Vulcan Materials Company (VMC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So good morning, and welcome to Vulcan Materials 2022 Investor Day. I'm Mark Warren, Vice President of Investor Relations for Vulcan Materials. Thank you for your participation and interest in the company. We titled this year's presentation, Durable Growth, the Vulcan Way. And during our time this morning, members of our management team are going to share with you plans for leveraging our aggregates-led focus model through industry-leading innovation and execution to drive value. At the end of the presentation, there's going to be a Q&A session. In the interest of time, I'm going to ask your questions for you. But if you're participating online, you can submit your questions through the microsite and you'll find it at vulcanmaterials.com. There'll be a drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner. If you're here in the room, there's a QR code on your table. You can ask your question that way and it will take you to the site. And if you haven't, I guess, one final thing, if you haven't silenced your cell phones, please do so now. One more thing. Finally, I guess let me remind you that commentary today may include forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. These risk factors can be found in our most recent annual report as well as our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Additionally, unless we’re required by law, the company undertakes no obligation to update or revise its forward-looking statements. Today's event will include discussion of financial measures that are not in conformance with U.S. GAAP. Additionally, information concerning these measures, including reconciliations to the GAAP numbers are included with the presentation. So with that housekeeping out of the way, let's get started. [Presentation]

You got to love rock quarries, this is all there is to it. Listen, welcome to our 2022 Investor Day. We're thrilled to have you here. We've got a really great, I think, informing program for you. But before we get started, while we're here warm and dry in New York, let's take just a minute and think some good thoughts to our friends and colleagues and family members in Florida. So let's just take a minute for that. Okay. We're flattered with your interest in Vulcan Materials. And we're excited today to talk about our company, the markets where we operate, the opportunities those markets offer us and our strategy to capture the value of those opportunities. As Mark said, our theme is Durable Growth. And our goal is to illustrate the strength of our company and how we're positioned to grow and deliver value to you, our shareholders. Vulcan's value and growth story is straightforward and compelling. We have a durable business, and we have end markets that are diverse and are -- have clear growth. Vulcan Materials is the aggregate leader in the United States, but the word aggregate leader in scope and most importantly, in performance. And we have the cash flows and the balance sheet to support that growth and value creation. Our foundation is unmatched in our industry. If you think about it, over the last 5 years, we've been able to grow our EBITDA by 11% per year. We're the leader in unit margins and aggregates. And besides being the leader, we've been able to grow those unit margins by 5% per year. We're also, importantly, the leader in safety. The most important thing all of us do every day is to ensure that our employees and their families are healthy and safe. We're the largest producer of an essential product that goes into all construction. We operate over 400 aggregates facilities in 22 of the top growth states in the United States. All of this is underpinned by 15.6 billion tons of reserves. Vulcan Materials is here to stay. We operate in the most attractive markets in the United States. If you think about it, the country is moving to Vulcan-served states. Today, 60% of the population lives within 60 miles of a Vulcan aggregate facility. This addressable market is over $20 billion. So why is all this important? Because population growth drives aggregate demand. We are where the population growth is. Our leadership in aggregates is at the core of our durable business. Aggregates, it's irreplaceable, it's essential. It has high barriers to entry. You put all that together, it has fantastic pricing characteristics. We also enjoy diverse end markets, which are growing. It's a fantastic business. Now we also have smaller downstream businesses that are important to us, asphalt and concrete. Why are they important? Because they all use aggregates feedstock and they add value to our customers, this is another service to our customers. And in those advantaged markets, those privileged markets, those downstream products give aggregate like returns through the cycle. We've built a durable business. Now as always, we operate the right way. Why? Well, first of all, it's just the right thing to do, but it's also good for business. Our ESG initiatives also support operating goals, if you think about it, including safety and retention of our employees, the development of our employees, sustainable production and portfolio management, but you'll hear a lot about ESG in a few minutes. We've also built an outstanding team. And many of you got to meet them last night, and you'll hear from them in just a little while. They're talented people. They're smart, they're quick, they're intellectually agile, they are the best in this business and they're dedicated to the Vulcan Way. They know our business. They know our strategy because they're the ones who are executing every day. I'm proud of this team. In just a little bit, you'll see why. Now the team has been busy. What have we been doing? 5 things. Executing on our strategic disciplines. Racing towards our $9 per ton unit margin goal, which you've heard me talk a lot about. They've strengthened and expanded our portfolio, and they've been harnessing technology and innovation to improve our customer service, to improve our efficiencies in our plants, all of which improves the value creation to you, our shareholders. They further strengthened our balance sheet and delivered on return on investment goals. And it's working. They've delivered. Our initiatives are driving a superior performance, including a 25% improvement in unit margins over the last 5 years. They have also added more than 70 aggregate facilities in some of our top growing states. All of this speaks to the durability of this team and their commitment to continuous improvement. So how do you build on that track record, because it's pretty good? Pretty easy. Our strategy is two-pronged. First, we'll enhance our core by executing on our strategic disciplines, the Vulcan Way of ops and the Vulcan Way of selling. Second, we'll expand our reach, improve our portfolio through acquisitions and greenfields. And as always, embedded in this, you have a foundation of talent and sustainability, innovation and again, that continuous improvement commitment. If you look at our core disciplines, which you'll hear a lot about this morning, we have the Vulcan Way of selling. Embedded in that, you have commercial excellence and you have logistics innovation. We also have the Vulcan Way of operations, which includes operations excellence and strategic sourcing. You will hear a lot about this this morning. Now let's discuss our portfolio. We have significant opportunity to expand in our existing markets but also expand into new markets. What you see on the map, the dots are the 50 largest MSAs in the country. We operate in 35 of those. And we have room to expand in those 35. That leaves us 15 that we're not in. This is room to expand to new markets, which you saw us do recently in New York and New Jersey. This is an incredibly fragmented industry. 2/3 of production of aggregates every year comes from smaller regional producers. Vulcan has the people, and we have the balance sheet to grow, but a lot more to come on this. Now our end markets are in growth mode. The public markets are underpinned by the $853 billion of new federal funding. 41% of this is in aggregate-intensive highways and bridges. But I think what everybody misses is the balance, the vast majority, the rest of the $853 billion, requires new construction that consumes aggregates. This is a once in a multigenerational public demand shift, and it's already started. Highway projects have increased sharply over the last 6 months. And this is actually driven by improvement in state funding and COVID funding. This doesn't have the federal funding in it yet. So more to come, lasts for years. And as usual, Vulcan will get more funds than anyone else. To date, under IIJA funding, highways has it increased in Vulcan markets by 22% as compared to 14% in non-Vulcan markets. We are in the right markets. Now we all know that single-family residential construction right now is pretty volatile. You've got challenges with interest rates, expensive housing. But I think you've got to look past that and look at the underlying fundamentals of single-family construction in our markets. And they're good. The fundamentals are great. You've got record low inventories of houses in Vulcan markets. You've got population growth and you got household formation. It's estimated that in the next decade, 75% of the population growth will occur in Vulcan-served markets and 72% of household formations will also occur in Vulcan-served markets. Again, we're in the right markets. Now if you turn to private nonresidential construction, it's in growth mode. We took the hit in this sector back in 2020, the pandemic. We spent 2021 recovering, 2022 is in full growth mode. As you can see, if you look at trailing 12-month starts in Vulcan markets up 30%. Twice of what it is in non-Vulcan markets, again, Vulcan is where the growth is. Pricing. You hear me talk about it all the time because for aggregates, it's a big deal. Outstanding pricing characteristics. But I think what I'm impressed with is the team's performance over the past few months. We got hit hard in the first quarter with inflation. They went straight to work and reacted with price. That is a great performance. That is a nimble reaction. Now if you think pricing is only as good as what you take to the bottom line and they have done that also. Through our Vulcan Way of operating, which you'll hear some more about, we held our margins in the first quarter, reacted fast on price and by the time we got to May, we were back growing margins. That's a quick reaction. And we grew it more in June, and we'll grow it more in the third quarter and more in the fourth quarter. So we've proven that we can grow unit margins in good times. But what's important and what's durable is we've also proven we can grow in tough times. We grew them through a pandemic and now we're growing them through record inflationary pressures. This is our leaders illustrating the durability of this business. They are the best at this. In a little bit, they'll explain to you why. Vulcan's value creation and growth story is compelling and is straightforward. We have a proven business model, clear growth drivers, diverse markets. We are the leader in aggregates in scale and in performance. We have the cash flow and the balance sheet to support growth and value creation, and we have the talent and innovation to capture value. Vulcan Materials is clearly the most compelling investment opportunity in this sector. And now let's turn to talent and sustainability. Darren Hicks runs our HR and Janet Kavinoky is VP of External Affairs.

