NV5 Global - Earnings Call - Q4 2024

Executive Summary

• Q4 2024 delivered solid topline growth but softer GAAP profitability: gross revenues rose 15% year over year to $246.5M, gross profit increased 13% to $122.2M, GAAP diluted EPS was $0.09; Adjusted EBITDA was $36.3M with 14.7% margin and Adjusted EPS of $0.28.
• Full-year 2024 gross revenues reached $941.3M (+10% YoY), gross margin expanded 160 bps to 51.3%, net leverage remained low at 1.4x; Adjusted EBITDA was $143.5M and Adjusted EPS $1.14.
• FY 2025 guidance initiated: gross revenue $1.026–$1.045B, GAAP EPS $0.52–$0.62, Adjusted EPS $1.27–$1.37; backlog entering Q1 2025 was $904M, covering 88% of low-end revenue guide, supporting confidence in outlook.
• Near-term stock reaction drivers: margin expansion plan targeting +150 bps in 2025 (utilization, G&A/IT optimization, lease consolidations), cash conversion targeted to rise to ~60% via contract milestone/billing cadence renegotiations; continued data center and utility tailwinds underpin top-line momentum.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

• What Went Well

  • Strong Q4 and FY topline: Q4 gross revenues $246.5M (+15% YoY) and FY 2024 gross revenues $941.3M (+10% YoY); FY gross margin expanded 160 bps to 51.3%.
  • Backlog, pipeline, and secular demand: backlog entering Q1 2025 at $904M (88% coverage of low-end FY25 guide), with strong utility and data center demand; “We enter 2025 with a robust backlog and tailwinds” – CEO Ben Heraud.
  • Strategic execution in high-growth verticals: NV5 awarded $14M contracts supporting AI-driven data centers, surpassing 1 GW of data center MEP/CFD analysis in 2024; “helped clients unlock ~300MW of additional computing capacity” – CEO.

• What Went Wrong

  • GAAP earnings pressure: Q4 GAAP EPS fell to $0.09 (vs $0.16 LY) and net income to $5.4M (vs $10.1M LY) due to higher acquisition-related costs (+$3.9M, including $2.4M earn-out fair value) and +$2.3M intangible amortization; prior-year Q4 benefited from a $5.2M flexible time-off (FTO) reversal.
  • Inflation and mix headwinds: inflation impacted margins (admin costs not easily passed through), and legacy fixed-price LNG contracts weighed temporarily on margins prior to mix shift to T&M/hybrid.
  • Working capital timing: elevated unbilled receivables on certain geospatial contracts due to milestone skew; management aims to renegotiate milestones to accelerate billings and collections in 2025.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss NV5's Financial Results for the Q4 and Full Year 2024 ended December 28, 2024. Joining us today are Dickerson Wright, Executive Chairman of NV5, Ben Heraud, CEO of NV5, Kurt Allen, President of NV5 Geospatial, and Richard Tong, Executive Vice President and General Counsel of NV5. I would now like to turn the call over to Richard Tong.

Richard Tong (EVP and General Counsel)

Thank you, Operator. Welcome, everyone, to NV5's Q4 and full year 2024 earnings call. Before we proceed, I would like to notify all participants that today's presentation can be found on ir.nv5.com and remind everyone that today's discussion contains forward-looking statements about the company's future business and financial performance. These are based on management's current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements are included in today's presentation slides and in our reports on file with the SEC. During this call, GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed. A reconciliation between the two is available in today's earnings release and on the company's website at www.nv5.com.

Please note that unless otherwise stated, all references to Q4 2024 comparisons are being made against the Q4 of 2023, and any references to full year 2024 comparisons are being made to full year 2023. In this presentation, NV5 has included certain non-GAAP financial measures as defined in Regulation G, promulgated by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. The non-GAAP financial measures included in this presentation are adjusted earnings per share and adjusted EBITDA. NV5 provides non-GAAP financial measures to supplement GAAP measures, as they provide additional insight into NV5's results. However, non-GAAP measures have limitations as analytical tools and should not be considered in isolation and are not in accordance or a substitute for GAAP. In addition, other companies may define non-GAAP measures differently, which limits the ability of investors to compare non-GAAP measures of NV5 to those used by peer companies.

A reconciliation of non-GAAP and GAAP measures is included in the appendix to this presentation. We will begin the call with comments from Dickerson Wright, Executive Chairman of NV5, before turning the call over to Ben Heraud, Chief Executive Officer of NV5, for review of NV5 operations. Edward Codispoti, Chief Financial Officer, will provide a review of Q4 and full year 2024 results. Dickerson Wright will then provide closing comments before we open the call for your questions. Dickerson, please go ahead.

Dickerson Wright (Executive Chairman)

Thank you, Richard. Welcome, everyone, to the earnings call today, which will not only present our positive accomplishments for full year 2024, but more importantly, our growth and profit improvement plans for 2025. We are very excited about the wonderful prospects for 2025. First, I will speak to our record performance in 2024. So let's turn to page three of our presentation deck. On the left side of this page, we present our comparison for the full year 2024 versus the full year 2023. So let's go through them. Organic growth increased over 100% to 6% of revenues. Our revenues grew from $857 million in 2023 to $941 million in 2024, a 10% increase. Adjusted EBITDA earnings, before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, grew from $134 million in 2023 to $143 million in 2024, which is a 7% increase. Gross margins grew from 49.7% in 2023 to 51.3% in 2024.

