EMCOR at 24th Annual Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Thursday, 18 September 2025, EMCOR Group Inc. (NYSE:EME) presented a strategic overview at the 24th Annual Diversified Industrials & Services Conference. The company highlighted its robust performance in diverse markets, focusing on high-margin opportunities and long-term customer relationships. While acknowledging challenges in the commercial market, EMCOR remains optimistic about growth in sectors like data centers and pharmaceuticals.

Key Takeaways

• EMCOR’s revenue is growing three times faster than its workforce, emphasizing efficiency.
• Data centers contribute 20% to 25% of total revenue, with significant growth anticipated.
• Healthcare revenues have surged by nearly 40%, showcasing strong sector performance.
• The company prioritizes M&A with firms that align culturally and operationally.
• EMCOR’s strategy focuses on financial discipline and leveraging a skilled union workforce.

Financial Results

• Building Services: Over 70% of this segment is mechanical service, achieving high single-digit EBITDA margins.
• Mechanical Services: Experienced a 7% growth in the first half of the year, with a 12.5% CAGR over three to five years.
• Data Centers: Account for 20% to 25% of total revenue, reflecting substantial sector demand.
• Healthcare: Recorded an impressive growth of almost 40% in revenues.
• Construction Business: 50% to 55% of revenues are from projects exceeding $10 million.

Operational Updates

• Workforce: EMCOR employs 46,500 people, with 80% working in the field.
• Union Workforce: Offers a competitive advantage by providing skilled labor flexibility.
• Supervision: Growth is constrained by the availability of qualified supervisors.
• Project Mix: Revenue is evenly split among projects over $10 million, under $1 million, and those in between.

Future Outlook

• Data Centers: Cloud-based applications are expected to double in the next five to seven years, with a growth rate of 9% to 12%.
• Energy: Anticipates new centralized power plants and potentially more nuclear facilities.
• Commercial Market: Fire and life safety builds are expected to rebound, particularly in warehouses.
• Midstream: Projects for natural gas, including compressor stations, are anticipated due to power sector demand.

Q&A Highlights

• Union Workforce: EMCOR views unions as partners, enhancing operational capabilities.
• M&A: Focuses on acquiring companies with strong cultural alignment and management depth.
• Industrial Sector: Despite smaller planned turnarounds, the team continues to generate cash effectively.

In conclusion, EMCOR’s strategic focus on diverse high-margin markets and disciplined financial management positions it well for future growth. For more details, refer to the full conference call transcript.

Full transcript - 24th Annual Diversified Industrials & Services Conference:

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: All right. Everybody wants to talk about the commercial market today, right? Thanks,

Unidentified speaker: Tony. Well, with that, I’ll maybe turn it to you, just give a brief state of the union, get some more direct questions for you, Tony. But thoughts on the first half where you I see things going

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: mean, look, things are happening over the last couple of years, mostly like we expected. I think we’ve been pretty thoughtful about how we’ve allocated capital to position ourselves where we are today. The things we’ve done to build the company over a very long period of time as far as the culture we have, we’re a values based company with a very, very specific operating model that we train on. We’ve had really good success with our labor management and ability to track labor and build supervision, which is absolutely critical for us. If you look at the markets we’re serving today, clearly, I mean, I made the joke about commercial, nobody wants to talk about that, right?

But at the end of the day, we’ve built a very strong position in the data center market on a fire, life, safety, electrical and mechanical delivery. You see that in our numbers. You see that in our RPOsbacklog. We’re serving the traditional manufacturing market pretty well. The high-tech manufacturing market can be a little lumpy, but we have very good positions on some key semiconductor sites, but also pharma, bio life sciences and even the EV chain.

Continue to see strong demand, especially for fire and life safety in the battery plants. I personally believe most of us will be driving the hybrids ten years from now, maybe not EVs. And I think that we still have pretty good strength in our energy and sustainability, energy efficiency business. You see that in our building services business, which is really 70% mechanical services, earning high single digit EBITDA margins to low double digit. And so, and that’s held its own, right?