Thank you, Tom, and good morning, everyone. As Tom mentioned, talent and sustainability are foundational to our two-pronged strategy. We have 5 areas of focus. And this morning, I will focus on people and safety, and my colleague, Janet, will speak to environmental stewardship. The safety, health and well-being of our employees remains our top priority. We have maintained an industry-leading safety performance. In 2021, 270 of our facilities achieved our 000 status, 0 injuries, 0 MSHA citations, and 0 environmental citations. Now we're extremely proud about world-class safety performance. However, we're not satisfied. We're constantly aiming at 0 for all of our facilities. To further drive our safety performance, we have made a fundamental change in how we keep our people safe, and that's through risk prevention. Historically, safety in our industry has primarily focused on accident prevention and more backwards-looking metrics. In 2021, we have changed our focus to utilize more forward-looking metrics and taking the risk out of the job so that the accidents don't occur. Risk prevention is the future in keeping our people safe. Our people. We have great people. They are the heart of our success and our greatest competitive advantage. For those of you that have followed us for some time, one thing that makes this place special is that our employees, they want their kids to work for us. Their children want to work for us. If I could address your attention to the 2 photos on the left. Those photos represent fathers, sons, grandsons, nephews, spouses, these 2 families decided to come, build and grow their careers with Vulcan Materials Company. We have several examples like this across our company. This is a great place to work. And we also know that when we bring in diversity of talent, which will be additional thoughts, perspective and backgrounds, it helps us get to solutions a lot faster, a lot better. That is how we set ourselves apart. And if I can call your attention to the third photo, which is a student at one of our partnering Historical Black Colleges. Now Whitmark had a lot of opportunities for internships. He elected to come to Vulcan. He expressed his interest in learning about Vulcan, learning about our industry, and he is extremely excited about the opportunity to return next summer. Whitmark is an example of how we're investing and expanding the diversity of our workforce at all levels. We are making headway on our DE&I goals while further enhancing our reputation of being a great place to work. Diversity, equity and inclusion. In 2015, we formalized our efforts for diversity, equity and inclusion through educating our employees regarding the value and the impact it can have on our organization while also enhancing our culture of respect, embracing and celebrating differences. In 2022, we launched 4 of our employee resources groups. Employees have been extremely excited to join their fellow colleagues through celebrating differences and making it fun. That's the Vulcan Way. We know that when our employees are safe, healthy, happy, promotes a more empowering and positive environment that improves our performance and shareholder return. Thank you for your time. And Janet, pass to you.

Thank you, Darren. So environmental stewardship is another foundational element of our balanced strategy. Compliance is our baseline. We strive to meet and exceed air, dust, water, noise regulations in our operations all across the country each and every day, but its stewardship that takes us from compliance to sustainability. And we embed environmental stewardship in everything we do, in our business operations and our business planning. For example, we take a holistic approach to land and water management, looking how to mitigate and to minimize our impacts all across our properties. On a single property, we might be actively quarrying, reforesting a mined-out area or/and preserving a habitat. We are also diversifying our energy sources. About 40% of our energy in Florida is now coming from renewables. In Texas, we're using wind energy. And I am really excited about what we're doing in California. In 2023, we'll be installing floating solar panels on our settling ponds. Now it happens to be that California is also an area of high water stress. So in installing those solar panels, we are also piloting a strategy to reduce evaporation and be better water stewards. We've long been a top recycler of asphalt and concrete. And we continue to work with our suppliers and our customers to innovate our products to create more sustainable offerings that we can support a lower carbon economy. So let's talk about lower carbon economy. Of course, we look at greenhouse gas emission reduction as a way to support our business goals. Now we're starting with a very advantaged position. Our greenhouse gas emissions footprint is 20% of our closest peers. But we're committed to doing more. And so we have committed publicly to setting science-based targets in line with the Paris Agreement on climate change through tenant, sustainability, critical parts of our balanced strategy. And now it's time to hear more about that strategy itself. So I'd like to introduce my colleague, Jerry Perkins, our Senior Vice President, to talk about the Vulcan Way of selling.

Thank you, Janet. It's a pleasure to be here today, and I have some exciting news to share with you about the Vulcan Way of selling. The Vulcan Way of selling is the most mature of our strategic initiatives. It's well embedded and well ingrained in our culture, and I think you see that in our results. But let me back up for a moment. We at Vulcan are very fortunate to serve a wide variety of projects of all shapes and sizes and end uses. And the Vulcan Way of selling allows us to serve all of these end users very effectively. And the variety of all of these end users makes us durable as a company. Look, we have over 22,000 customers and with 22,000 customers comes a lot of opportunity. And speaking of opportunities, this is the greater Los Angeles market. Each dot on that map represents an individual quote to a customer over a 6-month period. There's 6,000 dots on that map. That's a lot of activity. That's a lot of opportunity for us and our customers. So we developed the Vulcan Way of selling to change the game in how we approach all of these opportunities. We're now using technology and innovation and process to win work and capture value. The traditional sales approach in our industry has been largely based on relationship selling and also backward-looking information. In 2017, we moved beyond the standard industry approach, and we revolutionized our sales process when we developed the Vulcan Way of selling. Out of the gates, we did 3 things. First, we developed custom proprietary technology that allowed us to have real-time insight into all of our end markets. The second thing we did is we developed KPIs and performance metrics for our sales teams, leading to better execution, accountability and development of our people. And lastly, and maybe most importantly, we removed all of the administrative work from our sales teams, allowing them to spend more quality time in front of our customers. So how did we do this? We created sales support teams. These sales support teams allow our sales reps to be much more customer focused. And these sales support teams do a lot of work, a lot of important work, but there are 2 themes to what they do. First, they take care, they perform all of the administrative work and all of the transactional work related to our sales process. You saw all those quotes in Los Angeles in a 6-month period. There is a lot of paperwork involved in that. The second thing these sales support teams do is they're staffed with analysts. And these analysts use data and technology to point our sales reps to the right opportunities at the right price. All of this leads to better execution and margin growth. So here are some examples of the custom-made proprietary tools that we are using. You can see we follow powerful metrics, job opportunities, what's in the pipeline? What does our future volume look like by customer? And it's important that it's by customer because we track our customer visits. Are we getting in front of the customers we need to see who have those opportunities? Win percentage and booking pace. Are those customer visits and contacts, paying off? Are we winning our fair share of the work that we're quoting? And lastly, price momentum. We're able to look in real time at our pricing on the local level. So if I'm a sales manager at Vulcan, I have all of this at my fingertips, and I'm able to have really meaningful discussions with my sales teams. Is the sales team looking at the right opportunities? Are they spending time with the right customers? And are we winning work at the right pace? And are we following through on price? This is very powerful information. And we are using this at scale throughout our footprint. And when you combine these tools with the scale of Vulcan, it generates impressive results. Since we rolled out the Vulcan Way of selling in 2017, we have significantly outperformed our public company peers in pricing. In fact, our compounded growth over that 5-year period is 30% higher. This is the Vulcan Way of selling at work. It's doing the things I talked about, spending more time with the customer, using data and technology to point our sales reps to the right opportunities and focusing on selling value and solution to our customers. Vulcan Way of selling has been a game changer for us. Logistics. Logistics is an important piece of our business. It used to be at Vulcan, we would produce inventory, pile it up and we tell the customer here it is, come and get it. And I will tell you, largely today, that's how the industry operates. But several years ago, we made the strategic decision to invest in technology around logistics innovation. And this is delivering value to our customers and making them more productive. So I want to share with you this technology and let you hear from our customers on why it makes Vulcan different. [Presentation]

Time is money in the construction and trucking industries. And these tools make our truckers and our customers much more efficient and productive. You heard it from them, they love it. I hope we've been able to show you today that we have a very sound foundation with the Vulcan Way of selling. But this is a journey of continuous improvement. We're always looking for ways to get better. For instance, over the next 6 months, we are going to roll out a new digital mobile platform. It will allow us to have real-time information at our fingertips, anytime, anywhere for our sales reps in the field. It will also provide a better digital customer experience, including the ability to order our materials on a cell phone. This technology will allow us to continue to lead the industry in the customer experience. We're very excited about this next step with the Vulcan Way of selling. And next, I would like to call Jule Smith to the stage. Jule is one of our customers. He is the CEO of Construction Partners, Inc. Construction Partners, Inc. is a leading producer of asphalt and construction services in the Southeast. So thank you for being here, Jule.