The center portion of the page speaks of our positioning in our three main segments: infrastructure support, geospatial operations, and buildings and technology. In these three segments, we concentrate on conformity assessment, or TIC services, included in at least seven of these main areas. We are very pleased with our 2024 performance, and we also reached our goal of $1 billion in revenue entering 2025. We are also excited about our future. We have set a specific revenue target of $1.6 billion by the end of 2028. What does our $1.6 billion revenue goal mean for shareholders, employees, and clients? For our shareholders, it means a continued increase in profitability. For our employees, it means increased opportunities for career growth, and for our clients, it means an ever-widening of our services across all geographic areas.

So I will now turn the call over to Ben Heraud, the CEO of NV5, for an update on NV5's operations.

Ben Heraud (SVP)

Thank you, Dickerson, and good afternoon, everyone. Please turn to Slide 4. NV5 enters 2025 well-positioned to build upon the momentum we have generated in 2024. We begin the year with the largest backlog we've ever had entering the Q1, with $904 million of backlog on a rolling 12-month basis. This is 8% higher than our backlog entering 2024. As we've discussed on prior calls, organic growth is a focus of NV5's operations, and the initiatives we introduced in 2024 will play a significant role in our accelerated organic growth in 2025. We also continue to see tailwinds in our key sectors of utilities, data centers, and digital transformation.

Though presidential executive orders and the Department of Government Efficiency have been covered broadly by media platforms, we have seen minimal impact due to the essential mandated nature of our work for the federal government and for state and local agencies. In 2025, we recognize the opportunity to expand our cash flows from operations and our operating margins. Improvements in these key metrics are in our control, and we have launched initiatives to strengthen our performance in these areas. Our CFO, Ed Codispoti, will speak about these initiatives in more detail later in today's presentation. Mergers and acquisitions continue to work alongside organic growth as a key component of NV5's growth strategy. Our pipeline of opportunities remains strong, and we continue to benefit from favorable multiples in our acquisitions as we target successful tech-enabled services that strengthen our testing, inspection, and certification, or TIC services, and bolster our existing platform.

I'll now turn the call over to Edward Codispoti, NV5's Chief Financial Officer, for an overview of NV5's performance in the Q4 and full year 2024, and an overview of our new cash flow conversion and margin improvement initiatives. Ed.

Edward Codispoti (CFO)

Thank you, Ben, and good afternoon, everyone. If you would please turn to Slide 6 of the presentation, I'll review our 2024 Q4 and full year financial results. Our gross revenues in the Q4 grew 15% to $246.5 million, compared to $214.9 million in the Q4 of the prior year. These are record Q4 results for the company. Our gross profit was $122.2 million compared to $108 million in the prior year, an increase of 13%. Our net income was $5.4 million in the Q4 of 2024, compared to $10.1 million in the Q4 of last year. And our GAAP diluted EPS was $0.09 versus $0.16 in the prior year period. Keep in mind that our GAAP results were impacted by increases of $3.9 million in acquisition-related costs and $2.3 million in intangible amortization expense.

Additionally, in 2023, our Q4 had a one-time $5.2 million reversal of expense related to the company's transition to a flexible time-off policy. Our adjusted EBITDA was $36.3 million versus $36.7 million in the prior year. Excluding the flexible time-off policy transition, the margins would have been similar in both periods at 14.7%. Our adjusted EPS was $0.28 in both periods. Gross revenues for the full year were a record $941.3 million, an increase of 10% over the prior year. Our gross profit was $483.2 million compared to $426.2 million, a margin expansion of 160 basis points. Net income was $28 million compared to $43.7 million in the prior year, and our GAAP diluted EPS was $0.44 compared to $0.71 in the prior year.

Just as in the Q4 analysis, please keep in mind that due to our acquisitive nature, our intangible amortization increased $9.6 million, and our interest expense increased $4.2 million. Also, 2024 had $11.2 million greater acquisition-related costs, driven in part by reversals of acquisition earn-out expenses in the prior year. Additionally, 2023 was impacted by the $5.2 million flexible time-off policy initiative. Adjusted EBITDA was $143.5 million compared to $133.8 million in the prior year. Our margin in 2024 was 15.2% compared to 15% in the previous year, excluding the impact of the flexible time-off policy initiative. Our net leverage has remained relatively low at 1.4 times. Our weighted average borrowing rate during 2024 and 2023 was the same at approximately 6.5%. However, the rate has been trending down favorably, as it was 5.8% as of year-end.

