen 25% growth year-over-year, again, organically. We told investors coming into this year that we thought the real growth rates on a go-forward are 10% to 11%. We were wrong. We came out and grew 20% in the first quarter. And right now, with the jobs that we have in place and the jobs that we see coming out, we'll continue that trend as we go forward. So we'd like to keep the 25% to 30% in the next 3 to 5 years, but it's a big number organically every year for us. We think long term, this is still a 10% to 11% macro growth market for us, but we'll take full advantage of all the onshoring and all these big facilities coming out as long as we can. The margins in this segment, the great thing is this is our fastest, highest growing segment. It's also our highest margin segment. So as we talk about the profitability and margin accretion of the company as we move forward, one of the really nice advantages we have is our 2 fastest-growing segments, our 2 highest margin segments. So as we go into the future, we get a natural margin accretion just through the portfolio balance takes place, right, on top of some other activities that we have. As we went into COVID, we did see margin impact hit us due to the combination of inflation and more detrimental to us were supply chain issues. So in real simple terms, the first thing you do when you develop the site is you put in all the underground infrastructure because you're just ripping stuff on, right? And you don't care that it's smooth or whatever. Well, when pipe goes from a 5-day lead time 1 week lead time to 6 months, and we have to start the project, you end up putting the pipe in last. So you do all of the work, it's finished. You send everybody to the next job. And then when the pipe shows up, you ship the equipment back out, you rip everything up you did. You put the pipe in the ground, and you smooth it out again, right? So it's terrible. It's like you would never do a job that way. But unfortunately, with the supply chain, we've been forced to do those sort of things. So we've lost about 2 full points of margin as a result of the supply chain disruption. We've seen some of that come back is from availability. We think as we go through the rest of 2023, we'll take that margin up throughout the year and be back on track. The other element of margin decrease of about 2 points is a permanent decrease and that is the addition of the Petillo business up in the Northeast. They do more than site development. So on a site development, moving dirt basis, the margins are fundamentally the same. Because of a union shop, a lot of our customers up there at less unions on the job site. So they ask us to do more activities. So beyond just the site development, we'll do curbs and gutters, flat work on concrete sound walls. Historically, we've stayed away from that work just because it's a lower margin, but they require it. So that's about 2 points larger in total that will stay depressed from the normal levels. Backlogs are strong. We're record backlogs. We're seeing kind of the 2- and 3-year plans of the data center world, the e-commerce distribution world and now between the electric vehicles, the electric batteries. We're seeing that activity coming on. So not only do we have the strongest backlog in our history, we think that's going to maintain and only grow as we go through 2023. The thing we haven't seen at this point in time is that anything from the chips act in our geography, those facilities haven't started yet. We think we'll see something in and into '24 and into '25 along with some other activities. So we got some really nice tailwinds today on the manufacturing front. So as we look forward, manufacturing is going to remain very positive. Data centers, we've seen -- we're actually -- we're a little perplexed because we keep hearing that the data center market is declining. And all we're seeing is more data centers and more activity, and so we can't put it together, but I can tell you it's growth from our perspective. And then distribution centers, everybody has talked about Amazon pulling back, they did, pull back lot in '23, and they'll stay low in '24. We immediately filled that void with other customers that we just didn't do work for in the patent, right? So it's a pretty easy fill. Amazon, everything we see and everything we're being told as their program kicks back off in '25, and they're going to be running hard in '25. So when we look out the next 3 years, we feel very, very good and very confident in what's going on in this segment. Transportation. So transportation in 2015, as we said, it was 95% low-bid heavy highway. Today, we've diversified transportation into still highway business, but we've gone from low bid to alternative delivery type applications. So remember, we're at 95%. Today, less than 15% of our business is low bid heavy highway, big shift in risk in margins. The alternative delivery does 2 things. Margin profiles are low double digits, where historically, that business was mid-single digits for heavy highway business. But we are involved in the design, in the development of the project upfront. So we control our destiny with partners as part of the project team to put together the best team to do the best work. The margins are better, the risks are lower. We diversified into aviation. So historically, when we came to the company and we looked at the last -- the first thing we did is we looked at the last 5 years of jobs, every job, every type, every customer every bid type, all the data. And we found that because we're concerned, is there