It's great to be here.

I'll let you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your company.

Okay. Well, I'm a North Carolinian, grew up near Raleigh, still live Raleigh with my wife and 4 teenagers. My wife is a New Yorker. So it's a little odd to be in the city without her. But my mother in law still lives not too far from here on Long Island. And one thing I learned from my mother in law, and I love her, but after our IPO, I learned that it's not necessarily your biggest shareholders that are your most vocal shareholders. So she keeps up with us pretty good. Our company, Construction Partners is an infrastructure services company in 5 southeastern states. We center our business, we do roads, site work for industrial, retail, residential, anything dealing with infrastructure. And we center our markets around a hot-mix asphalt plant and use a local workforce to work within sort of a 50-mile radius of that. In a lot of our markets we're partnered with Vulcan Materials.

Jule, what excites you about the road building business?

Well, it gets in your blood. I love it. I love leading the men and women in the construction industry. I love what we do. We connect our communities. Some of the things Vulcan said that they focus on. We're just a partner downstream, helping make that happen. And so it is exciting to build infrastructure by our communities. And then another thing that excites me is just the consolidation opportunities in our industry. There's -- our industry, a lot of companies started in the 1950s with the Eisenhower infrastructure act. And so they're hitting their third and fourth generation and making decisions for their families. And that gives Construction Partners a chance to consolidate the industry. And that's something we focus on. So it's a very exciting future for us.

What about IIJA?

Well, that's an exciting thing for all of our industry. It's a generational investment in infrastructure. It's badly needed. But it's going to, for the next 6 to 8 years, be an opportunity for us and Construction Partners is going to do more than just roads. There's a lot of investment in airports, railroads, ports, may even all these electric charging stations are going to need infrastructure to get in and out of them. So it's a real opportunity for us over the next 6 to 8 years. And I also think that for me, as I look at the outlook in the future as the private economy goes through its natural cycles, this gives us an opportunity. If our resources, our plants and our crews, if there's not as much work on the private side, there's plenty of demand over on the public side, and so we'll just pivot and do more of that work. And so it's really, I think, going to be an exciting thing for the next 6 to 8 years.

Yes, we're very excited too.

All right.

Why do you choose Vulcan as your supplier?

Well, I would say 2 things, reliability and relationships. Obviously, as a producer of asphalt and building -- you've got to have quality products, you've got to have availability of products. And that's -- with Vulcan, you don't have to worry about that. But I would say more of that's a relationship. And I would say, just in the last year, that's been proven out in a dramatic way. And the supply chain issues have been dramatic throughout the Southeast. And without Vulcan's, just relationship, in the Panhandle of Florida, Jerry stepped in and said, we have got to make sure that we take care of Construction Partners. And in some cases, Vulcan spent extra money to make sure that they got us the rock to stay in business. It's the same thing in South Georgia. The railroads have really struggled in South Georgia this year. And I know Jason stepped in and said, we're going to make sure that we take care of Construction Partners. So that relationship and the care that they have for us, when I have a choice that's going to play a big part in my decision to know that Vulcan stepped in and took care of us in a very critical time in our companies this last 1.5 years have been tough.

What do we do well?

Jerry, you guys are world-class at raising prices. No, I'm kidding, but I'm really not in the -- it's a partnership in many markets. We're partnered with the Vulcan and there's competitors partnered with other aggregates suppliers, so it's a relationship. And as a contractor, 90% of our work we win by low bid. So we are naturally going to be -- we're going to have a tendency to want to cut price. And so Vulcan is the partner that says, we know the market, we've studied the market, this is where we can be, we'll be fine because we both know the volume, we need the volume. But you just have the resources and capabilities to study the market. And so you're the one that's the cool, calm and collected teammate that says, you're going to be fine, this is how we maximize value. And so I would say you guys do that really well. You help us make sure that we know the market and because none of us want to give it away. And so that's something you do really well. And I would say even more than that, as I look to consolidate the industry in the Southeast, the asphalt industry, it's helpful to have a partnership with Vulcan that they know the markets. When we were looking at an acquisition in South Carolina that just closed in August. I was able, as I was looking at that target, I saw, hey, they're in the Vulcan -- they're in this facility with Vulcan. They buy from Vulcan. So I was able to call Jason and say, Jason, what do we need to do if I make this acquisition to be successful in this market? And he knew the market. He and his team were experts at it. And so I would say just that aspect, you guys do really well.

What about innovation? We saw some of the logistics tools earlier. What do you think about our innovation?

Well, Jerry, I have to say when I first heard about this, I said, why is Vulcan investing in technology for trucks. But the more I got to understand it, I realized it's really ingenious in that you were solving a huge problem for the truck driver and that he wants steady utilization of his trucks. He wants to make sure he's getting a lot of hours. The customer wants to make sure that we have trucks because, especially this last 1.5 years, trucks have been a huge shortage. So in solving a huge problem for the trucker and the customer, you're creating a differentiator for Vulcan, but at the same time, you're getting great vision of the demand and what you need to do to manage inventory. And so I think it's very innovative, but -- and it's something our industries needed. What we do is not rocket science, and we do it every day over and over. But it takes someone with both the foresight and the resources to invest in it and sort of tell the industry, hey guys, we've solved this problem, let's all use this platform. So it's really a valuable tool. I have guys a lot like the folks in that video, and it's a major differentiator.

Well, Jule, thank you so much for your time and your insights, and we really appreciate the partnership with you.

Thank you.

Look, the Vulcan Way of selling is a difference maker for us, and it underpins our durability. We're going to take a short break, and then we'll be back and Jason Teter is going to share with you some very exciting things we're doing with technology with the Vulcan Way of operating. Thank you. [Break]

All right. Let's go ahead and get started. We'll turn it back over to Jason.

