Okay, great. We will get going. It's going to be a bit of a genius to the name change here for me. I've been around this company for a long time as an analyst, but NWPX Infrastructure, formerly Northwest Pipe Company. Glad to have Scott Montross, President and CEO. Scott, thanks for making the trek out and doing this. Absolutely. Maybe just to kick it off, for those new to the audience, I thought you could take a few minutes just to explain your business to folks, and we'll get into some more specific questions. We'll start there. Yeah, sure. It starts with the piece of the company is really two business units in the company. One is Water Transmission Systems, which we used to refer to as steel pressure pipe before the rebranding, but obviously everything changed during that. The Water Transmission Systems business is a business that basically takes the raw water and transmits it under pressure to water treatment centers so that it can be made in potable water for communities. I think what's a little bit different about it, that it just being a pipeline, is a high-pressure transmission. Usually, we're testing pipe to 250 to 350 PSI, which doesn't seem like much, but when the pipe's 72 inches or 96 inches in diameter, it's a lot of end thrust. It can be 3 million pounds of end thrust. Our pipe we use for this, or produce for this, is anywhere from 2 feet in diameter up to 13 feet in diameter. It's an entire system. We have four-way connections that are as big as a house that we have to ship, miter joints, all kinds of fabrication. Each one of our Water Transmission plants has a fabrication shop because it's not just straight pipe. A lot of those are really jobs that are going to municipalities that go through a contractor, is the way we sell. That's our point of sale through a contractor. The other piece of the business is the precast business, which is a newer business for us. We got into the precast business in January of 2020. Ultimately, it was the acquisition of a company called Geneva Pipe and Precast, which is precast infrastructure, RCP, curb inlets, culverts, manhole, manhole risers, mostly related to residential, some of it a little bit related to DOT work. The other part of our precast business is, I guess what I would refer to as a quasi-precast business because really it is a business that takes a precast vault and installs in the precast vault water control systems. Water control systems that anything from what we call a storm trooper, which yeah, we had a little bit of problems with the Star Wars people at one point a few years ago or several years before we owned it. It removes hydrocarbons from water. We make large industrial grease traps that remove fats, oils, and grease from the off-fall of water process or food processing centers all the way down to smaller restaurants. We have large backflow preventers that go on all the buildings, that if there's a change in water pressure between the buildings and the public water supply, the processed water from the building doesn't run back into the public water supply. Pump lift stations to move effluent up a grade so it can flow downhill and things of that nature. A lot of which has offsite monitoring, which starts to take a little bit of a tilt towards smart water for us, which is significantly different than we've been, as you've been with us for a long time. That's a little bit of an overview on the company, and I guess we'll probably get a little bit deeper into this based on the questions you ask. We'll see where it goes. Scott, I think there's been a lot that I've seen evolve here with the company in the last four or five years, especially with some of the transactions you've done. To jump into that, the strategic objectives that you have over the next three to five years. I know precast is going to be a part of that, but why is it so important to you? How do you see that driving value here? I think it starts with understanding the Water Transmission Systems business. It's really a relatively small market, niche business, generally somewhere between $450 million and maybe $650 million or $700 million on an annualized basis. We have two major competitors in that, and we have 50% to 55% market share. A lot of it is government bid work, right? There's some variability in that business. When you have that level of variability, it's a little more difficult to be a public company and create quarter after quarter of growth. That's why we ended up getting into the precast business. The precast business is much more transactional than what we see in Water Transmission. Water Transmission projects could go on for, just the getting ready to do a project can go on for 10 years, right? We followed projects for 10 years, and you've heard us talk about projects for 10 years before they happen. The difference is, on the precast side, it's much more transactional. Customer comes in or calls in, wants to place an order, gets a bid, places an order. You can ship an order out of stock if you have stock or you produce it and ship it when it goes. Obviously, Water Transmission is a lot longer fuse on the production and shipping process and ties up a lot of cash and current assets. The precast business is a much quicker business that, quite frankly, has better cash cycle days, things like that, generally better margins than what we've seen in the Water Transmission business over longer historical periods. The opportunities for M&A growth are significantly greater because really, on the Water Transmission side, we're probably about as big as we want to be with some of the variability that we've seen in the past. The idea is, you know, our Water Transmission business is $300 million, $340 million annualized. It's not a gigantic business. Right now, the idea is to get our current configuration on the precast side of the business up to about $200 million as it exists right now. Over the next several years, the idea is to, you know, get the entire business up to $1 billion. That would all be growth on the precast, precast related