anywhere that the company made money, if you can [Indiscernible]? And there were some areas that they made, not only money, but a lot more margin. In aviation, we generally make about 1.5x what we make on highway. So we -- this is really simple. Let's do more aviation, runway or highway, doesn't matter to us. Let's do more of it. So we put a concerted effort. We've grown that business significantly. We saw a slight dip in the first quarter of this year just because there's been a lag in infrastructure spending in the aviation piece versus the highway the infrastructure bill pushed the highway money out first, but we saw a tremendous design activity in the fourth and first quarter. We're seeing strong bid activity in the second and third quarter. So our Aviation business backlog will pick up significantly here as we move forward. And the last piece is around rail and then we have some specialty items. We cover -- our main focus is the Rocky Mountains, Nevada, Hawaii. We do some work still in Texas, but that's one of the businesses that is not strategic for us from a standpoint, Texas has a big highway market, one of the biggest in the country, 1 or 2, depending on how you look at it. But it's highly competitive. It's predominantly low bid, very low margins, very high risk. So we've shrunk that business from a little over $300 million. That business is about $75 million today. And the majority of that business is moving away from heavy highway DOT to aviation, along with some other specialty work that we're doing there. Competitive advantages that we have in transportation is really around our Rocky Mountain business is they are bridge builders. That's -- they are one of the best bridge builders West in the Mississippi. We like the team up with other players that will do paving or do heavy dirt work out there, let them do those stuff, then we stick to our core competencies. We look at that market. That market is the strongest it's been since we've been here and probably the strongest it's ever been. The last infrastructure package started to kick in the second quarter of last year at the end of second quarter and continues to be strong. The next outlook the next 24 to 36 months bid activities could be very strong there. If you look at the financials of transportation, we grow that business at about 3% to 5%. The market is growing faster than that. Our philosophy is cherry pick the best jobs grow low and continue to drive margin. We think we still have 200 basis points of margin to pick up in this business as we move forward. And again, we're now in the low double digits there. So we've taken a business that was a losing proposition, very high risk. We turned it into a cash cow. We work 100% off customers' money to generate cash to put into other businesses. And if you compare it today to any of the other players in this space, our margins are significantly better than theirs overall. So it's turned into a nice add to us instead of a detriment as we move forward. We have outlook. Is that where we're at? Sure. I'm looking at the right slide here, sorry. We continue to see margins increase in -- not only in transportation, but across the board. One of the things that's really important to us is not just margins and backlog, how we execute to those margins in backlog. It's really easy to tell everybody your backlog is growing. It always scares me when I hear companies go, we grew our backlog 42% and everybody is excited like, is it going to produce any profit at the end of the day? Or is it just going to grow your backlog. We measure every project, as you can imagine, to what it was bid at to what it finishes at, and we consistently finish about 0.5 point, sometimes to a point above our bid margins. So as our margins are going up in backlog, we feel very confident our overall margins are going to follow and have consistently actually beat those particular numbers. There's a lot of lies poker going on out there where people say they got all this money in backlog, but they really -- they don't. Building Solutions. So what we do there, this is the most simplistic business we have, the least complicated, but probably one of the greatest businesses. It's various we do slabs. That's it. These are $30,000 a piece. We do a lot of them, right? We do a lot of very high turns. We have a model that's fundamentally different than everybody else. First of all, if we go to build their X or build Y. And they would like us to do their slabs, we do 100% of the development or we do not. That's a rule 1. Rule 2 is the way we do them is with what we call almost a reverse assembly line. So if you think of an assembly line for a car, you move a car down, people are expert at 1 skill and they do that. It's kind of hard to do with the house, right? But what we do is the opposite is at 8:00 in the morning, if we're on site A, team comes in, does final grade. They're done at 10:00, 11:00 whenever they finish. They move on lot down. and they do final grade, and they keep moving down. And we have time lapse videos on these developments. And in 2 weeks, it goes from a field to houses of 4 blocks, right? So unbelievable how fast we go. The next crew comes in, they do forming. That's all they do. They know nothing else. And the big advantage of this is, one, they're really skilled at what they do. Two, they're more productive. Three, what a single crew does is you have 12 people on a crew part of the day you need 2 people working. So you've got 10 people acting busy, right? The other part of the day, you need all 12 of them, right, and 2 of them