Good morning. Welcome to Construction Partners, Inc. First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Rick Black, Investor Relations. Thank you, sir. You may begin. Thank you, operator, good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for the Construction Partners conference call to review the first quarter results for fiscal 2023. This call is also being webcast and can be accessed through the audio link on the Events and Presentations page of the Investor Relations section of constructionpartners.net. Information recorded on this call speaks only as of today, February 10th, 2023. Please be advised that any time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate as of the date of any replay or transcript reading. I would also like to remind you that the statements made in today's discussion that are not historical facts, including statements of expectations or future events or future financial performance, are forward-looking statements made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. We will be making forward-looking statements as part of today's call that, by their nature, are uncertain and outside of the company's control. Actual results may differ materially. Please refer to yesterday's earnings press release for our disclosures on forward-looking statements. These factors and other risks and uncertainties are described in detail in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Management will also refer to non-GAAP measures, including adjusted EBITDA. Reconciliations to the nearest GAAP measures can be found at the end of our earnings press release. Construction Partners assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Construction Partners CEO, Jule Smith. Jule? Thank you, Rick. Good morning, everyone. With me on the call today are Alan Palmer, our Chief Financial Officer, and Ned Fleming, our Executive Chairman, as well as other members of our senior management team. I'd like to start by thanking our approximately 4,000 dedicated employees throughout our now six states in the Southeast for their focus on safety and taking care of their teammates each day at our job sites and plant sites. I believe our talented workforce is our most valuable asset and will continue to create a competitive advantage for our company. CPI had a good first quarter to begin our fiscal year 2023, with revenue growth of 20% year-over-year. A positive sign that our efforts to capture inflation in new bids is working and will continue throughout the year to positively impact the results. This quarter, throughout our footprint, we experienced inclement weather for two-thirds of the quarter, with above average precipitation in November and December, resulting in a reduced number of productive workdays. These weather impacts show up mainly in fixed cost recovery at our plants and fleet and create extra project costs. We approximate an abnormal weather impact in Q1 of approximately $4 million. However, weather impacts can go both ways, such as last year's first quarter, which had below average precipitation that allowed us to over-recover our fixed assets. In our line of work, usually over the course of a full year, the weather tends to even out. Another factor this quarter that we did plan for was the completion of the majority of our remaining low gross margin projects from our pre-inflationary backlog that was bid prior to October first, 2021. Our customers typically need their projects to complete the final paving before winter. As expected, most of these older projects wrapped up construction in our first quarter then represented approximately $50 million of revenue with little or no gross profit. In our annual financial plan for FY 2023, the combination of completing these older projects in the first half of the year then moving almost exclusively to higher margin backlog during the work season creates a margin profile more heavily weighted toward the second half than normal. Over the past five years, CPI's average split of EBITDA has been 33% in the first half of the year and 67% in the second half of the year. In FY 2023, we anticipate this being close to 27% in the first half and 73% in the second half. We are right on track with our plan for the year, and our external environment is slowly but surely returning to normal. Both of these factors give us confidence today to revise our annual guidance and raise the midpoints for revenue, EBITDA, and net income. We are pleased to report another record backlog this quarter of $1.47 billion, demonstrating that the demand environment remains strong in both the public and private sectors. Public infrastructure lettings are beginning to deploy the IIJA funding, impacting each of our six states for their highway and bridge projects, airport renovations and expansions, and other types of infrastructure. Over the last two years, CPI has focused on preparing our organization and workforce, and we're now ready to capitalize on this generational investment in infrastructure over the next six to eight years. We continue to see a steady amount of commercial bid opportunities on both non-residential and residential projects. We believe the private markets will continue to be bolstered in our southeast footprint by the strong migration of new residents and businesses into these states. This month, a National Association of Realtors study measured the top states in 2022 for net migration gains, and five o f the top six w ere CPI states. This strong demand for our services not only continues to keep revenue backlog