Good morning, everybody. It's great to see you. My name is Jason Teter, I'm responsible for our business from Pennsylvania to Florida. And I can tell you right now, I appreciated what Tom said earlier. My team in Florida is battling some things right now, and I appreciate all your thoughts for them. My thoughts are with them as well. I've got the really great opportunity this morning to talk to you about what our teams do every day to drive our operations, it's what we call Vulcan Way of operating. Like Vulcan Way of selling, Vulcan Way of operating is the tools, the processes, the way we think about going about driving our operations and driving value in those operations every day. It has always been and always will be something we work on every day. We've been working on that for a long time. It's always going to be, first and foremost, about the safety and health of our people, which you heard Darren talk about earlier. And secondly it's about customer service and providing the highest quality customer service and the highest quality material to all of our customers every day. We work closely with all of our sales teams, as Jerry talked about earlier to do that. And it's also about -- and well, really fun part of it for us is driving productivity. And driving productivity, if you think about it, the way we talk about it is more of the right tons at the right time. Just to go back a little bit, in 2017, we talked to you a lot about strategic sourcing. That paid significant dividends for us during the pandemic with supply chain issues. And it has also really helped us with what we would call generational inflation over the last 18 months. We then in 2019, redefined and ensured that we were consistent on all of our Vulcan Way of operating disciplines. That's been underpinned in 2019 by a training platform to develop our people and develop our talent, something we're quite proud of. That's a proprietary system that we consider to be an intellectual property. I'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute. Then we have plant technology. We started this in 2021, and it's a tracking tool to help us get better visibility into our plants every day. And I'll get a little bit more into that in a few minutes. First, let me talk about training. As you said, or as we talked about in 2019, all of our training used to be in a binder that might have looked something like this. We told you we were going to get rid of the binder and we're going to create a platform where people could access any and all training on their phones. We've successfully done that. We have a library of training for all of our pieces of equipment in a quarry, about how to inspect it, how to maintain it, something we're quite proud of. Very importantly, it was developed by our most seasoned operators. And as you can imagine, given the workforce challenges that are going across all industries today, that is extremely important, and I couldn't be more proud that we were ahead of the game, and we were proactive in developing that tool. I'm going to play a video for you that is an excerpt from one of our trainings. What you're going to see, and if you're a new employee or if you're an employee that's been around for a while and you just want to refresh, you're going to go in and you're going to look up jaw crusher. You want to inspect a jaw crusher and you want to understand how to go about doing that. It's going to take you through what it is, what are the big pieces of equipment that are part of that jaw crusher, what you need to inspect, what problems that you might be looking for that are the most common. And then it's going to test you at the end, so be ready. So you come in, you look it up in the library. You can see all of the different pieces of equipment that are in here. Anything that's in our plant is in that library. It goes through the major components, shows you what you need to look for, shows you in a minute here what you don't want to see. Right there. And then test your knowledge. Does anybody have a good answer? Again, this is something we're really proud of that our people can access anytime, anywhere, whether they're in a plant, just want to look it up, like you and I are looking up something that we're trying to fix at home like looking on YouTube or if we have a new employee that wants to go through the full training, this full training on this particular one is over an hour. But they can look it up and they can do it in pieces whenever they want. Next, I'd just like to get into a little bit of the innovation and the technology that we're putting in our plants. In 2021, we started a pilot where we put a plant tracking -- or production tracking technology into our plants to give us better visibility minute to minute anywhere, anytime, and you can access that technology anywhere where you are -- anywhere in the company. You could be at that plant, look at it, the operators are doing every day or you could be somewhere else. We've successfully implemented this technology in our top 100 plants, which represents 70% of our production. That was just completed in July 2022. Importantly, we're seeing some immediate benefit in some of those plants, but it is something that we're going to see significant benefit to going forward. So just quickly, I'd like to make you all a VP of Operations in Vulcan. You all have responsibility for this group of plants. And you go through your day and you can see on your phone, at any point in time you can pull up any of your plants very specifically or your iPad. And during your day, you take time to look at each of your plants, and you sit down and you've got a dashboard that shows you where you might have a plant that might not be on track that day. So you pull that up and as you see it go through, you pick a plant or two that you want to look at. You then drill down a bit deeper. And again, you're at a plant, not the plant you're going to look up, with your team working on that plant, you're taking a break that day and you're looking through all your plants. You then drill down deeper. And so what you do is you pick that particular plant in Middle Tennessee and you notice that you've got a couple of crushers that are problems. They aren't running the way you want to. You have a screen that isn't running the way you want to. And the most important outcome that you're looking for, your critical product, which we call 89s for this particular plant is not producing at the rate that you need it to produce. So you make a phone call. You call the plant, you call the area manager and maybe the plant manager and you ask him what's going on. They've got a handle on it. They're working through it, but they have a couple of questions. They're struggling with their automation system or they might be struggling with a mechanical situation. You know somebody in California, that's an enterprise-wide expert that works for Vulcan, that can help them. They know the automation system. They're familiar with the mechanics of the plant because we have some of those crushers in other places around the company. And so you make that phone call. That particular person is able to remote-in from California, they can look in and they can make contact with the plant. They can help them solve the problem. They can solve the problem for them. They can give them hints to what it might be. But at the end of the day, the problem gets solved. While they're doing that, they're looking at a dashboard that looks like this. And they can see each one of the crushers. They can see whether it's full. They can see whether it's cycling, which I'll talk about in a few minutes. And they can solve that problem. I want to compare and contrast that to how that might have worked a year ago. That VP of Operations, you guys, may not have known that problem existed until the end of the day. You may not have known that probably existed until the end of the week, depending on the gravity of the problem. Now you know that day. The particular individual in California, that's the expert that can help work on it, that individual would have had to fly out to Middle Tennessee. And as you can imagine, to get that scheduled and get that orchestrated for somebody that's been -- that's doing that all over the place, it might be 3 weeks before they are there to solve the problem. The plant can still run, but it's not running as efficiently as it could. Today, you solve it in a matter of hours or days, whereas before you might solve it in a matter of a week or a month. It's a big difference in how we do it. It's transformational. So I'm going to show you a plant, which we have installed the system, okay? And this is how it was running beforehand. And I'd like you to notice as the recording plays, you'll see the top bar bouncing up and down. And you see the green at the top, right? The green is good, but when that bar bounces down, that means we've lost tons in a given time frame. That means in a market that has increasing demand that you need more material, you've got to run more hours to get the same tons. Now I'll show you that same plant after. You see the smooth bar at the top, smooth line. And you see the green at the top is just consistently green. We gained all those tons, which very simply means we get more tons in the same time frame. We can run less hours and get more tons. It's pretty neat stuff. The visibility that this system gives you is really incredible. The other thing that I would say is that once this plant was tuned, you now have a way to make sure it stays tuned, you can see it every day. And for the person that's diagnosing the problem, they understand whether -- they can go back and look at the history of that because this is available going backwards. They can understand whether it's a systemic issue and it happens all the time. They can understand it's a onetime issue, whatever it is, that helps them go solve the problem. And again, then you have a plant operator that can sustain it. The plant operator calls that green bar at the top, which is his fun. They've denoted that the golden batch. They're all looking for the golden batch. As you can see, this is transformational for us. We can fix things much quicker. It helps us run our plants consistently and crush every minute of every day. It truly is very different from what we've had with our production systems in the past. And why does it matter? Because it helps us improve productivity and it helps us improve yield. Productivity is more total tons, yield, we think of as more tons at the right time. I'm going to give you a couple of examples that will help you understand the benefit of that and how that helps us reduce our cost of production and increase our total material margin. These are 2 plants I'm quite proud of, by the way. One of them is in Atlanta. It's the first plant that we implemented this system at. It was the pilot plant. That plant in a market in Atlanta, which a lot of you know, Atlanta has been doing quite well from a demand perspective. We have workforce challenges to try to hire new people, right, because a lot of companies do. And we needed to be able to produce more of our critical product and more of our -- more total product. After implementation of the system and the visibility that it gave us, we got 15% total improvement in productivity and 5% total improvement in that critical product. That's a big deal. What that meant is that we could run the same hours, get more tons. We had more time to maintain the plant and keep it running. Great job, guys. Second is a plant that we bought in 2018. It's in South Georgia. Jule knows this plant because we supply him out of it. This is a particular plant that used to run 7 days a week. It now runs at most 6 days a week. In 2021, in the first half of the year, we ran 8 Sundays. That's hard for our team. That takes them away from their families, gives them very little break. And after implementation of the system, we've now been able to run 0 Sundays in 2022. And that team is on their way to running 0 Saturdays by the end of the year. That's the goal. I was there last week, and it was a lot of fun. They were talking quite a bit about how much fun they were having. And a couple of quotes, one from the plant operator. This is the guy that runs the plant all day long. He's been doing it for 15 years. He said, this is the best thing Vulcan has ever done for us. He said it makes it so much easier. And as importantly, he said for new people coming into our company, it's going to make it easier for them to learn how to run the plant, and they can run it more consistently and they can run it sustainably. And they'll know when there's a problem because they know what the golden batch is. From the plant supervisor, he said last year, we were having trouble at times making sure we had enough material for our key customers. We haven't had any of those issues last year and we are having fun, making more tons in less time, and our people are happy. Plant Manager, same thing. Last year was tough. We were working 7 days a week a lot. This year, we're having fun, and we have the right material at the right time for our customers. This is fantastic. What that all translates into is lower cost and better margin per ton. As you can see, this is working. And by the way, this is us beating inflation over the last 5, 6 years without the benefit of that new tracking system. We put the new tracking system at all our plants and as we drive for impact over the coming months, this is just going to continue. We're doing really well with Vulcan Way of operating. We're very proud of our people for the hard work they do every day. We're not done. We're going to continue working hard on talent. The library is going to continue to grow. It's going to be updated with the latest training that we can put into it. Continue to leverage our seasoned operators, and we're going to continue to leverage new and different technology in each of our plants every day. I really appreciate the opportunity to be with you guys. Next, Ronnie is going to come and talk to us about expanding our reach and portfolio management. Thank you.