are on break or something. It's just -- it's a mess, right? It's really, really hard. But the other thing you do is you teach them how to go into business against you, and you do all of that. So our crews, first of all, are all subcontracted with the exception of Phoenix, an acquisition we just made some of their crops. So these are teams of people that we've actually developed. We've put them in business, we help them get started, and they know 1 skill set. So they can't go build slabs for themselves or somebody else, but they're dedicated to us. They are very efficient, very quick and moved out. They're all incentivized off, so a poor crew or a finished crew, they all have incentives in place. Standard, if you go to any development, they use forms or made out of wood. At the end, they [Indiscernible] them, they throw them in the dumpster, they move on. Our crews when they use them for the third time, we give them the price of a set of forms in their patent, okay? So we have a lot of motivation for them to improve margins in a watch yields. So it's worked out as a very nice model. So our crews are subcontracted, so the variability of our margins are incredibly flat. We flexed up. We flexed down, it's there. Our customers pay us in 15 days. Cash cycles are beautiful. We spend less than $100,000 a year in CapEx. It's a great business. and our customers are the ones that ask us where to go next. So our strategy with them is you tell us where you need us, and we will go. Therefore, we don't get into pricing [Indiscernible], trying to get market share, come into a new market that will help us with the supply chain. They'll help us get set up, and it's a great relationship. So we've gone from Dallas to now we're in Houston and in Phoenix, the top 3 markets in the U.S. And to kind of put it in perspective, the first quarter for the U.S. was down 30%. Housing, we were flat overall. So we've got a really nice model for that. Our builders are bothering us all the time. As a matter of fact, we're with somebody with the last name of Horton a couple of weeks ago. And the first thing Mr. Horton said to me was when you bought the company, you promised us, you would expand with us, and you've done. I said, good. He said, "But I've asked you multiple times, when are you going to get into plumbing, when are you going to get into framing, so you can do more of our work." And so we're looking as we go forward, that's one of the growth opportunities for us. And we actually see this downturn as an opportunity for us to buy companies much less expensive than they were a couple of years ago in the boom, so we're currently looking for good companies that are in a downturn, that we will pay less in leverage on the way out. We've been growing about 6% annually. We think this business is kind of a high single-digit growth rate for us organically. As we expand, we'll continue to pick up that pace, but again, our biggest advantage right now is we're positioned to take full advantage of upturns. But with the low market share that we currently have in Houston Phoenix. That gives us an opportunity to offset downturns and stay flat or even grow during the downturn. The first quarter proved it. Second quarter will be very good, I think, at day, we're not through it yet, but we're seeing very good trends. Let's see what I miss here. A little bit about the market. we saw in December and January, like most of the world, about a 30% drop overnight in the market. He said this su***, really bad. We saw that flatten in February and then start to come out in March. But I say that in a macro look. Our Houston market has never slowed down. continued to grow every single month through all of this in Houston. We saw Dallas come back starting at the beginning of March and Phoenix come back starting at the end of March, and they're consecutively growing every single. So we feel very good about the trajectory. The builders are much more bullish than we are. If you sit down and talk to the builders, they have some pretty high expectations for the year. We hope they're right. But we're going to have a very good year. See trends. We talked about the trends. Let's go to Ron?

Sorry, we have to wrap up due to time.

Are we run up?

Yes.

I guess that's why the big clock is there.

It's that red thing.

Rod gave me $20 to make sure that he didn't have to speak.

I knew if I let Joe go first, I was in good shape.

Here's what. We have a question-and-answer session next door. You're more than welcome. We'll answer any questions. Look, here's what I'd tell you. This business is a totally different business today, which may or may not mean anything to you. But I would tell you, the tailwinds that we have and the position we're in today is unlike any other time in our history. And the visibility we have over the next 24 months is phenomenal right now. I'd like to tell you it's that way for the next 5 years. I can't see past 24 months right now. It's just we don't see projects that far out. So we're in a great position. stocks performed well. We're throwing off a tremendous amount of cash. We'll continue to make tuck-in acquisitions. We'll end up making a large fourth leg or fourth segment acquisition at some point in time when it's right. But we're extremely disciplined on the acquisition side. If it's -- the people aren't as good or better than ours, we're not interested. If they're not going to stay, we're not interested. It's not accretive to us. We're not interested. So we look at a lot of deals to get one. We'll continue to add that this point. Thanks.

Thank you.