high, but also has allowed pricing in the new backlog to remain at the higher margins, in line with backlog added the previous three quarters. We will continue to leverage this demand environment and our southeastern footprint to add future work at attractive margins. During the first quarter, we also integrated two strategic acquisitions, a bolt-on company in Nashville, Tennessee, our first interest into that state, and a new platform company in North Carolina. Both of these expansions represent excellent new markets for CPI, adding six asphalt plants while expanding our workforce. We welcome Ferebee Corporation and 150 new teammates to the CPI family as a platform company in the Charlotte metro area in western North Carolina. The Ferebee team is an impressive group of construction professionals, and the company will continue to be led by Chris and David Ferebee. Throughout CPI's history, a platform company, once established, has served as a catalyst for dynamic growth throughout a state or region, as demonstrated last year with the addition of King Asphalt in South Carolina. We're excited that with Ferebee Corporation, we now have a well-run platform company with a great reputation in one of the fastest-growing regions in the country. Right before Thanksgiving, in our last earnings call, CPI entered the Nashville metro area with the purchase of three HMA plants and a construction operation from Blue Water Industries. I'm pleased to report that the initial integration, led by our Wiregrass Construction team in nearby Huntsville, has gone very well. The construction operation is staffed with experienced and talented personnel, we will be entering the first heavy work season in Tennessee with a full backlog of good work. As you would expect in the fast-growing Nashville suburbs, we are pleased with the amount of bidding opportunities and potential for future organic growth. Turning now to growth initiatives. We continue to evaluate attractive investment opportunities in all three of our levers for growth. First, organic growth in our existing markets, as such as last year's 24% organic growth and 8.7% in our first quarter. Secondly, greenfield investments in new asphalt plants and vertical integration facilities, such as the new asphalt terminal in Alabama we announced last quarter. Finally, strategic acquisitions in new markets, such as our recent entry into Charlotte and Nashville. CPI will continue to carefully evaluate each opportunity and to use all three of these types of growth in making smart long-term investments that continue to grow the company. To fund these growth investments, we will continue to generate strong cash flow from ongoing operations. CPI, throughout its history, has generated strong free cash flow, with a typical free cash flow conversion rate in the range of 50%-60% of adjusted EBITDA. Over the last two years, CPI has invested this cash flow into numerous attractive long-term investments, which have generated 22% adjusted EBITDA growth last fiscal year, despite a challenging macro environment. This year is on track to generate 35%-40% growth in adjusted EBITDA. As CPI expands its footprint and continues to consolidate markets, margins will increase, growth will continue, and shareholder value will compound. As CPI grows, we benefit from scale in our fixed costs. After significant investments in our organization to prepare for growth over the last two years, we now anticipate in our revised outlook that general and administrative expense will be in the range of 8%-8.2% or 20-30 basis points lower than last year. As a growth company, we must stay ahead of the curve in preparing and investing for future growth as we did in FY 2021 and FY 2022. This will allow us to capitalize on efficiencies of scale at CPI over time and expand bottom line margins. Finally, this fiscal year should have our typical seasonality of revenue being realized approximately 40% in the first half of the year and 60% in the second half, and our fixed asset recovery having our normal underrecovery in the first half of the year and overrecovery in the second half of the year during our busy work season. We are excited for the year ahead and we expect to achieve significant top line and bottom line growth, supported by strong customer demand and project funding. I'd now like to turn the call over to Alan. Thank you, Jule, and good morning, everyone. I will begin with a review of our key performance metrics in the first quarter of fiscal 2023 before discussing our revised 2023 outlook. Revenue was $341.8 million, up 20% compared to the prior year quarter. The mix of our total revenue growth for the quarter was approximately 8.7% organic revenue and approximately 11.3% from recent acquisitions. Gross profit was $30.5 million in the first quarter compared to $33 million in the same quarter last year due to the factors that Jule discussed during his remarks. General and administrative expense as a percentage of total revenue in the quarter was 8.7% compared to 8.8% in the same quarter last year. Net income was $1.9 million in the first quarter compared to $5.5 million in the same quarter last year. Adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter was $27.6 million, an increase of 4.7% compared to the same quarter last year. You can find GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations of net income and Adjusted EBITDA financial measures at the end of today's press release. Turning now to the balance sheet. At December 31, 2022, we had $43.5 million of cash, $269 