Good job. Thank you. Good morning. As Tom talked about earlier, our two-pronged strategy. So we told you about enhancing our core. And as we've heard from Jason and Jerry, that stuff is transformational. I mean when you think about the investment we're making in our technology, that's transformational stuff. I get the opportunity to talk about the second prong, which is how do we enhance our portfolio, expand our reach. So let me first talk about our guiding principles when it comes to expanding our portfolio and enhancing it. One, we will continue our aggregate-focused mix of business; two, we want to continue to build out strategically in the right market structure where we strive to have a leading position that protects our core assets. It also complements our product value resiliency. Third, we will continue to pursue downstream concrete and asphalt businesses in selected markets that are also complementary to our aggregate position. And then all of this leads to our disciplined approach. And our disciplined approach means we have a goal of achieving a #1 or #2 position in the markets we serve. Why is this important? Because as you heard from Jason and Jerry, through our Vulcan Way of sales and our Vulcan Way of ops, we are the leading unit margin producer in our industry. And when we grow margins in our markets, our customers are able to operate profitably. So we are good for the market. So let me give you some examples now of how we're going to grow both in existing markets as well as outreaching into new markets. Here's an example of expanding an existing market. This is Northern California. In 2016, we had 5 operating facilities. Through, again, a strategic bolt-on and targeted acquisition strategy, we first acquired Shamrock. So Shamrock Materials, as you see, ready-mix asphalt -- a ready-mix company, but let me point out the triangle there. The triangle is a water terminal that was called Landing Way. Landing Way was getting materials from a company called Polaris. So what was the next acquisition? U.S. Concrete. What does that include? Polaris Materials. And so strategically, as we build out these footprints, it's critically important to us, as I talked about, protecting our core assets. Those 5 original plants were our core assets. Now we want to protect those. So we did another acquisition. U.S. Concrete came also with 4 water terminals. So now we have Polaris Materials that can come down, 4 water terminals that can serve market, including Landing Way. So what have we done now? The next one is Syar, just recently done. Again, expanding our reach in this market. Building a network, protecting our portfolio. I mean these are strategic things that we do when we look at this market, very high growth, very dynamic, very, very high barriers to entry. We love a market position like this. Next, let me talk about greenfielding. So when we think about greenfielding, I'm going to give you an example here in Atlanta. So starting from the inside, center of the map and working our way out, as we anticipate growth in these markets, we have to secure those inner -- the inner circles. We want to secure those core assets. So one of the ways we can do that, again, some of these markets, there's not acquisition opportunities. So what do we do? The 2 green stars that you can see on the outer side, the 1 in the South, Lamar County and the Northeast is our Jackson County quarry. Both of these new quarries will be operational in 2023. Again, we're anticipating growth. So we're building our network. And you have to get way out in front of this growth. So this is again an opportunity for us to enhance our long-term growth strategy in a very attractive high-growth market. So geographically, how do we expand our reach. Again, here we are in New York today. 2 years ago, there was no Vulcan in New York. Today, we are. And so through our acquisition of U.S. Concrete, again, now we're here. In Long Island, we have a low-cost, high profitable sand and gravel producing plant that serves this market. In New Jersey, we acquired 3 stone plants as well as a sand and gravel plant in South Jersey, again, expanding our reach through a targeted acquisition. So as I review, discipline in our approach, growth in existing markets through targeted acquisitions as well as greenfielding and then growth in new markets through a very strategic acquisition strategy. So what does that look like? Here -- since 2016, these are greenfield in the green DOTs, and targeted acquisitions with the blue DOTs. So you think about this, since 2016, we've added 74 aggregate operations. 74. I don't think Vulcan gets enough credit for the strategic position that we're in. We've done a lot of growing. How about downstream? Here's our downstream products, concrete and asphalt. Again, very strategic, targeted markets, complementing our aggregate position. So we have a lot of strategy around that downstream business. It's core to our business, but it's also going to be very complementary to our aggregate position. And now what's our full footprint. Very impressive. So this is it. This is all of it. And when I look at this map, I see networks. I see portfolios. I see our ability to say, in California with Polaris and our other markets, we can go from the north to the south. We can move material by water, we can move material by truck. In Texas, recent acquisition of Fordyce. We can barge a material. We can go from Houston to Beaumont to Corpus Christi. Again, in Texas, we can rail from San Antonio, we can rail from Oklahoma. We've got networks. It just gives us such a protection of our core assets because we are defensible positions. We have multiple ways of serving the markets. And for our customers, we have multiple opportunities in meeting their needs. So as I wrap up, I'm going to leave you with this map. As Tom talked about, 67% of the aggregate market is small regional producers. This is the map. Every red dot there is a small regional producer. You know what we see, opportunity, lots of opportunity for growth. And again, we want to do it strategically. We want to be disciplined and we're going to be industry-leading. So thank you for your time. I'll now welcome Mary Andrews, our CFO.

Thanks, Ronnie, and good morning. Today, you will hear from me many of the same themes and priorities you've heard in the past. And there's a reason for that. Our disciplined approach has yielded consistent results and growth through the cycle. As Tom highlighted for you in his opening remarks, over the last 5 years since the launch of our strategic disciplines, we've improved our adjusted EBITDA at a compound annual growth rate of 11%. During a time in which construction activity faced the headwinds of a pandemic, labor shortages, supply chain constraints, elevated inflation and numerous other disruptions, consistent operational execution, cash generation and capital allocation have been the drivers of our success. So let's start with operational execution. You heard a lot from Jerry and Jason about the progress we've made on our strategic disciplines. And more importantly, the exciting runway in front of us for continuing to make the best better. Since the end of 2017, we've improved our trailing 12-month aggregates cash unit profitability in 16 of 18 quarters. In one, it was flat. In one, it declined by $0.3. This performance stands alone in our industry. Our strategic disciplines are working. Our business model is durable. And while pricing is certainly an underlying strength of the aggregates industry and a powerful profit lever that contributes higher margins each quarter, pricing alone does not drive profitability. It obviously depends on what you can take to the bottom line. And that is exactly why we have been so relentlessly focused on our operating disciplines to ensure that we are always growing our unit profitability and not giving back our hard won price increases and cost escalation. Jason gave you lots of examples of our operational disciplines and innovations that will play a critical role in our continued consistent execution. And the talent of our teams in the field, commercial, operational and support, and their day-to-day focus on execution is what leads to industry-leading unit profitability. The gap between us and our competitors has widened in the turbulent time since the onset of the pandemic. But you know that aside, what's most important to us is that we are continuously improving and making ourselves better. From top to bottom in our organization, we have been focused on our goal of generating $9 in cash gross profit per ton. And we've made great progress toward that goal through our consistent execution. And importantly, we've taken that consistent operational execution and generated attractive free cash flow. Our free cash flow conversion ratio has averaged over 100% for the last 5 years, and consistent free cash flow creates optionality and flexibility through the cycle as we make capital allocation decisions. And to ensure that we drive long-term shareholder value, we follow a disciplined capital allocation strategy. Our highest priority, use of cash, is taking care of our valuable franchise, the investment in operating and maintenance CapEx. These sustaining projects help drive operational efficiencies, often reduce cost and therefore, generate attractive returns. Our next priority is to deploy capital for growth through both acquisitions and greenfields, which Ronnie described for you. And in a minute, I want to give you another example of how our balanced approach to growth with both acquisitions and greenfields can be very complementary and generate extremely attractive returns. And after funding our first 2 priorities, we focus on returning excess cash to shareholders. First, via a growing but sustainable dividend and then via share buybacks. So now, let's go to the southern part of the Atlantic Coast for a minute and rewind a few years to see our balanced growth capital strategy at work. In 2015, we had a single rail yard in Charleston, South Carolina and no presence in Savannah, Georgia. In 2016, we invested in 2 greenfield rail distribution sites. One in Charleston and one in Savannah. In Charleston, the yard expanded our market presence along a growth corridor. In Savannah, the yard was our entry point into an attractive market. In 2017, we acquired Aggregates USA. And you can see here how this investment was complementary to our greenfield sites and further built our position in these important Southeastern growth markets. Our greenfield distribution investments were paid back within 5 years. And in 2021, they generated an EBITDA return on invested capital of over 50%. Growth really does take a balanced approach. And we've talked now about each of our 3 growth engines, organic growth, be a strong operational execution and improving profitability, our M&A growth engine, and our greenfield growth engine. And we will continue to invest in all 3, always being mindful of where we are in the cycle and in our leverage range in order to protect our balance sheet. Our investment-grade balance sheet supports future growth and is a source of strength. We've worked hard over time to craft a capital structure that is appropriate to our asset base and its long-lived nature. Our target leverage range of 2 to 2.5x keeps us importantly investment grade. This ensures that we will have access to capital at all points of the cycle, that we'll maintain a reasonable cost of capital and that we'll have the opportunity for longer-dated debt that matches that long-lived asset base. Our balance sheet gives us the financial strength and flexibility to fund our capital allocation priorities in order to sustain and strengthen our operations, to grow and to return capital to shareholders. So now let's tie it all together and talk about where we're going in terms of targets. We are raising the bar. At our Investor Day in 2019, we reiterated our long-term goal of generating $2 billion of EBITDA. But importantly, with fewer tons and higher unit margins than we'd initially imagined in 2015, we expected to generate $9 in cash gross profit per ton when we reached 230 million tons to 40 million tons. Now remember, that was in the context of the asset base at that time. So although this year, our volume guidance of 5% to 7% implies approximately 236 million tons of shipments, on a same-store basis, adjusting only for the large acquisition, we stand at about 225 million tons. And we are barreling toward our $9 per ton goal. This year, based on our guidance of mid-single-digit improvement in cash gross profit per ton, we expect to deliver approximately $8 per ton. Our $9 goal is in clear site, and that is why it's time for us to raise the bar. Going forward, we now expect to generate between $11 and $12 of cash gross profit per ton when we reach 260 million to 270 million tons. Our commitment to our strategic disciplines and our consistent execution give us confidence in this next horizon of growth. And in conjunction with our accelerating aggregates performance, we expect to return non-aggregates gross margins to their long-term averages over time. And we will remain focused on continuing to leverage our SAG costs to our long-term goal of 6%. Achieving these goals will deliver the next $1 billion plus. We expect to generate between $2.7 billion and $3 billion of EBITDA when we reached 260 million tons to 270 million tons, by delivering $11 to $12 of cash gross profit per ton. Leveraging our consistent operational execution into reliable free cash flow will give us the opportunity to strategically allocate capital, to continue to grow, to improve our returns on capital and to create long-term value for you, our shareholders. And so now I'll pass back off to Tom for a few closing remarks before we take your questions.