side. There are many more opportunities, although there's a little bit of a dearth in opportunities in the market right now, simply because of the private equity interest that we've seen in the precast business over the last probably four or five years. The multiples in that business are a little bit crazy right now. It's a very localized and fractured market, right? There are a lot of different pockets to the market. That is where we will focus on growing this business over the next several years. Okay. You don't always get rewarded for being patient. It's been a little while since you've done a deal. Maybe talk a little more about those bottlenecks. Is it simply expectations and maybe frothy sort of buyer environment? Is it a key priority right now to do a deal in that sort of situation? Yeah, I would say that it's been about almost four years since we've done one. Obviously, there's a little bit of pressure from the financial markets for us to do something. Generally, it's only every time that I talk to somebody where we're talking about acquisitions, whether it's an earnings call or we're in things in conferences like this. I think also the idea of it being frothy, simply because of the multiples that have been paid by private equity over the last, probably I would say three or four years, the expectations for exit multiples are relatively high. We've seen on larger projects, seen multiples that are 9.5% and 10%. I think everybody knows that CPMP was sold today to CMC, and the multiple on that was approaching 10 times. It was like a $675 million deal that they did. That's pretty common, even on the smaller side, to the point where the multiples get to a point you have to make sure that it works and it's accretive for the company if you're acquiring something at a multiple that might be a little bit different than what you're trading at. I think it comes down to, for us, it's being willing to look for even single plant opportunities where we can create a beachhead to get into the business and, you know, bring some of our other products like we do at Park down to a precast infrastructure business. The idea of being able to look at something that's maybe a little bit more of a fixer-upper that we have the opportunity to do that gets us into a market that is a market that we think is growing and offers significant growth potential through the future. Those are the kind of things that we're looking at now. There are things out there like that that we're kind of working our way through at this point. I certainly understand the urgency of making sure that we're doing different things. In the meantime, when we're not doing those things, that's why we put share buybacks in. To the extent that that opportunity comes, what sort of level of debt leverage are you willing to take on? I think we've been very conservative with debt. We're about, I don't know, about 0.6 lever right now, maybe a little bit less than that, depending on where we are in the cash collection cycle. I think that the stabilization of earnings that we've had from quarter to quarter to quarter makes it a little bit more reasonable to take on higher levels of debt. I think at this point, I'd be comfortable with two times, maybe two and a half times debt if the right opportunity was out there. If it was a transformational opportunity, then you'd have to look at, would you be willing to go to something that's three times? I think something that's transformational is something that would likely have the potential of doubling the size of the existing company. There are things out there that could provide those kinds of opportunities. Brent, we're at a point now where we're getting a little bit more comfortable with debt, and we probably would have none if we weren't doing share buybacks now. We're on the hunt for getting something done that's reasonable, that's a good fit for the company as soon as we can. Yeah, you've had a good record of accretive deals. Yeah, we want to keep that record. That'd be great. I guess maybe just on the markets, the Water Transmission Systems business in particular, you have a pretty big backlog right now. Got good visibility, maybe just the opportunities to build upon that in 2026. What does the market tell you about next year in terms of bidding opportunities? This is a long cycle sort of business, as you said. Yeah, I think the most important thing about looking into 2026 is the bidding level that we're seeing in the fourth quarter of this year. We originally thought the third quarter was going to be the biggest bidding quarter of the year. It is now going to be the fourth quarter. There are segments of Red River bidding. I think there's a couple of those bidding. There's another segment of IPL, and you've heard us talk about IPL since probably 2011. There's still segments of that out there. There's some reliner jobs that are relatively large reliner jobs in Southern California that are slated to come our way. It's going to be a big bidding quarter. That really is the thing that solidifies 2026, the kind of backlog that we come out of 2025 with. The fourth quarter should put us in a really good position to have a strong running start for the first quarter, which is generally the slowest quarter of the year, simply because of the weather in different parts of the country. We have four plants in Texas, and the weather seems to get more severe in Texas all the time with ice storms and heavy rains and those things. Ultimately, we're going to be in a good place with the backlog to capitalize. That's really even before the IIJA funding starts to kick in. We're seeing it's a little bit of a slow burn on IIJA funding. We're starting to see some of the bigger projects in California come up with IIJA funding, like Sykes Reservoir is one that we've talked about for multiple years. It's likely that that starts to get some momentum sometime later this year, maybe early next year, which should probably be a big project for 2027. Demand-wise, 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2023 have