million of principal outstanding under the term loan, and $158 million of principal outstanding under the revolving credit facility. We have availability of $182 million under the credit facility, net of a reduction for outstanding letters of credit. As of the end of the quarter, our debt to trailing 12 months EBITDA ratio was 2.96. This liquidity provides financial flexibility and capital capacity for potential near-term acquisitions, allowing us to respond to growth opportunities when they arise. During the three months ended December 31, 2022, cash used in investing activities was $70.7 million, of which $77.2 million related to acquisitions completed in the period, and $31.6 million was invested in property, plant, and equipment, partially offset by $1.6 million of proceeds from the sale of the property, plant, and equipment, and $36.4 million of net proceeds from the facility exchange. The company's interest rate swap contract is at a SOFR rate of 1.85%, which fixed the company's interest rate during the quarter at 3.7% on $300 million of our debt. The maturity date of this swap is June 30, 2027. During the three months ended December 31, 2022, cash provided by financing activities was $49.7 million. We received $53 million of proceeds from our revolving credit facility, primarily used for acquisitions completed in the period. This cash flow was offset by $3.1 million of principal payments on long-term debt. Cash provided by operating activities, net of acquisitions, was $28.9 million for the three onths ended December 31, 2022, compared to a use of $0.6 million for the same period last year. Capital expenditures were $31.6 million. We expect Capital expenditures for fiscal 2023 to be in the range of $85 million-$90 million. This includes maintenance CapEx of approximately 3.25% of revenue, so the remaining cash invested is funding growth initiatives. Today, we're revising our fiscal year 2023 outlook by raising the lower ends of our estimates. We expect revenue in the range of $1.475 billion-$1.55 billion. Net income in the range of $30 million-$40 million and adjusted EBITDA in the range of $145 million-$160 million. Finally, as Jule mentioned, we're reporting a record project backlog of $1.47 billion at December 31, 2022. With that, we are ready to take your questions. Operator? Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star keys. Our first question is from Stanley Elliott with Stifel. Please proceed. Hey, good morning, guys. Thank you all for taking the question. Good morning, Stanley. Hey, can you all talk about, and I apologize if you mentioned upfront, I've had a bunch of things juggling this morning. Some of the material shortages that the industry had seen kind of last year, you know, does that seem like that's gonna be another headwind for you guys in the coming year? Any sort of update on that would be great. Yes, Stanley. You know, I did mention that our external environment's normalizing, and that's part of it. You know, we see that slowly but surely, you know, a lot of supply chain issues, the kinks are starting to get worked out. It's nowhere near normal yet. It's getting better. You know, we've mentioned in the past, cement in South Carolina and rock in Georgia and Florida, and pipe. All of those, you know, these suppliers wanna sell their products, so the market forces that you would expect to solve those, they're working. It just takes time. I would say we see things getting better, and we don't anticipate those being a headwind this year. Great. In terms of, like, bidding activity, I mean, do you still see pretty normal bidding activity, you know, across the market? I'm just curious if maybe some of the softness in the headline numbers we see in the residential market is causing increased bidding activity in some of your core, like highway and some of the commercial work. No, Stanley, no. Bidding is still very busy. You know, let's take the public markets. The Infrastructure Act is in full swing now. We're seeing very healthy public lettings at the DOT level and with airports. Just a lot of infrastructure on the public side, that's good. We've been expecting that, it's now hitting. On the private side, you're seeing a lot of, you know, industrial and retail bids as we have. I've been watching the residential market and thinking, okay, is it going to fall off? We just haven't really seen a big fall off. We've seen maybe where two years ago, a developer would say, "We wanna build this whole subdivision and bring all hundreds of lots up front." What we're seeing now is they say, "We wanna start and build phase 1 and bring on 50 lots and just take it in more bite-sized pieces." I think, you know, I mentioned the migration to the South. I think that that's helping the residential market maybe just go from white hot to good and steady. We really haven't seen a big drop-off in residential in our markets yet. Great, guys. Thanks for the color, and best of luck. Thanks, Stanley. Our next question is from Andy Wittmann with Baird. Please proceed. Oh, great. Thanks for taking my questions. Good morning, everyone. I guess just a point of clarification. When you'd mentioned that weather was a $4 million impact, I'm guessing that's EBITDA, not revenue. Is that right? Yes, that's correct. Can you estimate what the revenue hit was from that as well or maybe any more detail on that? I'll let Alan take a stab at that, Andy. Andy, I mean, as you can see on the revenue, we beat. I think where weather hurt us is our internal production of, like, asphalt tons