Great job. Thank you, Mary Andrews. Look, our two-pronged strategy has worked, is working and will work in the future. Jason and Jerry talked about enhancing our core through our strategic disciplines. It is key to growing organically. Ronnie talked about expanding our reach. And as you've seen, we do that with discipline and marked strategy, so that we're expanding our footprint effectively and creating value for our existing footprint. All of this, this strategy is so important, and it is working, but all of it is underpinned by 5 facts. Number one, we're in the right products, which is aggregates and downstream is selective markets. Two, we're in the right markets. Vulcan Materials is in the fastest growing markets in the country. Three, obviously, we have the people. And beneath these people is really strong teams. And those people for harnessing technology and innovation to enhance our core. We also have the most attractive portfolio in the industry, and we continually enhance that portfolio, as you saw, with discipline. You put all of this together, I think it's quite obvious that Vulcan Materials is the most compelling investment opportunity in this sector. Thank you. And if my colleagues will join me on stage, we'll take your questions.

All right. So I've summarize -- we've got a number of questions here for the group, but I've summarized a few of them to kind of get us started as others come in. So let me just kind of start with those. I think the first would be, can we talk more about our pricing momentum you're seeing and the expectations for pricing going into 2023?

Let start this off Jerry.

Yes. I think we continue to see really good momentum with pricing going into 2023. We're right now having conversations with our customers on 2023 pricing, which pretty much across our footprint will be effective January 1 in all end uses. So I think we feel confident about where we are and where we're headed with 2023 pricing.

Tom, for the footprint that I have, we've got rock -- situations where rock's demand is outstripping supply. We continue to see good opportunities for pricing. Like Jerry, we're having those conversations right now with all of our customers for 2023 pricing. And the outlook, I think, is quite good for the remainder of the year, and it's accelerating and into 2023.

Yes. Same for both Texas and California. And when I look at Texas, again, all the demand for the different markets is really strong. And then you also think about what we just witnessed with the railroads and as they got their potential strike settled, they got a pretty healthy contract coming. So I think a lot of that is going to -- again, it's going to put momentum behind because the transportation network in Texas, we have to rely on rail. So I think there's a strong momentum there. In California, it's again, a very high value market, and we see a lot of momentum for pricing there as well.

Yes. I think I would summarize it with, I think we are set up well for '23. Obviously, the work we're bidding right now will ship in the first half. I think the teams are working on fixed plant price increases for January 1. We're having those conversations early and right now. So while I think we've got a good start on '23, and we're set up real well, but we've still got work to do.

Okay. I guess, related to that, staying on the pricing theme, kind of some comments around the pricing assumptions supporting the targets that we just laid out in terms of just kind of longer-term look at pricing.

Yes. I think that as you look at those targets and the $11 to $12 target and with less growth of tons than what we've historically done, what we're doing is accelerating our growth in unit margins. And I think what you heard from this team is our disciplines give us confidence that we can grow our unit margins, that we can grow them in good times or when we have challenges, which you've seen and that we're accelerating that growth.

No, I agree, Tom. I think with the Vulcan Way of selling, we're getting out in front of the customer. We're providing solutions. We're getting value for our products. I think we showed you that today. And then with the Vulcan Way of operating having the ability -- this technology is so new to us, right? And it's in our top 100 plants and having the ability to leverage that technology as we go forward to control and reduce our cost is really going to help us grow those unit margins.

Yes. I think that one of the things that, to be clear, when Jason showed a slide of our cost, CAGR over inflation and how we were beating it, the technology in those plants is not built into that. We just rolled that out. I mean that's brand new. So more to come on that. And our people are getting better at this. So again, I think what this gives us is the confidence that no matter what happens, we can grow unit margins and that we can actually do it faster than what we've done in our history.

Anything else you want to add to that in terms of assumptions around the targets, pricing, that kind of thing?

I think they've covered it. The key is those margins. And you can tell from the bars up there on that graph that we plan to accelerate that unit margin improvement. And like Jerry just talked about the Vulcan Way of operating and the Vulcan Way of Selling are really going to be our keys to doing that.

Switching to volume, I guess, related to the targets, talk about timing and maybe what supports the volume assumptions underneath the targets, talk a little bit about that.

Well, we'll talk about what you guys are seeing in your markets today, and then we'll go to that.

Yes, my markets, I have sort of the Gulf Coast area of the United States and also Arizona and New Mexico. And we've seen a little bit of pullback in residential, but non-res continues to be really strong and big projects, we continue to quote. And then the highway work is -- we're starting to see an acceleration with the IIJA money starting to trickle out. So we feel good about volume and where we are.

Yes, I'll just kind of work from south to north. And if you look at Florida, the DOT is very healthy. Residential, the single-family, we're seeing a little bit of a drop there. But again, the fundamentals are quite good. And I would say that's across going from south to north. As you -- and as I said, supply is right now, can't keep up with demand. If you go to Georgia, you have elements of that supply not keeping up with demand in Georgia. You've got a really healthy DOT, as you heard last night. Same thing in South Carolina. The same thing in North Carolina. I would tell you, in North Carolina, what we've had is the DOT has now recovered, and we're seeing really good letting that -- and in Virginia, a very strong DOT program, very good demand and same thing in Maryland.

Yes. I mean I'm seeing the same thing these guys are in Texas. Texas DOT has been very consistent. And so I think what Jule said, I mean we have this underpinning of funds to come and it's just going to be even greater opportunities. So Texas is clicking on all cylinders. As Tom mentioned, population matters. We have a lot of people still moving and relocating to Texas. So that's giving us all kinds of opportunities in Texas. California is interesting because California is one that over time that we haven't kept up with infrastructure there. So we do have infrastructure dollars flowing in California. We have other ways of funding them to with Prop 1. I mean we have the opportunity with that. We have a lot of existing payments there that have not been taken care of. And so there you'll see a lot of resurfacing, a lot of reconstruction. So I think both of those markets give us a lot of opportunities.

Mary, just talk a little bit about what we saw in our past goals and how much we grew over what tonnage versus what's in our future goals?

Yes, that's right. So I think if you look at -- look back to 2017, since we've talked about that a lot today, we were shipping a little over 180 million tons. So basically, from '17 to now, we've come 50 million tons, right? Obviously, some acquisition growth in there as well. We were generating $6 in cash gross profit per ton in 2017. So we've improved $2. And our new goal now is to go $3 to $4 on the next 25 million to 35 million tons. And I think the key, more than time as we always say that we're going to focus on the things that we can control. And so what we are focused on is compounding those unit margins as we gain incremental tons and not as focused on the timing of exactly how that will play out.

Thank you.

We'll stay on the volume theme, just can we get -- drill down a little bit more about how we're serving the Gulf Coast, Tom, maybe an update on Mexico. Any update on Mexico and just how we serve Gulf Coast?

Yes. The news on Mexico is there is no new news. We are -- we were shut down illegally. We are not producing or shipping out of Mexico. And the question is, it's always been, what can you mitigate those tons? And the answer to that question is no. The railroads have, as you've heard throughout today, they've had their bottlenecks. And so the rock is actually short in those markets, and it'll probably delay some jobs. What happens in Mexico, there is a NAFTA case, which the tribunal let us reopen with further evidence and further damages. And we'll hear that probably in the next year and seek the damages for the illegal shutdown of the operation. But at this point, that's built into our numbers. And you're seeing the durability of this company that even though we took that hit, we continue to improve the value to our shareholders.

Okay. Talk a little bit. There are several questions in here about maybe inflation in diesel more specifically. So any thoughts around kind of how we're viewing diesel right now and maybe what we're kind of thinking in terms of longer term maybe in the cost side of the targets?