If you turn to Slide 7, I'll discuss some of the initiatives to expand our EBITDA margins and cash conversion that are currently underway. An important component of NV5's business model is to continue to expand our operating margins as we grow and benefit from our scale. Recently, our margins have been impacted by inflation and the integration period of some of our acquisitions. We currently have several initiatives actively in place to expand our adjusted EBITDA margins in 2025 by a targeted expansion of 150 basis points. The initiatives focus on optimization, utilization, and productivity, reducing administrative costs through scale, and consolidating and optimizing lease space. We generated $57.3 million in cash from operations compared to $62.2 million in the previous year. The decrease is primarily driven by working capital timing. We have a handful of geospatial contracts that have contractual billing milestones towards the end of the projects.

We are in the process of renegotiating some of these projects and anticipate that billings and collections will increase during 2025. This should translate into higher cash conversion rates. Our EBITDA free cash flow conversion in 2024 was about 40%. Through the renegotiation of contracts and optimization of billing cadence, we believe we can achieve a free cash flow conversion rate of 60% in 2025. We believe our strong balance sheet will enable us to continue to execute our business model as we focus on organic growth and strategic acquisitions. I'll now turn it back over to Ben for some additional comments.

Ben Heraud (SVP)

Thank you, Ed. Please turn to Slide 9 for an overview of NV5's unique business model. Though NV5 is typically lumped into the engineering and construction segment, NV5 is really better compared to businesses in the testing, inspection, and certification, or TIC industry. While engineering design is viewed as a conflict in the European TIC industry, it is a catalyst in the U.S. TIC market. The majority of our service offering is in the TIC space, and our engineering capabilities in civil, structural, MEP, and technology allow us to enter client relationships at a higher level, giving us a standing as the expert on the asset or system that we've designed and open the door for cross-selling of our high-margin TIC services. Our TIC services provide ongoing relationships with clients that extend past the design phase throughout the entire asset lifecycle.

These high-margin services are often recurring OpEx services that keep us engaged with clients for years and are a significant contributor to our margins that are higher than the industry average. On Slide 10, you'll see an overview of the infrastructure support segment's Q4 performance. We generated $111 million in revenue in the quarter, led by a strong performance in our utility services group. Our utility services group benefited from a strong demand for our utility undergrounding and LNG services. We also had strong performances in our infrastructure design and surveying business units in both East Coast and West Coast. The growth drivers for essential infrastructure support services remain strong, and one area that has received a great deal of attention publicly is the undergrounding of power lines due to the fires earlier this year in Los Angeles.

These types of high-profile events drive nationwide demand for these services in the near to midterm. One area that we're focusing on for 2025 is the leveraging of our geospatial technology platform for both infrastructure support and our buildings and technology businesses. Geospatial services provide ongoing client relationships in such areas as delamination aerial inspections, power delivery system resiliency, and asset management. On the right-hand side of the slide, I'd like to bring your attention to some of the acquisitions that we've recently made to strengthen our high-margin recurring TIC services. From conformity inspections and materials testing to building digitization, we continue to expand our expertise and reach in highly profitable TIC services that support margin expansion and long-term client engagements. Please turn to Slide 11 for an overview of buildings and technology.

Data center systems and design and commissioning continue to grow and now make up 15% of our buildings and technology portfolio. Clean energy also continues its strong growth, supporting energy conversion and electrification initiatives largely with public sector clients. Our growth drivers for the sector are in high-growth areas with strong demand, and as with the infrastructure support segment, we are focused on leveraging our geospatial platform for our buildings and technology clients. Two particular growth segments that we're focusing on include our international and data center groups. In the data center business, we are expanding into new geographies of Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia, and the Middle East, and now receiving direct requests from our clients in the European market. We've also seen success in cross-selling services to both domestic and U.S. clients to expand our existing relationships and services provided.

Some of the newer services that are gaining traction include power delivery for data centers, as well as clean energy, structural engineering, and fire protection consulting. For the geospatial segment update, I'll turn the call over to Kurt Allen, our President of Geospatial. Kurt.

Kurt Allen (President of NV5 Geospatial)

Thanks, Ben. As you can see on Slide 12, Geospatial recognized $69 million in revenue in the Q4, with 50% of this revenue coming from the federal government, 31% coming from utilities, and the remaining 19% coming from state and local government. We approached our 2025 budget process with an eye towards margin expansion and leveraging some of the cost efficiencies in our major 2023 acquisitions of the L3Harris Geospatial Software business and Axim Geospatial. We are confident that these will result in improved profitability and performance of the geospatial business. On the federal side of the business, we have had no contract cancellations to date coming from DOGE activities, and we do not see anything yet that will significantly affect our budget. We believe that the backlog we have brought into the year will enable us to weather any impacts.

In fact, DOGE activities may create opportunities for NV5, as history has shown us that when resources are constrained at agencies, they tend to increase their dependence on outside consultants, such as NV5. On a very positive note, we are seeing several of our growth drivers bearing fruit. Right after the first of the year, we announced a major award for topobathymetric LiDAR mapping for the South Island in New Zealand. This $multi-million-dollar award is part of our effort to expand internationally, particularly with our niche capabilities that we can project globally, such as topobathymetric LiDAR , satellite-based monitoring solutions, and EGIS. Additionally, our all-commercial growth driver has been on a successful path forward. Being beholden to government political change and budgets must be balanced with additional commercial business, and our utility business exceeded its bookings budget in 2024 by 38%.