and our own equipment use. If we had had those weather days that were impacted, we probably would have seen $10 million-$15 million more of actual top-line revenue. The bigger impact was on the number of tons we ran through our asphalt plants and the equipment usage utilization that we got. That $4 million we're talking about is under absorption of fixed costs at our asphalt plants and our own equipment use. It's not as much revenue as it is that utilization of those hot mix asphalt plants and that fixed cost recovery. Okay. That's a good answer. That makes, that makes sense. I just thought maybe I'd ask about some of the other external factors, Jule, that you'd cited previously and kind of get your updated thoughts on these. Specifically regarding labor, its availability, are you able to keep the man-hours that you need and the rate per hour as expected? Maybe some of the other things like some of the trucking costs. I know were for a while there were getting kind of tight. I thought maybe have you addressed, have you addressed those? Yeah, Andy. On the labor markets, I would say, it's gotten a lot better since, you know, the summer of 2021 when that really was some of the ankle weights we talked about. I think part of it getting better is the, you know, the housing market as it does slow down a little bit, it eats a lot of labor up. Part of it is more people are coming back to work after COVID. Part of it is, you know, I told you we would adjust to make sure that we had the labor we did. We put a lot of programs in place that are working. We offer great benefits, great pay, and then we try to create a career path for all these, you know, employees. I think all of that's working together. I really don't hear a lot about labor now. I think we're doing a good job staffing our crews. That's really not a impact. On trucking costs, you know, part of the labor thing is, I think truck drivers are not quite as hard to get as they were back when you just, you know, a year ago, it was very difficult to get truck drivers. That's helpful. I do think, you know, you asked about trucking costs. I think it's important. We don't anticipate construction inflation moderating to normal quickly. You know, you read in the newspapers about inflation moderating. Construction inflation, I think, is at a different scale and on different timing. I think with the amount of money flowing through for infrastructure, we are certainly not letting our guard down on getting inflation in our bids and making sure we pass that along. I think it'll be elevated more than the top-line CPI number. That's the color I would have around inflation. That's super helpful. I guess just kind of my final question dovetails on that last one a little bit, which was on these acquisitions, and one of them is one in North Carolina, obviously larger platform. I guess I was hoping maybe Alan first, if you'd comment on how much backlog was acquired or maybe Any guideposts you want to give us on how much revenue you expect? Maybe as important or maybe more important, with the dynamic inflationary environment and the challenges about getting margin, can you talk about how well you're able to scrub that backlog and the confidence that you have in its newly acquired backlog and its ability to deliver product margins in line or above kind of what CPI would have done on its own? Yeah, Andy. I mean, as far as the backlog, I think Jule in his comments stated that it was a very strong backlog both in North Carolina with the platform acquisition and in Tennessee. We were very pleased with that. The bid opportunities in both of those markets, as you can imagine are extremely good, even post-acquisition. You know, the total backlog from both of them was in the range of about $70 million. You know, we're in there evaluating that backlog, but what we're seeing is that it's good, healthy backlog. We don't see it having... Of course, just the dollar amount, it's not gonna have a significant impact on our overall margin, but we don't see it being anything, a lot of problems that we've gotta work through. Fortunately, they were kind of in the same place that we were in bidding that work. They, like we do, these are shorter duration contracts, so they've got cost built into them. We're seeing that. They've not bid on that pre-inflation cost. They've got accelerators in them just like we put in. That was very pleasing, so we think it's gonna be a good, strong, healthy backlog. Again, it's part of just they were at the same place in the cycle and have the same sequence of completing jobs quickly that we do. That's really helpful context. Thanks a lot, and have a great weekend, guys. All right. Thank you, Andy. Our next question is from Tyler Brown with Raymond James. Please proceed. Hey, good morning, guys. Hey, Tyler. Good morning. Lots of good stuff in the preamble, I do kinda wanna go back to margins. I appreciate you guys reported, call it $28 million of EBITDA, but that does include a gain on sale. I know there are gains time to time, but maybe not to the magnitude of this. Clearly, there's a lot of moving parts in EBITDA. Alan, I don't know if you've done this, but if you were to normalize the gains, normalize the weather and the $50 million of no gross profit revenue, do you have any idea what that cleaned up Q1 margin might have been? I mean, my simple math would maybe indicate that margins were more flat year-over-year. Just any color there would be super helpful. As far as the gross profit margins, you're exactly right. I mean, the $50 million