Yes. That's a tough one. And we can't obviously control the price of diesel. We can control our operating efficiencies, and that's what we're focused on. And you've seen us control our costs even with inflationary pressures, particularly diesel. If it comes down, it will help our cost, and we'll take that money -- take that price and that savings and cost to the bottom line. Again, we control how we use diesel, not what it costs. We control the operating efficiencies that Jason talked about to offset headwinds that we can't control like diesel.

A couple of questions in here about, talk a little bit about the M&A environment, the pipeline, kind of what we're seeing, attractive opportunities where we are.

Yes. As we talked about, always with M&A, this is about discipline. What markets do you want to be in, what positions do you want in those markets, what are the synergies that are unique to Vulcan? And don't overpay. And once you get it, integrate it rapidly and accurately. I don't see big one like we saw with U.S. Concrete anytime soon. We've obviously pursued some more traditional aggregate bolt-ons which we're very happy to get in strategic markets and really improve our position in those markets. So as I looked at it, I would point you towards more traditional smaller bolt-on acquisitions that are focused on aggregates.

Maybe a question -- there's a couple of questions in here about the 4 disciplines and maybe I'll summarize it to say, can you talk about the progress in '17 and kind of opportunity, where you are maybe use the baseball analogy of early innings, middle innings, late innings kind of thing, just to give people a sense of maybe what they've contributed to this point, but also moving forward?

So Jerry, why don't you take selling and Jason, you take operating.

Yes. I'll take selling, Tom. The baseball analogy, I would say we're in the mid to late innings. In 2017, we rolled this out with a strategy around it. And I gave you a little color about that today. And so it is well ingrained in our culture, and it's working really, really well across our footprint. So how do we get better? And we're going to play extra innings because we're always trying to continuously improve. And this new technology -- right now, we have some disparate systems. We've got good data, but we've got some disparate systems. And we're moving into this new digital sales platform which will be rolled out across our entire footprint, first half of next year. It's going to give our sales reps that real-time information at their fingertips to make them more efficient, more customer visits, less price leakage, and the other thing it's going to be a much more better digital experience for our customers, and we're really excited about that. Right now, in our industry, it's tough to order material on a mobile phone or even a website. And we're going to be able to do that with the new technology, and we're excited about it.

Yes. No, thanks, Mark. I think from a bulk operating perspective, I actually don't like the baseball analogy because it depicts an end. And I don't think we ever end. And we've been at it for a really long time, and we continue to work on the health and safety, the customer service, the productivity. And as you saw today, there's some really neat things that are going to take us another step as we go forward with the visibility that we're going to get into our plants, and we're going to continue to look at it. And our people do that every day in our plants. It's never an end, we continue to go and push.

Yes. I think it's well said, Jason, for both of these, particularly Vulcan Way of selling, what we've learned is we're learning upon learning. So if you looked at our goals for Vulcan Way of selling back in 2017, we've probably checked the box on all those goals, but in embedding this, we've actually created new goals and learned more. So that's what we are in extra innings. And to Jason's point, this is also about culture of continuous improvement, which I think is embedded in who we are today. These strategic disciplines have helped that. But again, this is a journey, not a destination. And so -- and we are learning upon what we didn't know before.

So related to that, could you talk a little bit about how they would help you integrate acquisitions, capture synergy opportunities, those kinds of things?

Yes. More faster. I mean this allows us to capture value in greenfields or in acquisitions that much faster because you have the disciplines, you have the tools and you have the training. We've seen that. I mean we've seen it over the 2 we just did, we actually traded best practices and technology with U.S. Concrete. So we are seeing this, but it also gives us confidence that once we close an acquisition, we can move that much faster to integrate it and get it up to deliver value for you, our shareholders, that much faster.

Maybe switching to end markets a little bit. There's a number of questions in here about infrastructure. Can you just talk a little bit about how the DOTs are combating inflation that they're seeing right now in terms of new projects and lettings?

Yes, I'll let you guys talk about the individual DOTs, and then I'll summarize. So can you start?

I can start with -- and George has been the most public about the inflation and the impact of that, and they've turned back a few jobs because jobs have come in over what they were expecting. That's really the only DOT within my footprint that I've heard a lot of conversation about it. And I think as you heard last night, there's an element of some of those costs are coming down. And in the long term of it, I think we're going to see significant benefit from IIJA and DOT has been able to work their way through that.

Yes, in Texas we're seeing the same thing. And I think as you heard last night as well, with some of the inflationary pressures we saw early on, Texas DOT had to rethink the way they were estimating jobs and some numbers came in quite aggressively above engineer estimates. But I think as you heard last night, the same things happening in Texas is they got multiple bids coming in, and those bids are within a very tolerant range, they're awarding the jobs. I mean, they can't stop. The jobs have been there. The jobs have been prepared. The growth is there. They have to let these jobs. And so the DOTs are going to -- they'll adjust, they'll rethink their assumptions around their estimates, and then they'll let the work. They got to get it out.

Yes, I'm seeing the same thing. You see the DOTs prioritizing jobs. I haven't seen any jobs where they pulled the letting. So they might just make the priority a little bit different. A few jobs may get pushed here and there, but they're not getting canceled.

I think one thing to remember, while inflation, particularly in energy cost, is the headline right now, it's starting to moderate and it will level out. One of the things that -- also, I think, is missed is, while the headline is IIJA talk about it because it's $853 billion. You also got to remember you guys -- as Jim Tymon said last night, you got substantial funding, new funding from states and you have COVID funding. So there's a lot of money out there. I don't think it's going to be gobbled up by inflation. We'll see growth.

Sticking with the same theme, any risk with all the funding that states would substitute projects versus the IIJA being incremental?

No. I mean first of all, once the states get federal money, they're not going to give it back and they have to match it. But also, you got to remember that embedded in the state legislatures, the bills that pass increasing gas taxes, it's all firewall. It only can be used for highway construction. So -- and they're not going to give it up.

Switching to housing, I guess, single-family specifically. I guess, can you talk about the impact of single-family residential versus the other two major end markets and kind of how we're thinking about that impact on our ability to continue to grow our margin in '23.

Yes. As we said, the leading indicators are challenged with single-family and that's obviously because of inflation and cost. And while that's there, as I said, the fundamentals in our market is still there. I mean you have record low inventories, population growth and household formation in Vulcan-served markets. That being said, multifamily in leading indicators are double-digit growth. As you saw in non-res, it's up 30% in Vulcan-served markets. And obviously, public and highways are coming on strong.

All right. Maybe back to the -- I guess, the theme in this was technology and what we're innovating there. I guess, can we talk about kind of quantifying or talk about the -- and talk about the opportunity, the upside opportunity from the investments in technology in the business?

Why don't you handle sales and ops and then I'll...

Sure. Sure. I think on the selling side, the technology and data we're using gives us confidence in meeting the $11 to $12 margin. I mean it's allowing our sales force to be more efficient, to go after the right opportunities at the right price. And we're also delivering value to our customers. You saw the logistics platform. That's a real solution for us. It makes us a preferred provider, supplier to our customers. So I think that will continue to allow us to grow not only with volume but price, which supports that $11 to $12.

Yes. No, Jerry, I think that was really well said. I mean the Vulcan Way of operating gives us the confidence that we can achieve that $11 to $12 per ton over time, along with our people that are out there in the field executing it every day and driving the value in our plants.

Yes, I just think it gives us insight into all phases of our business to help us move faster further and with more profitability. And that is why we're confident in we're going to $11 or $12 per unit margin faster than what we've ever done in our past.

So related to Vulcan Way of selling, Vulcan Way of operating. Maybe this one is for Darren to kick off. But we mentioned this kind of culture shift, right, in implementing this back to 2017. Can you talk about some of the people-related struggles with this, right?

I'll start. Yes. I think that this is one of the things that was probably one of the hardest miss. We talked about the technology and the tools and the processes, particularly in the Vulcan Way of selling. This was a shift for us. And it was more accountability and clear goals of what we had to do. And -- in all of this, we're past that. This is in our language, it's who we are. It's in our culture of continuous improvement. And so we're -- that hurdle has gone and actually the fact that it's embedded in our culture now, pushes the initiatives forward faster.

Yes, Tom, I think you're right. When we implemented this process, obviously, there was a lot of communication, a lot of expectations regarding the rhythm, and that was a cause of change from the existing sales team that actually had their own way about how they would interact with our customers. The structure has been in place, it's embedded in the day-to-day rhythms of our employees. Now did that impact some folks that have been around for a while with their own expectations on how to engage with our customers? Yes. But overall, our sales team embraced the tools, the rhythms, the processes, and now we're showing significant impact in our performance.