And that’s grown mid single digits to high single digits despite the commercial market being basically flattish to down. And that’s a lot of the market it serves that institutional healthcare. We still have good underlying demand in markets outside of data centers and high-tech manufacturing. And if you look big picture over a long period of time, we continue the growth trends we’ve had. In mechanical and electrical construction, we continue to outgrow non res significantly, 400 or 500 basis points versus any non res print over time.

And in EMCOR overall, that’s 200 basis points. So it’s a growing company. We’ve expanded margins. We have great cash conversions. And all those things that have made us who we are over a long period of time continue to play well in the market we’re in, which is a market with more opportunity than we’ve seen in a long time.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Thanks, Tony. And a few questions.

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: Anything to add, Jason? I think that’s a good summary, Tony. Mean, right, everyone wants to talk about data centers and high-tech manufacturing. Yes, they’ve been a big player in our growth recently, but you have to look beyond that as well and look at the rest of the business and the core markets that Tony mentioned. And if you look at our core business, we’re still very diverse.

Data centers are only 20% to 25% of our total revenue and those other markets are growing mid single digits. If you think of who we are before we kick off here, we’re contractors, right, with great technical capability, pretty good application engineering capability. But we move to markets that earn margins, right? So we don’t spend a lot of time saying, oh my God, we’ll become an overweight data center in a local market. We look at a two or three year period and we say, how can we maximize margin in that local market, while still maintaining the relationships we need to with our core customers that we’ve had over a long period of time.

That’s how our guys think. That’s how they’re trained to change. That’s how they’re incentivized. And that’s how we want them to think.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. I promise not to ask about data centers for my first questions then. What I want to talk about maybe and this comes up inbound to me, but one of the questions that comes up is how EMCOR’s sort of scaled union workforce differentiates you from others. How do you respond to that?

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: I agree. Think having a union workforce right now in this market with flexibility the unions have shown and how we recruit people, especially in the states that are growing has been a real competitive advantage. People sometimes take unions and they immediately leap to New York City or they leap to industrial trade unions like the UAW, the United Mine Workers, the steel workers. God love them, my family members were members of those, right, that come from Western Pennsylvania. However, that’s not most trade unions, right?

Trade unions are very different than that in most of the country. Most of the country, the trade unions are our partners. We work through the associations like MICA and MCAA, and we work in partnership with them to develop a workforce. As you get south of the Mason Dixon line and out towards the Midwest, they want to put a team on the field to win work. So they allow us to have the classifications we need to do that.

And that allows them to grow their membership for a long time with the right people that eventually become journeymen. We work with them to develop training and we train on our own So it also allows people to come from other parts of the country where maybe there’s not as much work to travel into the markets that and you know they come with a basic skill level that allow you to be successful. So I look at it as an advantage. It allows us to build supervision. A journeyman is who becomes a foreman, he or she becomes a foreman.

And it allows us to have more standardized training across the country. So we run non union people in our industrial, our oil and gas business and some of our industrial businesses in the mechanical segment in the Southeast. By and large, our construction business, mechanical electrical is a union business. It has served us well and it’s especially served us well as we’ve gone and done these big jobs. And in markets that’s really allowed us to grow well is fire life safety, our electrical, our low voltage and just our standard pipe fitting.

And also our HVAC technicians are about 60% union in the building services business. And I think that scale is what allows us to react to our customers’ needs in different geographies and different markets. With confidence. And just to put it in perspective, that’s June 30 as a point in time. We had 46,500 employees, about 80% of those are out in the field.

And that ratio hasn’t changed. So we’re not adding a whole lot of overhead. And the other thing is, I think, it’s a productive workforce. So if you look and so you think about it, we’re buying less equipment today on these major jobs than we ever have. The owners are buying you at themselves for the most part.

And that workforce, we’re delivering revenue at three times the rate of what we’re growing our workforce over a five and ten year period. Said it another way, that 46,500, knowing that about 35,000 of them are tradespeople, that number would be well north of 45,000 tradespeople today had we not be getting the productivity we need to with that workforce through BIM and from prefabrication and also that it’s a trained workforce. And I think our union partners have a lot to do with that.

Unidentified speaker: You’ve pretty consistently grown your workforce year to year as you reported in the 10 I guess the question I have is where are you still most constrained?