all been a pretty similar amount of demand that we've seen. I would say that the demand is just okay on the water transmission side of the business. With the market being consolidated down the way it's been consolidated down, it's still producing good revenues and strong margins. As you look at IIJA funding kicking in, you could start seeing a level of demand in the marketplace that starts those margins like we've talked about with a two instead of a one, especially if you start getting up into 160,000, 175,000 tons of demand for Water Transmission Systems stuff. Scott, one of the bottlenecks maybe to some of these projects, they're big, they go across states in some cases. Permitting seems to always be somewhat of an issue in terms of pushing this forward. The new administration, do you see that changing? I think some of those things have loosened up a little bit with the new administration. I mean, you still have to go through various things. A lot of times you'll get into areas where there may be endangered species that seem relatively minute, whether they're some kind of beetle or butterfly or something. We do have some of those. We've seen some of that slow projects down in the past, but we haven't seen much of that lately. I think the whole administrative approach to trade may have caused a little bit of disruption in the first quarter of the year, but that seems to have subsided. That's not really being an issue. We're really not seeing a lot of issues related to permitting much anymore. We have in the past, not as much anymore. Got it. Since no one here at the conference is talking about data center projects, maybe I'll ask you this way. I mean, a lot of the things that you hear are accessibility of power and water. Is there any sort of thematic play here for NWPX Infrastructure Inc. projects that might be coming down the pike to support that, you know, or indirectly? It's kind of interesting because I do a bid log meeting with the people in the Water Transmission Systems. I almost said steel pressure pipe in our Water Transmission Systems business every week. For the first time, I saw a data center project show up there. It was the first time I've ever seen one on Water Transmission Systems business bid log. Talking about that, it was kind of interesting. I'm like, wait, that name doesn't sound like it belongs on a backlog or a bid log for Water Transmission Systems. We're starting to see some of that because data centers, a lot of cooling required because of the energy requirements. You have processed water involved, and that processed water has to be cleaned, right? They try to keep that water process, the processed water in place so that you don't have to keep releasing that and getting new processed water. First time I've seen one show up, though, and that was kind of encouraging. I couldn't tell you. I haven't seen any of those before. The size of the project is not a huge one, but it's good size. It's good size. It was from one of those big names that are building data centers. I don't know if it's just getting started, if it's related to how much processed water we need. A lot of times when you're dealing with stuff like that, that's not heavily pressurized. You know, API people can make pipe up to 48 inches in diameter, right? You can use 48. If you need something bigger based on the size of the amount of processed water you're using, I mean, we make pipe that's, like I said, up to 13 feet in diameter. We have the ability to make it. Generally, it's 72 or 96 inches in diameter, up to 108 inches in diameter. We'll have to see how more of the project comes out as this goes through. It hasn't been bid on yet. There's going to have to be a little bit more work done around it. It is the first time I've ever seen something like that show up on a Water Transmission bid. Something to watch. Yeah, for sure. Interesting. Okay. Maybe just on the precast market, you had some different trends that have been happening there the last few years in two distinct regions for that matter. Maybe an update on what you're seeing now. The residential side of the business, which is in Utah, our Geneva plants that we acquired back in 2020, that business has remained strong even through the increased interest rate environment that we've seen because of the net migration into the state of Utah. It's remained strong. We acquired Geneva in 2020. It was $41 million in revenue. At the end of 2024, it was $82 million in revenue, and it's moving past that in 2025. That being said, it looks like it's topping out a little bit on the residential side right now. If you look at the Dodge Construction Start Index, you see the residential side maybe being down a little bit versus where it was last year. We still expect a year at Geneva that's probably going to be a record year at Geneva. On the ParkUSA side of the business, which we have, which is water control systems in precast vaults, we have three plants in Texas, one in San Antonio, one in Houston, and one in Ferris, Texas. That business was a little bit more affected by the interest rate environment that we saw. It's probably slowed the business down for, excuse me, probably about a year and a half, it slowed it down. The interesting thing is recently we've seen that business start to come back. The Dodge Momentum Index, which is what we look at to get a reference on projects going into planning, likely 12 months before spending starts, that's where a lot of the data center projects are starting to show up. It's up like 20% to 25% over where it was last year, and we're starting to see that reflected in the precast business at ParkUSA. We're expecting them to have a strong year. We're showing latest projections at another very strong year for precast, likely a little bit stronger than we had last year. I think the other thing to say is margin-wise, the ParkUSA business was off a bit on the margin side simply because it was slower. Now with the amount of business that we have, we're starting to see better absorption and a little bit better