of revenue, if you just say on the low side, that would have been about 10% gross profit, that would have added about another 1.5%. That gets you to about 10.5. Then the compared to last year, the $4 million that Jule mentioned about the weather impact on cost recovery, that's about another 1.2%. That'll get you right about or at the same margin we had last year for that. As Jule said, that was a very positive first quarter for us because of weather and other things with cost recovery. You would be pretty comparable to that same margin at the gross profit, and then that takes out the gain, and that would get you, to the, you know, probably slightly higher on the EBITDA margin. The gross profit margin, it would get you higher. Then, of course, we've said the G&A is about 20 basis points lower than last year. Right. Okay. Just big picture, though, if we think about in specifically EBITDA margins, you would kind of expect those to start trending up year-over-year, starting here in Q2, Q3, Q4. Is that, is that right? Yes. Yeah, more Q3 and Q4. You know, Q2, I think we've kind of given you some idea that the back end of this year is gonna be more loaded as far as the kind of the change in the margin profile from the first half to the second half. That's certainly what we expect. You know, we said we've got about $35 million more of this no margin backlog that'll be spread out more over the full year than it was in this first quarter. A real strong margin improvement. Our second half of the year compared to those same periods last year should be where we should start to see a pretty big difference in the margins. Okay. A couple other quick modeling. I think asphalt was still up about 30% year-over-year in Q1. Do you have what the asphalt index adjustment revenue was in the quarter? Yeah. We had $4.7 million in this quarter, a lot of that is related to those older projects. We expect that to drop off pretty significantly, because, you know, we bid projects that we're beginning to do with that. It's that really old pre-September 30th 2021 backlog goes away, those indexes will go the other way. I mean, they'll stop and they could possibly even if liquid asphalt stays down, they could start taking some revenue away from us. Right. Hey, Tyler. Right. Okay. This is Jule. You know, one of the things that we did in our prepared remarks is, you know, we gave, sort of the first half and back half spread of EBITDA, which we really haven't done before, it's really hard to look at this business quarterly. You know, we look at it annually, we give annual guidance. We do look at the first half and the second half, and we wanted to communicate that clearly, to you. You know, just it's a little different this year. Overall, we're right on track with the annual plan. It's just weighted a little differently. Just that's the reason we gave that color. Yeah. No. It's extremely helpful, believe me. Very helpful on the modeling side. One other question, though, just kind of a final question is around cash flow, and you guys kinda addressed it up in the, in the front. I think you said 50%-60% conversion. Is that right? Is that free cash flow? I may have missed. Yeah. You know- You know, Tyler. Oh, go ahead. No, I was just gonna say, so that's from a free cash flow basis, which has CapEx obviously in it. When we think about cash from operations, 'cause I've gotten this question a lot about the working capital consumption in the business. Is there something around acquisitions that require some of that working capital consumption? Just trying to understand how to think about, particularly the cash from operations, whether it's as a percentage of EBITDA or just some kind of construct to think about going forward. Yeah, Tyler, we wanted to share, you know, from a big picture standpoint, I'll let Alan give more of the details. You know, CPI throughout its history has generated strong cash from operations. In past years where we haven't done a lot of acquisitions or growth initiatives, cash builds up very quickly. We thought it was important to communicate that because, you know, if we have this cash building up and we have these growth opportunities that we think are good for the shareholders, we think it's smart to invest in that. We've done a lot of that the last two years. When you take and you just say, "What does it take to maintain the business?" You know, you take the EBITDA, and you pay your taxes and interest, and then you just you have maintenance CapEx. That creates about 50%-60% of, you know, your cash flow from operations is free. We've just, with the amount of opportunities we've had, we feel like it's the smart thing to do to invest that for long-term, you know, compounding of shareholder value. I'll let Alan give more of the details, but that's something we thought was important to start communicating. I just point out, and I think this quarter of this year compared to the same quarter of last year is a real good example of something that I've been saying before. The timing of when we get our revenue in the quarter, the first month and second month of the quarter versus the last month of the quarter, has a big impact on that because we bill 100% of our revenue after the end of the quarter, after the end of the month. If you look, last year, we had better margins, as we've talked about. We had real strong revenue last year in December, less in October and real strong in November. This year, as we've said, you know, the weather impacted us more in November and December. What you look at is