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: It’s supervision, right? Our constraints, someone asked me a really good question after first quarter earnings and we did the conferences in early June. And I had never really thought about it this way. They said, how do you make sure that you have the A team on every job? Of course, you want to reflectively say, well, here’s how we make sure we have the A team on every job.

Well, you think about what we do. If we put the A team on every job, we never develop people. So what we try to do is make sure we have a good BB plus team on every job so we can develop people. I think our BB plus team is probably someone else’s A plus team, it’d be a little biased that way. But that’s how we develop a workforce, right?

You bring new foreman on jobs that have, maybe there’s five experienced foreman on that job and three that are just the first time out. Well, if they’re learning from the right people, right superintendent, the right project manager, now you’ve built three new foremen that they can go do that on another job in a project manager. And then if you were really good at sharing best practices and really good at peer learning, where you could send people to one of your other companies to see a job start up, to help with the estimating. You can build that supervision, that estimating, that project management faster than you could. And look, these large jobs have allowed us to do that.

And some of the contract structure and the owners intentionally do this sometimes so that we can build capability when we go into a new market with us. They’ll give us a GMP contract and say, look, we want you to do this. We want you to build the labor force and maybe you’ll take the next job’s fixed price, but we can do this together. And that’s new. That really wasn’t the case that people would do that five, six years ago.

So a lot of ways, the more thoughtful owners, coupled with the unions, coupled with us and the training we do, we’re all trying to build out a workforce that’s sustained over a long period of time. But our constraint is actually not the individual trades people. Our constraint is actually supervision.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. I mean, a couple of just around data centers, obviously topical. Tony, I think a year or two ago, you maybe made the comment that the new data centers are sort of 1.3 to 1.5 multiplier in terms of opportunity for you. Least. These things keep getting reengineered, evolving.

Is that still the right view?

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: Yes. Think in some cases, could even be more, especially mechanically.

Unidentified speaker: Yes. And the thing I’d

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: say about mechanically is if you look at our data center business, both electrical and mechanical had significant growth. Let’s use the ’25 as a point of reference. Electrical is growing more in dollars but off of a larger base. So if you look at the growth rates, our Mechanical segment is actually growing at a larger percentage. And some of that is just some organic expansion we’ve done into new geographies and the other piece of it is that mechanical content you’re referencing.

Right. You’ve got to get the heat off the AI data center chips. I mean, I’m far not an expert on how that actually works. I know the system we’re using to call it works and the power we’re bringing to those racks. But do I know how all that why those things are hotter?

I have no idea. I just know we have a load we have to control. Presumably, that’s showing in your RPO But are you still revenueing sort of traditional cloud based centers? Yes. So we did some work around this, only on our own numbers, but others.

We believe that cloud based applications will double in the next five years to seven years. That’s about a 9% to 12% growth rate. We would have plenty of work to do and have a healthy company doing just cloud based work. AI and it’s more than AI, it’s the applications you’re using now within these data centers to do analytics. So when you buy a software tool even before AI and you put our enterprise systems up in the cloud, things that we were doing offline on our servers are now in those applications.

And those applications are using a lot of computing power within those data centers. It’s hard for me to tell if it’s a cloud or the but I know we’re building more. There’s more geographic sites because a lot of this was a quest for power. Right? I think you heard me talk about that five, six years ago.

So we’re gonna run out of power, especially with the energy policies we had here the last four or five years. You know, intermittent power is not gonna power a data center. It can help, but you have to have base load power. And there’s been a quest for power and that’s why we’ve gone from serving two data center sites to 14. So you have this quest for power.

I think they feel pretty good. The major owners up till with the sites they’re building on now up to about 2,030, But new capacity has to start coming online twenty eight, twenty nine, thirty, thirty one. And then there has to be a serious build out thirty one to thirty five to keep this going. And I think there will be. You can’t buy a gas turbine right now of any size, the two fifty megawatt variety.

They’re sold out till 02/1930, 02/1931. But they’ll build more capacity, so there’ll be more gas turbines. I think nuclear will restart or there’ll be more nuclear plants, some of this all, I don’t know what that means, but they’re going to be built at scale in centralized power plants. I don’t think there’ll be a lot of behind the meter power built. I don’t think the operators would like to do that themselves because the utility has no responsibility to them than to provide power.