We expect continued growth within this segment in 2025. Additionally, the last Congress passed a supplemental funding bill for Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Of that amount, we are expecting NOAA to contract out a record amount of tasking to their contractors in the late summer. NV5 is one of three contractors under this Topobathymetric LiDAR program, and we typically enjoy the largest share of wallet among the three eligible contractors. Next, we all witnessed with horror what happened to many families because of the catastrophic damage caused by the Palisades and Eaton fires in Southern California. As most of you know, NV5 has more than 900 employees living and working in California, and we felt obliged to help. NV5 acquired LiDAR over the fire area immediately after the fires came under control and when temporary flight restrictions were lifted for overflights above 7,000 feet.

The purpose of the acquisition was to quickly acquire and process provisional digital elevation data and get that data in the hands of responders. The initial data is most useful to model potential mudslide areas due to heavy rain. LA County, the California Department of Natural Resources, and the utility companies in the areas are all NV5 clients, and we believe the data provided made a difference in the response effort as the rain started to fall. Since then, the University of California, San Diego, has stepped up and purchased the data for the public domain. This allows NV5 to finish processing the data with additional meaningful analytics for the community. LiDAR is not only valuable for emergency response, but it is also useful for future wildfire mitigation.

If newly collected LiDAR over the entire Southern California area is part of the California Supplemental Package being considered by Congress, it will allow the communities, the state, and federal agencies to contribute towards reducing the fuel loads that cause these out-of-control wildfires. Additionally, we wanted to provide an update on Geospatial's effort towards artificial intelligence. The geospatial profession has been racing towards AI for a wide variety of deep learning and large language model applications for a number of years. NV5 has a team of data scientists to implement large language model or LLM services to our clients in support of their big data management challenges. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has relied on NV5 to employ LLMs to support their dredging operations around the country. AI has assisted the Army to make sense of dredge data that the human brain can't see.

We have recently entered our third year of the multi-million dollar contract with the Army Corps, and we believe this contract alone has positioned ourselves well in this space. Also, NV5 is using deep learning models to determine and understand irrigated landscape for water conservation in California and also for coastal resilience programs for NOAA. Both multi-million dollar AI programs drive efficiencies through automated processing that allows us to accomplish much, much more with less. Finally, we are seeing major government agencies move towards automated detection and change analysis from a more manual mapping process. Our ENVI Inform software workflow has allowed us to make this automated transition towards AI and to be among the multiple awardees for these types of activities for both the nine-figure LUNO-A and LUNO-B contracts for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

The U.S. Space Force has also contracted with NV5 for a similar automated detections proof of concept contract, and we are waiting an award decision from this client on follow-up work in the coming weeks. With that, I'll turn it back over to Ben.

Ben Heraud (SVP)

Thank you, Kurt. On Slide 13, I'd like to highlight some of the recent acquisitions that have joined NV5. Group Delta is a large-scale infrastructure testing, inspection, and certification in PFAS Environmental Services Company in Southern California. The acquisition expands our conformity assessment services in the region for electrical, utility, water, and transportation infrastructure, and its PFAS Environmental Services expand our PFAS capabilities. Global Fire Protection Group is a leader in the high-margin recurring fire protection consulting sector. Fire protection is a service that is in demand by all of our clients, and its first month with NV5, Global Fire Protection Group has completed $1 million in cross-selling with other NV5 business units, including data center projects. Southport Engineering is a provider of mandated energy efficiency engineering and owners' representation consulting in New York City and surrounding areas.

The city has been a target for our building systems design and energy efficiency consulting due to the mandate nature of these services in the region. In the domestic data center sector, we completed two acquisitions, Synergy BCS and Kisebach Consulting, to strengthen our data center design and commissioning services in the U.S., and they brought with them strong relationships with several hyperscalers. As we now move in the growth positioning section of our presentation, please turn to Slide 15 to discuss the bolstering of our successful cross-selling program. Our rich history of cross-selling has provided benefits and margin improvement from insourcing subcontracted work and a driver for our organic growth. In 2025, we are bolstering our cross-selling program with management incentives based on recording revenue from sales across business units and mapping key clients for applicable NV5 service offerings. Technology is a differentiator and competitive advantage for NV5.

We are leveraging technology to enter new client relationships, deliver our services more efficiently, and expand ongoing relationships with clients in the fields of recurring OPEX services, asset management, and digital twins. One example is in the buildings and technology business, where building digitization continues its rapid growth as a greenfield initiative using technology and expertise from the geospatial segment. Another example is NV5's geospatial data collection and analytics of the Los Angeles wildfires, which provides an introduction for NV5 to work with numerous government and relief agencies and private development as the Los Angeles area is to be rebuilt. No competitors have delivered geospatial data that is publicly accessible for the entire region, and this first-mover advantage in Los Angeles gives us a competitive advantage when approaching clients and prospects.