the cash flow from operations this year because December and even November were slower months in the quarter, was $29 million. Last year, it was a negative cash flow from operations because we did so much revenue in December, which was the last month of the quarter. Back on a bigger scale, and you pointed something out there. When we acquired Fairview, it was at the very end of the quarter. It was in the first of December. Because it was a acquisition that included their working capital, we did not have to fund that working capital, which would have been $9 million or $10 million roughly, out of our cash flow from operating activities. It was part of down in the purchase price. Where other periods, if we buy a company and we're not buying the working capital, then it shows up as working capital. We have to fund out of that first month, and that ends up in that first quarter that we report. That's a $10 million difference that would have come out of operating cash flow if it had not been a platform company where we acquire the working capital. Those are things, nuances that can make a difference. You know, again, last year, the organic revenue was higher in the quarter. Again, if it happens at the end of the quarter, it that working capital cash flow doesn't show up until the next following quarter. No, I appreciate all the detail. I'm still kind of figuring it all out here, but just very helpful. It's a cash generative model, and I was just trying to understand that better. Thank you guys so much. All right, Tyler. Thank you. Our next question is from Michael Feniger with Bank of America. Please proceed. Thanks, guys, for taking my question. Can you just help us understand with where liquid asphalt is today? It rolled over pretty hard. I realize, Alan, it might take a bite out of your revenue in the back half, but does it help your margin? Maybe you can just remind us how to think about that lag between your, you know, price and liquid asphalt and how that rolls through. Yeah. It has to do with when we bid the job. If we get like this quarter, we got $4.7 million worth of revenue related to them paying us for the higher cost liquid compared to when we bid the job. It adds revenue but 0 profit on that. When it's adding revenue, it has a slight impact on your margin. $4.7 million would. If there's no margin and your average margin is 10%, then that's $500,000. It's not that huge, but it has a tiny impact. If that is going down, again, you take away the revenue, but you still have the margin on that because the margin. You're just offsetting costs dollar for dollar. Unfortunately, you have to run it through as revenue because of the way the contract works. It has a slight improvement in your margin. It really is a bigger impact on how much your revenue is than what your overall margin is because it's $5 million or $4.7 million out of $341 million. It goes both ways. It's what we refer to as a slight tailwind when the costs are going down. We have cost on non-indexed jobs and FOB sales that when it's going up, that is a headwind in margin. When it's going down, it's a tailwind in margin. Oh, that was helpful. I mean, just on that, Alan, I realize there's been a lot of moving parts. A lot of moving parts impacting the gross margin over the years. If we look pre-pandemic, so before COVID, surging cost inflation, your gross margin was 15%-16%. Is there anything structurally challenging the business preventing you from getting back there over time? Thanks, everyone. Michael, this is Jule. There's nothing structurally preventing us from getting back there. As I've said for a while now, we're on the road back to there. The best indicator of our future is our backlog and our backlog margin. You know, we had another good quarter of adding backlog at healthy margins. That blend is continuing to move in the right direction. That's a good indicator of it. We continue to vertically integrate. The terminal in Panama City continues to add really good margin, and we're looking forward to getting the new terminal in northern Alabama online in late spring. When you take the backlog margin, the vertical integration that adds to it, and you get a normal external environment where our guys have a fair shot at every job to grow margin, you're gonna see those margins return. You know, something I saw that was very positive in the first quarter is more jobs finished higher margin than lower than I've seen in a while. They finished at a higher than bid margin. And that's throughout CPI's history, more jobs have finished better than bid margin than lower. As you could expect in the last 2 years with inflation hitting, it's like asking a football team to score a touchdown, but every drive you've got to start first and twenty. Now, as this newer backlog gets worked on, we're starting to see it revert to normal, where we can actually execute in the field, find ways to gain margin. All those things add up to where those margins could get back to that range. I'd say one thing structurally, because you asked, is there anything structurally? One thing that we believe structurally that helps us to respond much quicker to things, even as abnormal as what this cost inflation was, is our shorter duration projects that turn over quicker. We're not sitting here talking about we've got, you know, a billion worth of projects that were bid. You know, the faster turnover allows us to respond quicker to positive things, but even more important, to negative things because we're rebidding jobs. We're bidding jobs on a