And I think they like the redundancy of the utility. So there’s all kinds of things that are going to happen. I think that’ll keep this growing. And a lot of smart people are thinking about it every day now. I know I ask

Unidentified speaker: you this all the time and I’m sure it’s still a ways out, but the retrofit opportunities for data center seems huge for you at some point. Is it happening yet?

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: Yes, not really. We do a lot of day two work in data centers. We don’t necessarily operate data centers. What I mean by that is we’re not taking in a lot of cases, we’ll do it for some financial institutions. But we’re not saying, okay, we want to be your operations and maintenance provider for that data center.

We haven’t been able to get the risk aligned on that as far as contract structure. However, we do a lot of trades work in those data centers. We do a lot of power to the rack. We help them restack with our low voltage people. We rent cable to those data centers.

We help rebuild the structured cabling. We do a lot of mechanical work in those as far as taking care of the mechanical equipment, anything from changing the filters all the way up through resurfacing the chillers, right? And we’ll continue to do that. Now as far as the retrofit opportunity, we haven’t seen that in any sizable way right now other than the day two work when they restack. I’m not sure how that’s going to play out.

I I the question is, are they going to try to bring more power into those? And is a retrofit really just a quasi rebuild versus a retrofit? What that means? I don’t know. How big those jobs will be?

Are they going to actually strip it down and rebuild the whole thing because they have the land? I think that’s to be played out yet, whether they’re just new jobs and they look like a new construction job or you’re actually just retrofitting that data center. The land is pretty valuable. The power to those data centers are pretty valuable. The water they use.

So how they’re going to do that with the ones they built ten years ago, I don’t know, but I’m sure we’ll be part of it when it But today, if you look at our RPOs It’s new build. 80% to 85% is new build. And then the day two work we’re doing for the most part isn’t even in RPOs because it’s a ticket. What about facility services eventually for these centers?

Unidentified speaker: Is that a real opportunity for you

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: to No. Think I said we haven’t been able to get the risk aligned. You got to really think through what’s it mean to sign up for consequential damages in a data center. And what do you cap that at? Is it worth it for the 10% or 12% margin you can make?

Or are you just better off providing individual trade services into those data centers? But the mechanical service business and the service part of our electrical business, it’s an opportunity. It’s one today. That’s the other 20% Jason is talking about in data centers. Anything else you

Unidentified speaker: think is misunderstood about that opportunity for you in data centers?

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: Yes. I think it’s not a quarter to quarter business. You know, these things can come in in big contract orders, or they can come in small contract orders because it’s a GMP job and you only have this much of a contracted, but it’s going to be this big. And just to remind people, Jason, why don’t you tell them the way our RPOs are actually what they are versus backlog that other contractors may report? So for us, the simplest way to think about it is, if something is in what we call RPOs, it’s a signed contract with a set value.

We’re not putting in amounts that haven’t been released to us in funding yet. So sometimes we’ll have a contract that specifies multiple phases of work, but only the first phase has been released or funded. We’re only putting what’s in front of us today, contract funded. Oftentimes, we’re working on a campus where we believe there’s a strong opportunity for follow on phases or follow on buildings. We’re not putting those in or estimating those.

It’s just what sits in front of us today contractually. So when the SEC or FASB FASB. One of those guys, right, they came up with a way to talk about backlog with accounting. Were pretty close to that. Was that about five years ago?

Maybe ten years ago? Seventeen, eighteen. Yes. We were so close to that definition anyway, we just went with that definition. So ours is actually the accounting standard for backlog, we call it.

And it is the name for, I don’t know why they didn’t use backlog, but anyway, there’s remaining performance obligations. And so like everything else we do, we report GAAP numbers. That also is a GAAP number also. So for us, when you look at that number, it’s a firm number, cancellations typically don’t occur and certainly haven’t had a material impact on us. So we’re not making guesses off work we’ll do at a site.

We’re not making guesses that we always did. Now we’re doing that when we do business planning, right? That’s different, right? Our guys will think, okay, this is what my annual plan is going look like. But we’re not doing that when we report to you RPO.

That’s a big deal because ours is more firm than most people’s.