Please turn to Slide 16 as we review our new growth target that we announced last month of $1.6 billion of revenue by the end of 2028. Since our inception, we have created growth targets that all NV5 leaders and employees work toward achieving. These targets are built from the bottom up with input from every business unit in the organization. By successfully achieving these targets, we create growth opportunities for our employees, are better able to serve our clients, and deliver more value to our investors. This new target has been modeled to include both organic growth in the mid to high single-digit range, as well as strategic acquisitions to strengthen our platform and expand our tech-enabled tech solutions. Growth will come from all of NV5's businesses with a particular focus on our high-growth sectors of geospatial technology, utility services, and data centers.

NV5 has a successful history of achieving ambitious growth targets, and we're excited to work towards making the $1.6 billion revenue goal a reality. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Dickerson Wright to discuss our 2025 goals, objectives, and full-year guidance. Dickerson? Thank you, Ben. I would now like to list our goals and objectives for 2025. So let's turn to page 17. These goals and objectives for 2025 are based upon confidence in our plan. Our plan is to, one, accomplish mid- to high-single-digit organic growth, which will continue improvement in this area. Two, we want to increase our gross margin expansion by concentrating on high barrier, high revenue, and EBITDA services. Three, continue our improvement converting EBITDA results to cash. We have instituted a method of faster billing and stronger collections.

Four, our M&A program has expanded, and we will concentrate on higher profit through acquisition of technology and tech-related companies. We expect to see accelerated growth in service lines that increase the profitability of NV5. Our positive view going forward has resulted in full-year confidence in our 2025 guidance of $1.026 billion-$1.045 billion in gross revenue, with adjusted earnings per share of $1.27-$1.37 per share and GAAP earnings per share of $0.52-$0.62 per share. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you, sir. We will now begin the Q&A session. If you'd like to ask a question this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, press star one again. And our first question will come from Chris Moore with CJS Securities. Please go ahead.

Tim Mulrooney (Analyst)

Hey, good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking a couple of questions. Maybe we could just dig into the margin, the EBITDA margin improvement a little bit further. So looks like 150 basis points improvement in 2025, you know, roughly the same revenue growth as 2024 versus 2025. Is it, Dickerson started talking about, is it mixed? Is it cluster? Is it, you know, maybe just anything you have on that would be helpful.

Ben Heraud (SVP)

Thanks, Chris. I'm going to cover some of that in the concluding comments, but we really want to focus on to always improve EBITDA, and it's through efficiency. So we want to accelerate our administrative program, and we're going to be doing that, which will absolutely increase our EBITDA because the administrative people are non-billable. So we're going to lower the administrative cost as a percentage, and this will result in a higher EBITDA, and we'll approach that growth in 2025 of 150 basis points. But it's not unreasonable. I mean, we have achieved that same amount in prior years, albeit right now we have a higher revenue basis, but the increase, Chris, is not something that's unrealistic, and certainly the cash flow conversion is not unrealistic.

But to answer your question, we think that it's not a big leap to improve our EBITDA margins and approaching an improvement of 150 basis points. And those are not unreasonable targets, and nor are they targets that we have not reached in the past. So this is something we've already done in the past, so it's not like it's a phenomenal leap of faith to do that, Chris. But anyway, thank you for the question.

Tim Mulrooney (Analyst)

No, no. Appreciate it. It's helpful, and maybe just my follow-up, just a geospatial. Obviously it's still an area we've done well and tremendous potential. Just trying to get a sense from an organic growth standpoint, you know, what is a reasonable target over the next few years given all the opportunities that are out there?

Ben Heraud (SVP)

We have budgeted in about 10%-11% organic growth of our geospatial group, and that's fairly historic, and that's really we're basing that improvement more on EBIT than EBITDA.

Tim Mulrooney (Analyst)

Got it. That's helpful. I'll get back in line. I appreciate it, guys.

Ben Heraud (SVP)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question will come from Tim Mulrooney with William Blair. Please proceed.

Tim Mulrooney (Analyst)

Dickerson, Ben, Ed, good afternoon.

Kurt Allen (President of NV5 Geospatial)

Good afternoon.

Ben Heraud (SVP)

Hi, Tim.

Tim Mulrooney (Analyst)

Revenue guidance, it looks like you're calling for 10% revenue growth. I'm curious how much of that you're expecting to come from acquisitions that you've already made and how much of that you expect will come organically, or maybe you could give an acquisition dollar amount from last year.

Edward Codispoti (CFO)

Hi, Tim, this is Ed. The assumptions there on the low and high end range from 5% organic on the low end to 7% on the high end. And so you have about $17 million or so dropping into the 2025 period that was not in 2024 because we hadn't owned those acquisitions yet.

Tim Mulrooney (Analyst)

Okay, that's helpful. So just to confirm though, Ed, your guidance doesn't include any acquisitions that haven't yet been completed, right?

Edward Codispoti (CFO)

That's correct. It does not include any acquisitions that have not been announced or closed yet. Correct.

Tim Mulrooney (Analyst)

Okay, that's helpful. And Dickerson, that was helpful, that 10%-11% organic growth outlook in geospatial, was that organic revenue growth?