Yes. The thing that I might add to that, Darren, is that when we bring new people into the organization now using Vulcan Way of selling as an example, we usually give them a cell phone and your customer list and off you went, and there will be some coaching around it, of course, right? But now we have a process that we can share with them. We can -- we have a way to coach them very deliberately, very intentionally. And we've got people that are coming from outside that have given us fantastic feedback relative to that process that is what we call Vulcan Way of selling.

Switching gears a little bit. Any update on, I guess, well, let's back up. Back to the targets, any thoughts around the balance kind of between volume, productivity versus price versus cost kind of thing in terms of balanced approach to getting to the $11 to $12. Is it more weighted towards one or the other kind of thing?

Yes, I'll take volume first and then I'll work through the chain. Volume -- the leverage on volume is always important to us. And it's very helpful in the aggregates business. And it's a big lever. But I think in -- with us employing our strategic disciplines, we've now proven that even if we take a volume hit, we can expand our unit margins. We did it during the pandemic. And it gives us confidence that no matter what, we're going to improve our profitability. The price is a big lever for us. And as you see, we've gotten a lot better at being more nimble and being able to react faster with pricing, depending on what's happened with outside forces. And then to follow that up, obviously, price is only as good as what you take to the bottom line, and that's where the Vulcan Way of operating was. That price, we believe, belongs to our shareholders, and we should take it all to the bottom line and not give it away in cost.

So related to that, a question here about our confidence to continue to grow cash gross profit if volumes are actually down.

Well, I mean, look at history, we obviously think that pricing in aggregates is inelastic. And we've done a really good job even with some pretty tough headwinds of managing our cost, and that's our goal, to quarter in and quarter out, as Mary Andrews talked about, continue to improve that unit margin regardless of what happens with outside forces we can't control. It is about continuous improvement and controlling what we can control regardless of what happens with the outside world.

Switching back to M&A. We put up a map that showed 35 MSAs that we're in, 15 that we're not. So there's still some white space on the on the map, just talk about what makes an attractive market, markets that we might be interested in, opportunities within our footprint. That kind of thing.

So obviously, there's always opportunities in our footprint. And we -- as you just saw us this year we're very good at that. And it's not sketched in. As Ronnie talked about, this is a targeted approach to it. We know where we want to go and how we want to structure those markets. I think as far as new markets, obviously, population growth is important. It is a big driver of demand, but also infrastructure needs are important. And you've seen that in New York and New Jersey, and we're very pleased with our aggregate positions here. And so as we -- and we'll look at what are the barriers to entry, what is the structure and that's where you'd be disciplined about, all markets are not for Vulcan. But if you've got population growth, good infrastructure and it's structured correctly, we'll be understood in that market.

A question here about how we think about incremental margins in the long-term targets?

As we always tell you, we've long given that 60%, and we'll take you back to that. But you can see, again, what we're really anchoring on is what that unit profitability is that we can deliver. And we think that $11 to $12 is where we're going, and we'll take you back to those long-term averages.

Question here maybe about targeted leverage range and kind of just thinking about the capital allocation. I know you kind of went through it a little bit, but maybe just kind of talk about kind of where we are and being at the top end of the range.

Yes. So as you know, after the U.S. Concrete acquisition, our focus was to get back within our stated 2 to 2.5x range. We're right back at the top of that right now. And so as we talked about we're going to just take our same disciplined approach of taking the great benefit we have of being very cash generative and looking at those priorities of our reinvesting in our franchise then seeing what the opportunities are for growth. Obviously, we can't always predict exactly what those will be or when they will be. And so that will depend on what is then left as excess cash to return to shareholders.

There's a couple of questions back to the reference to the 100-plus locations that we stood up the productivity dashboards and things that we've got going on in the operations. Can we talk about kind of maybe Jason explain the benefit to yield and maybe why it's not always more tons, it's the right tons kind of the comment that you made the right tons at the right time. Maybe just kind of explain kind of how you've seen that progress in those 100 operations?

Sure. I'll go back to a little bit of a fundamental is when you break a rock, you get a certain split out of that rock. And what you do is you size that. In certain materials they come out of that are in more demand than others. For example, our asphalt stone sizes are typically we end up being -- there's more demand for those. And so what we mean by more of the right tons at the right time is driving that yield to get more of those asphalt sizes in this particular example than what we have had previously. And we do that through the visibility into the plants that we've now gained.

So a question here about ESG. We're happy to see you're setting ESG targets and head in that direction in terms of marking progress. Maybe just some thoughts around how we're going to update that and measure ourselves against that moving forward?

Sure. We will be continuing to do annual reports on our ESG efforts and targets. So our most recent report, which came out in May of this year is found on our ESG website, I can get you there if you need help getting there. And we're going to continue putting out what our aspirations are and then what our progress is. We'll also be adding targets. We wanted to start with some of the things that were clearly most important to investors because we've heard in our off-season outreach, a lot about people, safety and health and climate change. But I think as you saw in the presentation, there are a number of factors because of the business that we're in that we pay attention to and we're looking forward to doing more in those areas. At the same time, we're using that to drive productivity and optimize our transportation.

Specific question on maybe how we're utilizing our Panamax-class vessels, given where Mexico -- that we're not shipping from Mexico?

Yes. So remember, there are all kinds of products out there. We've actually got them with freight charters and they're running with different products beside aggregates but we're also a member shipping out of Canada with Panamax-class vessels. And so they're busy right now. And we think there's plenty of demand out there to keep them busy.

Some thoughts around how to think about annual capital spending needs during this?

Yes. So what drives our maintenance CapEx, right, is volume. So it will vary over time depending on our product volumes in all of our lines of business. But we don't expect the operating needs to substantially change. And as we talked about from a growth standpoint, we view those growth capital investments as part of our balanced growth strategy of using acquisitions and greenfields or other growth investments. And so we have a number of those in the works, and those we evaluate on a project-by-project basis to ensure they're generating the types of returns that we expect. So that will vary over time on where we are in those projects. One thing to remember about those growth investments in the greenfields is you have the added benefit of being able to control the timing of that spending. And so I think you saw during the pandemic in 2020, where we had the ability to pull back on some of the projects and control that. And so that's a lever that we'll have going forward as well as we balance our capital needs with the cash that we're generating from the business.

Question in here about how we think about the -- what would be core and noncore to the portfolio in terms of things we think about when we're deciding that? Is it lower growth regions, profitability, those kinds of things?

I think that if you look at Vulcan, we always look at it as a portfolio of assets and if it earns appropriate returns through the cycle, and we're the best owner of it, we'll keep it. If not, somebody else -- we will look for a new buyer and we'll take that money, that capital and put it back into our aggregates growth. I think that as far as priorities, aggregates is always at the top of the list and high-growth markets are always on the top of the list. And some of our most effective, highest returns are buying aggregate facilities that are adjacent to existing markets where we operate. And those are always some of the most attractive that will -- and when it comes to greenfields, obviously, as Ronnie pointed out, what we're looking for is always where are the growth quarters in those existing markets. If there's an -- and when do we need to go out there because there's not always a quarry or a distribution point to buy in those growth quarters at that point as far as time to look at greenfields. In greenfields, while we do them, they are difficult to do. They take -- that's not something you just go out there and do in a couple of years, they take decades, and they take a lot of hard work by this team and their staffs. And they're just plain hard to do, but the benefit of them is you don't pay a premium for them, and you control -- assuming you have the permit, when market demands, you open them up. So your timing you control what you don't always do with acquisitions.

It's a question here at Mary Andrews, I think you've mentioned this, but maybe a little more comments or revisit the downstream assumptions within the EBITDA targets. I think you talked about margins.

Yes. So obviously, over the last few years, the downstream margins have been volatile with the energy mostly. And so the way we're thinking about our longer-term goals is returning those gross margins and asphalt back to sort of their historical norms and same in concrete that we would expect the margins to perform how they have in the past, absent the current challenges of inflation and particularly energy cost in asphalt.

And I think you've seeing that happen in asphalt. I mean, we really -- you saw price jump in asphalt in the second quarter, and we're starting to catch those costs. Those costs would probably subside at some point in time. But the asphalt unit margins are traveling right back to where it would normalize, what we've seen in history. And obviously, if prices come down in energy, then we get the advantage of putting that back in our pocket.

All right. I think we had about 30 minutes for this. So I think we're good.

Well, listen, again, we're flattered you're here. We appreciate your interest in Vulcan Materials. Thank you for your time, and we look forward to updating you on our strategy and our goals. Thank you.