pricing on that business, and we're starting to see the margins move up. What sort of spread would you expect in margin between Geneva and Park on a normalized basis? On a normalized basis, I think you probably have anywhere between 300 and 400 basis points. On that business, snapping back, it's going to be accretive. That business coming back is going to be very, very good. Anything else from an input cost perspective? It seems like cement price increases are slowing, maybe. What else should we be thinking about? The prices of steel haven't reacted to the tariffs like I've normally seen them react, right? I mean, you know, I spent 24 years in the steel business before I came to NWPX Infrastructure Inc. Generally, when you have a tariff environment, it gives the steel price a relatively long runway to run. You know, we saw that in COVID when some of the 232s went into place during COVID, it ran up for steel coil to over $1,900 a ton. Right now it's probably in the mid $800 a ton range. Despite all those tariffs, the difference in that is due to COVID and the price run-up and the amount of earnings that the steel companies had, there was a lot of investments. There are new mills, things being built. The impact of the tariffs, I believe, and we believe, are directly impacted by the amount of new capacity that's coming online. It's not creating any major run-up on steel prices, at least not right now. On the precast side, if you looked at it end of second quarter to last year versus the second quarter of this year, aggregate cement, it's probably 15% to 20% up, but it seems to have kind of topped out now where it's kind of stabilized and we're not seeing a lot of upward movement in either the cement or the aggregates, large rock, small rock, whatever you're using fly ash for still. I mean, it's starting to stabilize versus what we've seen the run-up be in the past. Not a lot of concerns around raw material run-up, although, as you know, for us, steel pricing, higher steel pricing is good for us. Doesn't necessarily mean a higher gross margin, but higher gross profit dollars for sure. Okay. Okay. Just one more on precast was around the product spread concept. Maybe where you are, what ends you're in in terms of advancing that. Also, Scott, just the financial objectives you have for that over the next few years. The product spread is basically taking products that we make at the various plants and moving that to plants where they haven't been traditionally done. It started with when we acquired ParkUSA. For example, ParkUSA makes a precast vault and then installs water control systems in a precast vault. That's the primary container for that, a precast vault. Geneva Pipe and Precast up in Utah makes precast vaults, but they don't install any equipment in the vault. They ship it to the job site. Generally, the contractor installs whatever water control system equipment, whether it's meters or valves or backflow preventers or whatever it is. What we did a couple of years ago, we started having Geneva make the vault. We would kit the water control system at ParkUSA and ship it to Geneva and they would install it. Now we've got the Geneva people actually starting to install things. They're not yet ordering it on their own. Some of the orders are being done by ParkUSA and having it shipped by the ParkUSA facilities and having it shipped to Geneva. The plan this year is to have about $3 million worth of ParkUSA products booked out of the Geneva plants. That's a product spread to a plant where those products are not native to that plant. Conversely, we make lined manholes in Geneva for sewer applications and fluid and sewer applications, manholes and manhole risers. We've actually started making some of those at ParkUSA, which we've never done before. That's a product that's going down there. We'll likely also do something like make culverts at ParkUSA, like we make at Geneva and things like that too. Quite frankly, it increases their concrete yards production, absorbs better overhead, margins improve because of it. That product spread is going to continue. I think the biggest thing on the product spread right now is we've actually started buying forms for both our Portland and Tracy Water Transmission Systems plants. As you know, that's all been steel before. We have forms there and we're actually bringing concrete in ready mix and pouring the forms to make three-side culverts and various things in the Portland plant. We're actually getting to a point where we're doing some ParkUSA products out of the Tracy plant and buying forms so that we can start pouring culverts and vaults in the Tracy plant. Those products, those concrete products, will spread to traditional, I'm going to use steel pressure pipe because it makes more sense in this discussion. It'll have different products, those plants, bigger product portfolio. Steel pressure pipe slows down at some point. You have another product coming out of there. We think that this year, in total product spread, it'll probably be about $12 million in bookings for the business. What do you think it can be next year, Scott? I think the biggest growth, Brent, is if we can get these things going at the Water Transmission Systems plants, these precast infrastructure products. When we looked at a 10-year plan several years ago, the idea was to try to get the product spread up to $20 million or $25 million. I think there's probably more that can be done at steel pressure pipe plants, depending on where the regions are. We have our Atalanta, California region, which we don't do this at yet, and it has a ready mix plant right outside of the plant site. You start out with ready mix. If the business grows enough at those various plants, then you start thinking about putting a batch plant in that can deliver aggregates and actually make concrete. Then you're pouring forms and whatever, whether it's culverts or vaults. You could also do Park out of that if you're making the vaults, the Park products out there. That's going to be an area of focus for