Unidentified speaker: That might lead into some of the semi fab stuff, I imagine. I mean, what’s your visibility beyond what’s in RPOs for those types of jobs?

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: It’s pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s good. And then some of those places want the decision to make.

Right? Go back to the contract point. If that’s in a market that has a big data center build going two counties over, maybe that fab customer is a little more difficult to deal with, more risks, we may just go over there with that crew and do something different. Again, we’re maximizing margins to our best of our ability every day with an outlook to take care of our long term customers in a local market. We have to balance both.

While we’re not in a local market and as a project based place, we’re maximizing projects. I was just saying, while also balancing contract terms, project timing, flows. So it’s all of those factors together will dictate what work we ultimately take. But if you look at the end of the second quarter, we did book a follow on phase or Phase two semiconductor project. It was a large driver of the increase in our sequential RPOs from March to June.

Unidentified speaker: Yes. I think pharma falls into the high-tech category. There’s a lot of large capital dollars being talked about in The U. S. Do you like your position

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: We’re really well in RTP, Research Triangle Park, which is a big pharma center. We’re positioned okay in New Jersey to do that work, especially electrically. Indiana is another big place for it. We’re positioned fairly well there. And the other place we’re positioned well is Southern California, which is more a bio life, biopharma market.

So yes, we feel pretty good about where we’re positioned. We can do fire life safety anywhere in the country, much like the data center business or the EV business or anyone. Jason, maybe talk a little bit about, so we don’t bet on fads. So I thought data centers were more durable demand and semiconductors. Some of the big auto companies wanted us to dedicate abnormal amounts of our resources to them and go to those big sites.

They were going to build out these massive sites, which most of them didn’t materialize. We did do a fair amount of EV work, but that wasn’t the one we sort of put our chips on. However, we’ve had durable demand in batteries, right? Yes. So if you look at high-tech for us, broader high-tech, there’s really three subsectors in there.

And so the first we talked about being semiconductor. And round numbers, maybe that’s 40% or 45% of the revenues in high-tech. The next is biotech, pharma, life sciences, which you obviously just touched on and is probably about 20% to 25% of our high-tech revenues. And then you have what we call the EV value chain. And so to Tony’s point, that runs everything from EV manufacturing to battery technologies.

And so right about now, that’s maybe about onethree of the high-tech manufacturing revenues. What we’ve seen is, and particularly for our fire protection companies, we’ve had tremendous opportunity over the last several years in that space. What we’re starting to see now is maybe a shift away from traditional EV manufacturing to more of the battery technologies. And to Tony’s earlier point, our hypothesis is that we’re starting to see a shift towards maybe more hybrid technologies, but still a good opportunity for us in that space.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. I want to skip to healthcare, maybe some questions around that market. It’s been

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: a really good market. Yes, long term, durable market for us.

Unidentified speaker: And I guess maybe the pointed question is you’ve got a lot going on, Medicaid cuts, things like that.

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: We’re still going to take care of that market. Go back to my point about taking care of our long term customers in local markets, even though there’s other opportunities, we have to still take care of them, especially in the healthcare market, because that also leads to long term service opportunities in most of those companies. Once we build something, even outside of the mechanical service, we’re probably leaving behind 15 to 20 guys to do ad moves and changes, they never leave. So we’re going to service that market and we’re going to do the best. We don’t win everyone, but most major medical centers where we have capability, we get a chance to compete and win whatever major project they’re doing.

And typically, we have people at that site. And if we have a service either organization within that mechanical contractor or service capability electrical, which we almost do everywhere on the electrical side, mechanical are mainly in the mechanic service. But if there’s a certain that leads to a long term service opportunity. So yes, we’re going to continue to be big hospital builders. And I think if you look at health care outside of data centers, at least for the 2025, that’s a sector where we’ve had the most significant growth.

I think our revenues are almost 40% in the health care market. And for us, it’s a good split between retrofit and new build. We’re more balanced in that space. And the other part of that market is very so people that are doing that work are the same people that can do BioWide Pharma and the same people that can do data centers. The hospital is a very complex system.