Ben Heraud (SVP)

We didn't include any acquisitions in that, so it's just organic revenue growth, and it's gross revenue. I just want to comment a little bit on our confidence in the 2025 guides. You'll see on a previous slide, I can't tell you the number, our backlog was the highest ever, 904. And that represents almost, that's over 80% of the budget. And normally a good backlog is between 60 and 65. So we really feel good about what's going on in 2025, and it's really a lot of it is backlog of work to be performed in that period. So that gives us more confidence.

Tim Mulrooney (Analyst)

That's actually a really good color. It's Slide 4, and I see you have it right there. So your backlog represents a higher percentage of your revenue guide relative to historical standards.

Ben Heraud (SVP)

Normally it's about 65%, and this is over 80%. You can do the math, Tim, but I'm not, but 90% is over 80%.

Tim Mulrooney (Analyst)

It's 88 of the low end of the guidance.

Ben Heraud (SVP)

88 on the low end. So that really gives us great confidence.

Tim Mulrooney (Analyst)

No, that is definitely reassuring. I'll just ask one more question and get back in line, which is about the backlog, which is, is there any very large projects in there that's really pushing it up, and in particular, are they federal where there may be some investor concern of risk from DOGE or anything like that? Can you just parse apart the backlog for us a little bit?

Ben Heraud (SVP)

No, it's a pretty good mix across the different segments that we've got. We touched on DOGE through the presentation. We haven't had any contracts canceled. We've had one delayed by two weeks, but there's been minimal disruption from that right now. We're watching it very closely, but we're not seeing a huge impact from that right now.

Richard Tong (EVP and General Counsel)

And a lot of the growth in the backlog has come from our expanding the relationships that we have with utilities. Arizona Public Service, for example, it's a growing relationship, and that also includes the Salt River Project, another utility in that area. And then we had a special initiative and a support initiative to grow the Pacific Gas and Electric. And so we've seen some rewards from that, and we've seen some of the backlog growth. So a specific amount of the backlog is with utilities and public agencies, and that makes us feel pretty confident going forward.

Tim Mulrooney (Analyst)

Yep, yep. Very helpful color. Thank you, guys.

Operator (participant)

Our next question will come from Rob Brown with Lake Street Capital. Please proceed.

Rob Brown (Analyst)

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to check on the data center demand environment. Are you seeing those projects coming into your plan and maybe give us a sense of how much growth you're seeing in that vertical?

Ben Heraud (SVP)

We're still seeing really nice organic growth, tracking around that 25% organic growth, and we're not seeing that slow down at all, both internationally. And I've touched on this on last calls. We're really starting to make good headway in the U.S. as well. And it's the organic growth of our existing services that we've been providing, and then it's also expanding those services. I touched on the fire protection services that we're now able to bring to data centers. Structural and power delivery really is a big one that we're expanding in that space. Obviously, very important.

Rob Brown (Analyst)

Okay, great. On the M&A pipeline, you gave a little more specificity this time about the areas you're going and looking after. Could you give us a sense on the tech-enabled services? How is that pipeline shaping up? Are there geographic additions you want to add, or are there new technical verticals you think you can bring into the mix that can be included?

Dickerson Wright (Executive Chairman)

As it relates to data centers, it's more of an approach. In the U.S., the ones that deliver energy to these data centers are the public utility commissions, and they are very selective in who they're going to give energy to. For example, in Arizona, there's a moratorium on energy for data centers because they want to use that energy for air conditioning. However, internationally, they don't have such a big reliable grid, and so a lot of the data center growth is being done by private people developing their own energy sources, and as a result, we haven't had the inefficiencies. And so Ben can comment better on this than me, but we seem to see a much stronger organic growth as a percentage internationally than we do domestically.

Ben Heraud (SVP)

There's still a lot of opportunity here in the States, but it's just worth noting on the international piece. A lot of that's driven by an increase in cloud storage in some of these developing countries where the data, the cloud storage is just increasing so significantly that that's one of the huge drivers for redevelopment.

Rob Brown (Analyst)

You'll turn over.

Richard Tong (EVP and General Counsel)

Okay. Thanks, Rob.

Operator (participant)

Our next question will come from Jeff Martin with Roth Capital Markets. Jeff, please proceed.

Jeff Martin (Analyst)

Thanks. Good evening, everyone.

Richard Tong (EVP and General Counsel)

Thank you.

Jeff Martin (Analyst)

I'll dive in. Hi, Dick. Ivan, you touched on organic growth expectation for geospatial. I was wondering if you could do the same for infrastructure and building technology.

Dickerson Wright (Executive Chairman)

In the budget we've isolated those. We think that they'll be because of the infrastructure demands. That's a higher percentage as a percentage of organic growth. That's probably the high of the three segments. We have the geospatial segment, which we gave you the organic growth somewhere between what, 10%-11%?

Kurt Allen (President of NV5 Geospatial)

The rest are in the mid-single digits. Remember that in terms of our expectations, on the low end, we're seeing 5%, and on the high end, 7%. So on a blended basis.

Dickerson Wright (Executive Chairman)

The overall organic growth. If you consolidate all three of our reporting sectors, it'll be mid to high single digits.