our organic growth as we move forward to continue to build these products. I don't think you're going to be able to do it at all the steel pressure pipe plants. For example, doing it at the plant in Saginaw, Texas, would be a little rough because their production levels are so high there most of the time because of the jobs going on in Texas, which is not really needed to any great extent. That would probably be a little bit more difficult. If you look at plants like Portland, the one in Tracy, California, Atalanta, California, and the one in Parkersburg, West Virginia, if people hear Parkersburg, West Virginia, they're like, "What? What are you being Parkersburg, West Virginia?" If you think of the metropolitan areas that are around there, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Boston's not that far, New York's not that far, Pittsburgh. A lot of metropolitan areas that you could probably reach from there, especially on Park products, because they tend to ship a little bit farther than just the general precast infrastructure stuff. Good. Okay. I mean, just sort of wrapping all this up, Scott, it sounds like you've got stable to better market in Water Transmission Systems 12 to 18 months out. Hopefully, better industry capacity utilization or absorption gets margins higher. Precast is on the mend, margins moving up, and you've got some organic objectives and maybe some M&A in between. Am I missing anything? No, I think that's right. I think there's maybe too much going on, but I think it's the direction we've had. We had $132 million in revenue that you remember in 2017, and now we're in excess of half a billion. It's coming along the right way, but the road from half a billion to a billion is a long road. We're working down that road. The good news is the road from a billion to two billion is a lot less long than the road from half a billion to a billion. Scott's laughing at me here. Good. Any questions? Yes, sir. Talk a little bit about the data center. You see an impact from some of the plants? I haven't seen any yet at this point. It doesn't mean that there, you know, some of these jobs come through and they might be relatively small jobs. Our average Water Transmission Systems job, it might be 1,000 tons. It's not very big. Some of these could be undercover, but we haven't seen a lot of work in Arizona lately. It doesn't mean that there won't be. Just curious, what is your info? Steel. Yeah, it's steel. You've got to have a permit to ship that. Can you give us some context on bid activity? Accelerate, decelerate? I think a lot of it, we generally have a good idea how much work is going to bid in a specific year. What happens is, a lot of times work will slide around in that year. We thought the third quarter was going to be the biggest bidding quarter of the year, but things moved around a little bit and ended up that the fourth quarter is going to be the biggest bidding quarter of this year. We haven't seen a whole bunch of leak out of the year. A lot of it has stayed in the year. I think that there's probably some spending milestones that some of the agencies have that they try to get some of this stuff going before the end of the year. I would characterize the bidding environment as just okay at this point. I mean, the amount bidding is just okay. The environment, I think, is a relatively stable bidding environment because there's been a lot of consolidation from us and others that are in that business. You still have the same amount of plants that are out there. It's 13 steel pressure pipe related plants for Water Transmission Systems as it's known now. I think the bidding environment has stabilized around the three players in the business now. Even when we see small markets on the water transmission side of the business, they're not great margins, but you can see margins that are 12%, 13%, 14% versus what Brent will remember, the catastrophic margins that we're seeing in 2015, 2016, and 2017 that were negative margins at that point. I would say it's stable and it's just an okay bidding market. When it gets stronger, like we think it will with IIJA funded work, I think you start seeing margins in the Water Transmission Systems business that start with a two instead of a one. Yes, sir. Oh, no. Gross margin keeps marching up, and you make an addition to cash. We get 5% gross margin. Yeah, the higher the% of mix toward precast, the higher the gross margin is going to be because. Transmission gross is going to probably be inching. It will be inching higher because of demand related to IIJA. Even now, Scott, even with the market being just okay, it's been just okay like it is right now for the last few years. Even with that, now it's starting to inch up with it. The IIJA funding could really, I mean, we've seen margins before for the Water Transmission Systems business. You'll remember, Brent, back in 2013 when we were doing the IPL stuff and that, I mean, we've seen margins as high as 25% in a quarter. For a year, I believe, Jen, we were over 21% in one year when the demand was like that. Yeah, something like that. That kind of demand can be driven by the IIJA funding, except if they keep the slow trickle of the, sorry, I didn't mean to use that trickle. It fits in with the water theme, right? If it keeps trickling out the way it is right now, you may not see that giant year, but you may see many more years of a similar size lined up, which has produced a pretty good bidding environment. Either way, it might be better if you line many more years up like we have now for the bidding environment, because if you have a spike in bidding and then it drops off, the drop-off would probably be a little bit less margin, where if it stayed stable over a longer period of time, I think the margin remains relatively stable. I think with the way things are going, we could be approaching 20% margins, even in this kind of a market, which bodes well for a really large market. Uh-oh, here comes the next one. I'm talking about you, Scott. Anyone else? Awesome. Scott, thank you.