If you would ever go back down in the basement and look out, you’ll see several different mechanical systems feeding it and the electrical both from a low voltage and mid mid voltage is pretty complex. And we do also some creative things with hospitals around combined heat and power and the things they do to sort of minimize their energy bill and have good backup. We have to have backup power, right? And so there are different ways they think about doing that.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Maybe just one on the commercial side. I think you’ve always talked about that being more retrofit oriented. The past, warehouse distribution has not been a bad market. Fire in that

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: Life safety first.

Unidentified speaker: Is that picking back up?

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: Yes. Cold storage, definitely on the Fire Life safety stuff. We are still start seeing some build coming back up for fire life safety on the traditional warehousing. It’s not been a big market for our traditional mechanical and electrical. We’ve done some really good jobs.

But typically, if we’re doing that, it’s, not a lot of air conditioning in those places, systems. But the electrical side, if they, some of the big Amazon centers had basically substations because they were charging the electric vehicles there. So when they’re building those, we did that work in a lot of places. But again, that tends to be much like the battery space that tends to be a fire life safety product for us, doing sprinkler work and alarms.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. And then on building services, you got back to growth, modest last quarter, but nonetheless back to growth. Can you talk about maybe the restructuring on the site based side? And is there anything in terms of future considerations, financial targets that you have or objectives you have for that that we

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: can So think I think it’s important to understand the split in that business, right? 70 plus percent of it is mechanical service, operating at high single digit EBITDA margins growing somewhere between 510% a year. And it’s done that for many, many years regardless of what the commercial markets do. Yes. If you look at the first half of this year, that mechanical services business is up 7%.

And if you look over a three to five year period, that CAGR is probably 12.5%. So then you have the site based business, which lost a couple of big contracts. There’s people that will take them at cost, right, to hope that they can do projects work, and we don’t do that. So what you’re seeing is those contracts came off and as a result, see growth again because the compare gets easier. The mechanical service business is continuing to play along.

Site based business for us is if we can serve somebody that values either our ability to deliver multi site services, there’s some banking infrastructure and does that, or the values good technical resources on-site, we have a pretty good manufacturing footprint there to do operations and maintenance. We do well, but they have to value that. And when they don’t or they decide to go a different direction or sometimes they bring it back in house, we don’t compete with that. It’s always been a service that we hope to get a multiplier off of and do some mechanical construction work or mechanical project work. And then the team that operates that knows how to scale up and down.

We did do a significant restructuring. We took out when we lose large contracts, you don’t need the infrastructure you had. So we took they did a tough restructuring. It was a tough thing for the team to do because they did a great job for those customers. But it’s something we think about how we grow.

It’s not something we demand growth from. But mechanical service, mechanical construction, electrical construction is really what drives the company.

Unidentified speaker: Just a couple of questions on industrial. On the last call, Tony, I think you mentioned an uptick in midstream activity could help the electrical piece of that. Yes. Can you talk Yes. About

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: So we do compressor stations. Anybody that’s in the midstream, they’re trying to do as many pipelines over the next three years as they can so they don’t get trapped again and not being able to do it, right? So therefore, they’re trying to do compressor stations. And of course, there’s demand from the power sector for more natural gas. The two go together.

That really industrial is a misnomer. I was telling Jason, maybe we should follow what it is. It’s an oil and gas business. It got named that because that was really the industrial we did. Now we do a crapload of industrial business services, especially in our mechanical and our electrical business segments.

It’s been a tough market. We have a great management team in that sector segment. They know what they’re doing. It’s a tough customer base. They’ve traditionally had very planned turnarounds.

I think they’re those turnarounds are becoming more prevalent again, the larger ones. They went through a three year, four year period where they were doing smaller turnarounds, and they would make that decision at the twenty third hour after they had us gear up to do the large service. So it’s a business that always generate cash. It’s a good team and it’s not a capital intensive business. Suffice to say it was our highest margin business ten years ago.

But I saw that.

Unidentified speaker: Yes. Good segue because I want

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: to talk about

Unidentified speaker: margins. We always ask you where margins can go, maybe in a different direction. Can you talk about how your operations managers, kind of the folks down at the subsidiary level are incentivized from a

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: margin perspective? Our guys are incentivized on return on net assets. So what does that really mean? It’s cash flow, right? And balance sheet efficiency.