continuous basis and burning off backlog and replacing it with backlog that's got those factors built into it. That's the structural thing that we feel like distinguishes us from companies that do significant number of four or five year long-term design build type projects, which, we just found is not our, you know, the way we do our business. Our next question is from Brian Russo with Sidoti & Company. Please proceed. Hi, good morning. Hey, Brian. Good morning. Thank you for all the information. Just one question or two. You know, what is the M&A environment like? You did two acquisitions in early December. You're at about 2.9x leverage, up from 2.79x last quarter. You know, what are your thoughts as you move through the year? Should we expect, you know, more active level of acquisitions relative to, you know, the last couple of years? Maybe, you know, the type of profile now that you're in six different states. Yeah. Brian, I'll give the answer for the short term, and then I'm gonna let Ned give sort of a bigger picture outlook. You know, we continue to have really good conversations as we always have had throughout our footprint in some adjacent states. We're continuing to build relationships and talk to potential sellers. We're looking at opportunities. You know, we feel like our leverage ratio is gonna moderate down through the course of the year as we execute and deliver on the year that we've put forward in our annual guidance. I look more to, you know, making sure our organization can handle the acquisitions and they fit well strategically. Ned? I think the big thing is this continues to be a very large growing market. With Washington, what they have done with the Infrastructure Act, it's even larger. It also continues to be highly fragmented with a lot of family businesses. That has not changed. We have lots of opportunities inside our footprint and just directly beside our footprint. I think the other piece that I would not get confused by is one of the things that's happening is as we vertically integrate, and we are participating in more of the value chain from rock to road, it creates more acquisition opportunities. You know, some of the best, what we would think of as greenfields or acquisition opportunities are things like new liquid asphalt terminals. Businesses that we buy that may only be in the grading business, and we bring them into the asphalt business, and we get another crew. The vertical integration throughout the value chain has given us opportunities that really are very, not just revenue enhancing, but some of them are just margin enhancing, quite frankly. I think, as these families get older and you move from the first to the second to the third, and many times we're talking to families in the fourth and fifth generation, we see more opportunities and a longer runway ahead of us than we've seen before, quite frankly. I think the big picture opportunity, particularly with the demand rising, like it is in pretty much every state. I don't know about you, but I don't go anywhere that the roads are really good. Right. Understood. Understood. That's gonna continue to create demand and opportunity for us. Yeah. Understood. Just real quickly, any quick comments on the weather you've seen, January to date? You know, with the understanding of the seasonality in the business, just trying to get a better feel for, you know, kinda where you are and, you know, under recovery of costs, fixed costs, et cetera. Yeah, Brian, I saw an analysis this morning that I thought was pretty accurate that said, you know, January's been what you would expect in the winter. It's been wet in some places, drier in others in our footprint. It's about what we expected in January. Nothing out of the ordinary. All right, great. Thank you very much. Thanks, Brian. Our next question is from Brent Thielman with D.A. Davidson. Please proceed. Hey, thanks. Good morning, guys. This one might be for Allan. Good morning, Brent. Hey, Jule. Alan, the guidance for the full year includes an interest expense component to it that would imply kind of a higher quarterly run rate than we saw in the first fiscal quarter. I'm just wondering if that's based on an assumption for higher rates, or do you expect to tap the credit facility and add more debt just to fund the growth you're seeing? Or maybe it's both. Yeah. Good question. I mean, obviously we indicated we borrowed a little over $50 million in this quarter, and that was at the very end of this quarter. That will be debt that we're paying interest on the rest of the year. It has anticipated increases for the portion of our debt that is not covered by the swap. We've got $300 million that fixes the rate on that much of our debt, but any incremental debt that we have borrowed, which is what we borrowed in the fourth quarter. The guidance does not anticipate any future borrowings for internal purposes or for acquisitions. We've talked about the liquid asphalt terminal. There is a small amount of borrowing that we're likely to do as we finish it up. Our normal CapEx, we pay that out of our internally generated cash. Pretty much the debt that we've got on the books now, we'll carry. Again, it is higher in the last three quarters because of the borrowing that we did for the Fairview acquisition. Yep. Just the 2.96 leverage ratio, that's factoring in contributions from the deals you've done into that trailing 12 EBITDA, is that right? That is correct. We get credit- Yeah. for that in that calculation with our bank. That will roll off. Okay. each quarter, so