Jeff Martin (Analyst)

And then I wanted to drill in on your comment that inflation is also impacting your EBITDA margin. Just curious if that's embedded within contracts that you've had labor increases, cost of labor increases that you can't recoup because those contracts are already in place? And if so, are these under master service agreements that can be changed or not? How nimble are you in terms of recouping some of that margin due to inflation?

Kurt Allen (President of NV5 Geospatial)

No, we are nimble. And what I was referring to mostly there, Jeff, is, for example, we've spoken about this before, but when inflation was peaking, our LNG business transitioned from a purely fixed price model to a hybrid with some T&M in it. And so that has, that's an example of what would have impacted on a temporary basis our margins. If you think back to before any of the inflation came around, our margins were higher than even what we're projecting for next year, like Dick said. So we've been at those higher margin levels before. And as we cycle through some of these large LNG contracts and get into the newer ones, we should be able to see margins expand overall for the company.

Dickerson Wright (Executive Chairman)

Okay, Jeff, this is Dick. Just if you got your answer, believe me, I won't say anything. But.

Jeff Martin (Analyst)

No means. Go ahead, Dick.

Dickerson Wright (Executive Chairman)

A lot of the inflation hits our administrative things, and that is not easily as passed through as direct inflation numbers. So certain people that everybody deserves to raise are certain cost things, but not every one of those inflationary costs can be directly passed on to the client. Everything that Ed was referring to, so he was referring to a mix of those, and so that's where you've seen a little bit of erosion. And the increase in inflation has caused a little bit of erosion in the profitability.

Jeff Martin (Analyst)

Makes sense. Okay, one more from me, if I could. Last summer at your investor day, you talked about taking your software on the geospatial side and making that essentially a cloud model. Just curious the progress that you've made there, and are you seeing large opportunities to do the remote monitoring and other types of enhanced features that you can get out of the cloud version of that software?

Ben Heraud (SVP)

so just geospatial in general, we're seeing a great opportunity to leverage the technology within our more traditional engineering services to deliver more efficiently and push us more along the asset lifecycle, have a longer relationship with that, and drive the recurring revenue, but Kurt, you might be better to respond to the cloud-based software and where we're at with that we're taking it to market, right?

Kurt Allen (President of NV5 Geospatial)

Absolutely. We're taking it to market. The cloud-based revenue that we with our ENVI software products doubled in size last year, but it was coming from a very small base, and our success with software is absolutely all about being able to grow that part of the business. We're seeing that happen, and we're also implementing that software workflow into what I call the detections and change analysis that we're seeing a lot of large government agencies go towards that are very interested in remotely sensed information. I mentioned the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. We have two massive contracts that we have bid. It's the multi-award contracts, but so there are a number of bidders on it, but it gives us the opportunity to stay in the game and be in the game for major detections around the world.

If they want to understand changes in an airfield, we can do that automatically. And so that workflow gives us a lot of use cases and a very large total addressable market to go after. So we're turning the battleship, but at the same time, we're very bullish on this for 2025.

Jeff Martin (Analyst)

Appreciate the color. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question will come from Andrew Whitman with Baird. Andrew, please proceed.

Andrew Wittman (Analyst)

Thanks for taking my questions this afternoon, guys. I just wanted to dig into the margins one more time and just get a little bit more detail from you. It sounded like from the answer of a question or two ago that just running off some of the old LNG plants that were fixed contracts under some inflation is going to be positive to your margin. So a couple of ways to ask this, but how much of the 150 basis points of your margin improvement that you're looking for this year is just like mix that you don't have to really go after and get versus things that you're talking about doing, whether it's overhead, real estate, whatever. And so could you talk about that?

And then if you could, just drill in a little bit more about some of the specific actions that you expect to do to effectuate 150 basis points, just recognizing that 150 is a lot for a professional services model. So it's an important question.

Ben Heraud (SVP)

One thing that we can move, and we are moving the needle on quite quickly here, is utilization. So that's just getting our existing team more busy. So that obviously improves margin. We do have some opportunities on the real estate side and some efficiencies through our indirect labor. And so these are things that we're working on through this quarter. And also G&A, there's some IT expenses that we've identified that we can bring down here in the short term. And so that will also help. Ed, if you want to add.

Edward Codispoti (CFO)

That's right. Some of it is mixed and matched, but that throughout the company, we're looking very carefully at cost optimization. And like Ben said, IT is an example, but just because you're at a certain level of utilization doesn't mean that you can't increase that. And that goes right to the bottom line. And so we basically want to do that while at the same time reducing our indirect labor. It's not just a matter of increasing utilization and then having shifting between indirect and direct. I mean, we want to reduce overall labor while still increasing revenue, if that makes sense. So we've got several initiatives throughout the company that are focused on cost cutting, making sure that from an administrative standpoint, we're being as efficient as possible. And again, utilization is a big focus.