And balance sheet efficiency. That’s what our folks get incentivized on. So obviously, margins help them. That’s the numerator, right? The denominator is a thirteen month average of net assets.

And so why do we do that? So order contractors get in trouble. They take work where the scope is not clearly defined. They can’t get change orders approved. They build cost in excess and then spend two years after the job arguing about how they’re going inflect.

That’s how contractors get the job, right? By focusing on return on that assets, our folks know that’s not what we really want to do. We’re not a revenue we’ve been growing rate. We are not a revenue driven company. We are a cash driven company.

And the way our guys can make more money for their team is to generate a better return on that assets. And what we expect them to do is adapt to their local market. If it’s a growth local market or if they have a growth bigger companies, they want to go to other markets. We think about how to invest to go in another market. We do that together.

And if it works, right, they can drive the return on that assets up. They can create a bigger pool for their people. But we want to do that all with an eye on cash efficiency because that is what’s good in a great market because it makes you pick the right work. And that metric is what’s good when the market churns, it forces us to focus on cost reduction to keep an eye on cash as we go forward. That’s fair summary, Tony.

So they focus on margins because it creates more opportunity, but they always are thinking about return on net assets. That’s a long time durable metric for a contractor, especially trade contractor. And it helps balance risk. Okay. And you’ve been pretty clear.

Unidentified speaker: I mean part of the success in the margins the last few years has been your ability to get better utilization out in the field, I good mean obviously bigger projects, more complex projects allow you to do that. Can you help us understand what the mixed picture looks like for you today versus, call it, five, ten years ago?

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: Just wanted to do that because we just went Sure. Through these numbers to talk

Unidentified speaker: If

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: you look today let’s look at our construction business first, and then let’s look at total import. So if you look at construction today, somewhere around 50% to 55% of our revenues are coming from jobs greater than $10,000,000 If you look at that same metric, let’s say, five years ago, that number would have been about 30 to 35%. So we’re seeing a scale up in terms of job You talked about the two construction. Not construction. So for overall what does that mean?

It means that overall EMCOR is generating only about 30% to 35% of our revenue from jobs greater than 10,000,000 versus five years ago, that number would have been about 20% of our total revenue. So if you boil that all down and step back and say kind of what a project sizes look like, a good metric, round numbers, is that today, onethree of our revenues are coming from jobs greater than 10,000,000 a third is coming from jobs less than $1,000,000 and a third is coming from that in between spot between $1,000,000 and $10,000,000

Unidentified speaker: Presumably, the RPOs reflect a similar mix?

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: Yes. Except that I would say that jobs less than $1,000,000 probably aren’t even really in RPOs. They turn so fast. Right. Okay.

Unidentified speaker: That’s great. That’s really helpful. And then the other question I had on margins, I mean, the investments you’ve made in technology, BIM, BDC, they get could argue it structurally changed your margin profile. How do we differentiate sort of high demand for quality craft labor, which you have versus sort of other things like that, that are driving the margins?

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: They’re hard to separate because that high demand for high quality craft labors would drove in some ways those investments because you can’t add enough people to do the work responsibly, right? So we were doing this before. And most of our fabrication lessons came from the healthcare sector. When we would do big hospitals, that’s really if you go back ten or fifteen years, that’s where we started really doing the big fabrication, whether we’re doing a big patient tower, whether we’re in the casino work. So we learned those lessons and of course, the manufacturing work.

And then quite frankly, the work we’ve done in some of our industrial businesses, even the oil and gas, you’re around a lot of fabricated work. So we’ve taken those lessons from the healthcare sector and applied them to the data center and high-tech world. And once you do that, once it gets there, it goes on steroids because the designs, you get integrated quicker up here in the design. They’re usually releasing 40%, 50% drawings. They’ll eventually get to 100%.

We come in and actually we start looking at that and designing for constructability. And then once we can, and then we think, and then while we’re doing that, we’re thinking about our prefab plan until we learn about all that in BDC. And who’s doing that is our folks in the field, the foreman that I talked about, the superintendents, the project managers. And we have now in our companies, the bigger ones, we actually have BDC managers and we have prefab people. And usually our better prefab people are people that came out of the field.