we have to replace it with real EBITDA. Okay. Just, you know, directionally, where would you like to see that leverage ratio? I know EBITDA and margins are compressed and that's gonna change. Yeah. Where would you like to take it? Yeah. We'd like to get it down in the low twos. Yeah. We feel like with the projection we've got, we'll get down into the 2.1-2.2 range by the end of the year. Yeah. Okay. Just, Jules, this might be for you, but there's a lot of infrastructure work getting released around the country. Maybe the best market. I mean, clearly in your areas, but elsewhere too. Maybe the best market we've seen in a long, long time. I guess going through what you've had to go through the last couple years with supply chain, I was curious on the liquid asphalt market, is there any concern about availability or future availability, just given this kind of national pull and demand? Maybe what you're doing to ensure you get what you need. You know, Brent, we haven't heard of any supply chain or supply issues with liquid asphalt. You know, one of the things that we've done that I think helps hedge against that potential risk is we have one terminal now. We'll have two terminals here in the next few months. You know, that we're able to store a lot of liquid asphalt and manage our own supply, not at a wholesale environment, not retail. That helps us, you know, if there is a potential supply issue there. I haven't heard of any concern there. Okay. Last one, sorry. Just on the M&A pipeline, which obviously continues kind of here or there, here and there, you know, issues in availability and just cost of new equipment. Is that coming up in your conversations with folks that may potentially be wanting to partner up with you? Brent, it's a good question. Obviously, when I'm building relationships with potential sellers, we talk about the last two years, and everyone's lived through it together. Yeah. As you can imagine, there's a lot of small talk about supply chain. Every contractor's experienced it. I would tell you, our potential sellers, the people that we're talking to, they're really making their decisions more based upon what's best for their family and long-term planning, and that hasn't changed. You know, they're getting, some of them have been running the business a long time. They're getting ready for retirement. They've got a new generation that may not wanna be in the asphalt business or the construction business. It's really what's best for their families driving their decisions. They've lived through, you know, macro challenges before. I would say that's still driving our M&A discussions. Okay. Hey, great. Thanks for taking the questions. Best of luck here. Okay, thank you. Our final question is from Kevin Gainey with Thompson Davis. Please proceed. Hey, guys. It's Kevin on for Adam. Hey, Kevin. Thanks for taking the question. Wanted to know if you could maybe provide some more detail on maybe the Ferebee acquisition. Is there any kind of vertical integration there already? Well, we're very excited for the Ferebee t o join the CPI family of companies. I have really enjoyed getting to know them. Their organization is very impressive. They're from Charlotte. Their business has grown up there, and so they really know that market well. I've been very impressed just also with the market. From a vertical integration standpoint, one of the things that's really impressive about them is they do a lot of crushed concrete and making aggregate base that really helps them. That's just been something that they're really good at. We're looking, and I'm sure throughout the CPI footprint, their sister companies will be talking to them and trying to learn from that expertise. We consider that a vertical integration they do and do very well. They do on the services side, the same things we do, the grading and different things like that. Very common to what we have. Of course, we've said they've got their own asphalt plants, which is very helpful. Not a lot of difference there as far as the vertical integration things, but, you know, they do all the types of construction services that we typically do in our companies. Cool. Thank you. I think you mentioned too, I don't know, but both of them combined it was $70 million in revs. Is there a split that you could provide for between the Blue Water and the Ferebee? I think the $70 million was in response to how much backlog they had at date of acquisition. We've not really given a revenue number that I recall on them. Typically, to answer the question, a platform acquisition for us is always a larger acquisition than a bolt-on. The Tennessee, their size was such that they were a bolt-on to our Alabama operations, Wiregrass, and so they're integrated into that. That backlog overall would, you know, represent. Typically, we've got about 9 months worth of revenue on backlog in our companies at any one time, slightly higher for most of our companies right now. You could kind of back into that and say that the total revenue would probably be about that backlog divided by, say, 75%-80%. All right. Perfect. That's all I've got. Thank you guys for the time. Thanks, Kevin. We have reached the end of our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for closing comments. Yes, I'd just like to thank everybody for joining us today. We are right on track and looking forward to a great year. Hope everyone has a good weekend. Thank you. Thank you. This does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and thank you for your participation.