Richard Tong (EVP and General Counsel)

Let me just jump in here as well, Andy. Just we always remember this budget that you see is a consolidated, but it came ground up. It came from every one of our operations, and all of our operations had mandates on reducing indirect costs and just the scalability. You'll see an increase in revenue. And so that increase in revenue does not necessarily have to mean that there's going to be an increase in administrative costs to provide that revenue. So we're looking for that efficiency. We focused on a specific thing to lower administrative costs. And so when we looked at everything coming up, I would say what was found to you is more conservative from what I've seen from the individual budgets and operations. But that was a key initiative to lower administrative costs, which would then therefore increase the profitability.

And as a result, you see 150 basis points in front of you, but this came from the ground up. This didn't come to be mandated, but each came from individual budgets with the direction to reduce indirect labor and all types of indirect costs. And it goes from anything. I'm being long-winded here, but it can go to facilities. It can go to many things that are fixed costs that should be reduced, but also in non-fixed costs, which is really a target-rich environment for us. So that's how we arrived at that number.

Andrew Wittman (Analyst)

Then just my follow-up question, is probably going to be for Ed. And just heard the comments that the government is one of the reasons the cash flow has been or the DSOs are up. They're up a decent amount, and obviously, that's fertile ground to pull it back out. But specifically around the unbilled are up the most. I mean, maybe the direct question is, what's the right number for your DSOs and for your, and specifically underneath that, your unbilled? I mean, you're at 42 days of unbilled to a level that you haven't really seen before. So I'm trying to just get a better sense of what you think the opportunity there is and how you're going to get after it.

Edward Codispoti (CFO)

It's a good question, Andy. And from an unbilled, sorry, from a billed perspective, our DSO is very good. There are some business units that have DSOs as low as 40 and others internationally typically a little bit longer. And so let's say overall for the company, let's say it's 60 days, that's fine. The opportunity is more on the unbilled receivables. And what I was referencing earlier is the bucket of it's a handful of contracts where just the milestones for billing, for actually sending out an invoice, don't necessarily match up with the work that's being performed. It's just skewed to the right. And that's where our opportunity is. We want to see that cash come in sooner. And the quality of the unbilled is very good. We scrub that project by project, and it's all high-quality unbilled receivables.

The key there to optimizing is just to be very focused on each contract, the milestones themselves at the initial contract stage when you execute a contract so that it's done in a favorable way to the company. And then as you perform the work, making sure that you're performing in alignment with those milestones so that you can get billed if it's task-oriented across different phases that you're getting that money in as quickly as possible.

Dickerson Wright (Executive Chairman)

It's also just worth noting that there's been some key lessons learned from those projects that we have those issues with. So moving ahead, we won't be making those same mistakes again. So we'll see improvement there too.

Andrew Wittman (Analyst)

Okay. Thanks, guys. Have a good evening.

Richard Tong (EVP and General Counsel)

Thank you.

Tim Mulrooney (Analyst)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

At this time, this concludes our Q&A session. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Wright for closing remarks.

Dickerson Wright (Executive Chairman)

Thank you, everyone. We appreciate your listening to what we've had to say. I took a few notes as these presentations were given, but you can conclude and see that we at NV5 have a very positive outlook for 2025 in both revenue and EBITDA improvement. But it's going to require hard work. It's going to require tremendous work on every one of our offices, every person that is providing a service. All of us will have to do this as a team and to do this together. But to help that and to assist the growth, I'd like to speak to the growth initiatives that we've had. And these growth initiatives are supported by our corporate office. And some of those growth initiatives are in areas where we want to be supportive, but we also want to be optimistic.

So the growth areas that we have, we have a specific organic growth initiative that to develop our capabilities in these three key areas. And so one of them is in our PFAS environmental. We want to expand our environmental. We've looked for a senior executive that we're going to support to grow that area. The second key area that we're very excited about is our position currently in Southern California. We're with many, many, many municipalities, and we have a specific business that provides staff augmentation to the municipalities in the public work areas. And as you well know, there's a mandate that the municipalities have now to expedite their permitting process and with financial penalties for not doing so. So we want to take that same relationship. It's not like we're breaking new ground.

We want to take that same relationship that we've had through for many years with the Departments of Public Works to really address the municipalities that have been particularly affected by having to rebuild and regrow. And we want to support that. So we're looking at that area as a specific growth initiative. And the third, restructuring of our power group so that we can really look for opportunities we have with public utilities across the nation. And so we have a specific way of addressing that. All of these will serve to do two things. It will absolutely improve the revenue that we look for, and it will make us even more scalable with our administrative costs. We don't look for tremendous cost to do these initiatives, but we look at a way that we can grow our revenue and support the bottom line.

We're very pleased going forward. We feel good about the year 2024 we've had. We had a very profitable year. We've cash flowed. But there's always ways that we can grow. And so we're looking very optimistically for year 2025, and we have specific tools in place to grow that. So please review our presentation. Maybe you would like to look at the last page 17 where we're increasing our guidance, increasing our guidance from 2024 to 2025. And that's because we have a positive outlook on what we need going forward. So I want to thank everyone for the time that you gave us today. And we look forward to reporting our progress as we go further into 2025. Thank you very much.

Operator (participant)

That concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.