And they say, yes, that’s how we’re going to build that in. Can bring that skid. You got to think about the rigging to get it in. Got You to think about the connection points. Can you handle it on a job site?

It’s not as simple as, oh, yeah. Let’s build something as big as this room and figure out how to drop it into the job site. That’s you know, something that size is really we’re not in that business. We fabricate for our jobs.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Two more I want to squeeze in before we have to close. But one, Tony, sure you’ve been asked, but it’d be good to get your thoughts. I mean there’s been lots of higher profile consolidation activity in the sector, Quanta, Cupertino, DSI, Sterling, CEI. I mean what CEC, what’s it mean for you?

Are there still ample opportunities out for you?

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: Yes, there’s plenty of opportunities for us. Right? We if you look at the two largest three largest deals we’ve done over the last six, five years, it was it was Bachelor and Kimball, Quibby Holdings, and Miller. All of them have one consistent favorite. They have owners that really, really cared about what happened to their people and them long term because it mostly all work for us.

Right? We’re partners now. And there’s plenty of opportunity out there, especially as these companies have gotten bigger, they have high quality companies that really care about their people and who’s made them successful. We’re never gonna be the guys that are gonna be the private equity auction guys. We’re not particularly suited to that.

So how do we how do we really evaluate a company? And the smaller ones, we’re doing just pure tuck ins, if they can execute in the field, we’ll figure everything else out. The bigger ones, you know, when you’re working with a a bachelor and a Kimball or a Miller team or even Quibby, they can execute the field. Now their culture and their values have to align with ours, and they typically have to have depth of management team. And that’s where we together can create magic with those companies.

And a lot of times, the only company a lot of these folks want to sell to is us. They made that decision. They know our people. They’ve met our teammates out at the NECO or MCAA. They said, man, we like that M4 guy.

Feel like they still own the company, right? They still so the way we treat those folks is they’re our partners. They are considered CEOs. They’re my partners. I don’t I’m not the Imperial CEO, I’m one of them, right?

When Jason and I go do a review, nobody is standing up in the room, right? This isn’t General Electric in the day or as a result, we’ve been able to build this over a long period of time, right? I just happen to have this job. I have my job and those guys are better at things than I am and I’m better at things than they are other things. And together that makes it all work.

When we invest, we co invest, Right? They have to think about what return they’re getting. We co invest more time before building a fab shop or something. We have a very transparent culture. This doesn’t work.

So if we get a sense through a significant acquisition, we walked away, things aren’t making sense to us. We’re like, who are you kidding? We’re gonna figure it out. You might as tell us where your problems are. Then we’re gonna figure out where they are.

Every company has problems. Right? Everything has to place they get better. And so when when when the bachelor family or and the owners of bachelor and Kimball or, you know, Henry Brown and his brother, when they’re making the decision to sell, they’re worried a lot about what happens to their people. And by the way, they still wanna work.

You know, you you draw a straight line with a bachelor in Kimball. Brian Baxter runs our mechanical segment today. Right? He’s a perfect guy to run it. Henry Brown, building Miller and then accelerating his pace from where he was even before when he was doing a great job with it.

They now use more capital, risk aperture change a little bit, use it as a platform. The Quibi team has been fantastic. And then we have smaller ones we’ve done around that over the last five years that tuck into our existing operations. And I think it all starts with knowing who you are, where you really add value. And do those people really share your values?

Do they really care about the people mission? And do they care about the customer to get the job done? Are they going to be transparent? Are they going to be able to fit into our culture of teamwork and safety and mutual respect and trust? They’re not just words on a piece of paper.

And those values then feed a very specific operating model. At the local level, we believe in operational autonomy with Guidewire. But that only can work with transparency and that you have a very strong metrics driven culture. And if someone doesn’t want to be in a metrics driven culture or we get the sense they’re cowboys, it can’t work here. That doesn’t mean an entrepreneur doesn’t mean you’re an unabated risk taker, right?

We have an entrepreneur in our culture, but our folks are very aware of risk. And the companies we buy at scale, they have culture that are very aware of risk. This is a risk at the end, this is a risk management business across projects and services.

Unidentified speaker: That’s a great stopping point, Tony, Jason.

Tony Guzzi, EMCOR: Thank you. You. Thank you.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.