Morning once again, everyone. Let's keep things moving here. This is Dan Moore, Director of Research at CJS Securities, and thank you again for joining us today for our 25th annual New Ideas for the New Year Conference. Our next presentation is from Gibraltar Industries. It's my pleasure to introduce Bill Bosway, President and Chief Executive Officer, as well as Joe Lovechio, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We'll start with a brief 10-15 minute overview and update from management, as always. Following that, I'll kick off Q&A, and feel free to submit any questions you might have through the portal. We'll do our best to make sure they're covered. With that, Bill, Joe, thank you very much for being with us today. The floor is yours. Hey, thanks, Dan, and happy New Year to everybody. Excited to be here again, as always. Let me just start with a little bit about the business. You know, the big piece of Gibraltar is residential building products, I think, as most of you know, or some of you may know. We have a renewables business, we have an Agtech business, and we have an infrastructure business. Finishing up 2024 and getting ready for 2025. We'll talk a little bit about that today, but, you know, I think 2024 was an interesting year. We've had a couple different dynamics impact some of our end markets that we've talked in the past about. Let me start with residential. Residential, as an end market perspective, I think has been relatively solid. It wasn't, you know, anything super exciting from an end market perspective. It was kind of where we thought it would be. About 80% of what we do is repair. We're not really in remodel, so we like to separate those two. If you think about what we do, it's really around the roof, and so roofs and homes get repaired when there's some type of storm damage or they age out. And of course, we do new construction as well. And our mail and package business, which is inside the residential business, again, people tend to replace mailboxes when they need to be replaced versus that being a remodeling type activity. So, you know, going into the year, we thought the market would be relatively slow. That kind of ended up being that way. Our strategy the last four or five years and continues to be today is to, how do we find ways to drive more participation, get a bigger piece of the pie? And we continue to work pretty hard on that. We'll talk a little bit about that here in a few minutes. Some of the wins that we had, particularly the second half of the year, were delayed in terms of moving forward. And that happens sometimes when the marketplace slows a bit and the incumbent is on its way out and the new supplier like us is coming in. There's a transition as you're taking inventory out of the old product and bringing in new inventory. And so that impacted us in the third quarter and in the second half of 2024. We don't anticipate that being an issue going forward now that that kind of gets cleared out. But, you know, our game is all centered around participation gains, and we have, I think, a pretty solid plan going into 2025 as to how that's going to continue. Switching to renewables, our big initiative in renewables this year outside of dealing with, again, ongoing regulatory issues that have been plaguing the industry for a bit was launching our new tracker technology. And so this is something I mentioned a number of times recently or in our previous calls, and it really surprised us with the pace at which the product took off. So it happened about nine months quicker than we had originally thought, and we weren't as well prepared as we should have been. We've gone through that learning curve. I think we're pretty far through that, and I think the team's made a lot of progress. But in the midst of launching a new product that came a little bit quicker than that should have been on top of the regulatory issues. It made for an interesting dynamic for us during the year, but we battled through that, and I think we're in a good position going forward now having that behind us. So that's, I think, a big milestone for us that we've been able to achieve and overcome in a very short period of time, have pretty good success with getting the product out there. Now it's really about, now we're getting through the learning curve, is executing as we get into 2025 in a more effective way, and we can talk about that as well. I think the third area I'll mention is Ag tech. AgTech is one of those industries that are hard to understand because it's really owned by private companies, and so as we've gotten people more familiar with what's going on here, there's three pieces of AgTech that are important to us. One is produce, and you hear a lot about that. You'll hear me talk a lot about that, and that's actually the production of fruits and vegetables that are grown in controlled environments, and that industry has been around for quite a long time, and it serves a lot of your supermarket retail environment and your produce section today. It continues to grow nicely there, and I think the investments going into this space are going to accelerate. There are a number of companies now coming in that historically have not been involved in this space. We're excited about that. But if you look at the investment profile that our growers have going forward with the capacity expansions that are required to meet the ongoing demand, it's a really interesting opportunity for us. And we believe that the Agtech business will be a big contributor for Gibraltar the next couple of years and sooner than later, and we're looking forward to demonstrating that to you. And that activity continues as well. The only challenge with this business is the projects are so large when they swing a quarter or two. It can look on the surface like there's something going on, but it's not a build-and-ship kind of industry as you might expect. But, you know, what I encourage people to look at is the capacity that's been involved in investments that are occurring over a given year, and they continue to be quite robust. So we're excited about that. More to come on that. And then finally, our infrastructure business has done a nice job the last couple of years. It's running well. You know, the Infrastructure Bill is still in place. Things are still relatively well funded, and we're excited about that. The amount of projects that we're designing and working on are still robust. It's a very, very robust design backlog. And I think one of the interesting things for us, we haven't talked a lot about in the past, but we'll talk more about going forward is some new technology centered around the installation of fiber optics in streets. And so we have something there that we think is kind of interesting, and more to come as that evolves. But as you can imagine, fiber optic cable with the way the world's going is really important, and how do you get that in the ground to bring access more to others or to the many folks that need it? And, you know, I think we're going to play hopefully a bigger role in that down the road. So as that materializes, we have something that's unique there that's patented, and hopefully it will contribute accordingly. But so a lot going on. You know, we get a lot of questions around, well, what does it mean going forward, new administration, and what are you most worried about, and what are you excited about? And, you know, the way we set our plan this year is, you know, until you see things actually evolve, you don't see things evolve. So you play around with a couple of scenarios. I'd say in residential, taking the same approach as last year, I don't anticipate anything the new administration will do that will change that dramatically in a short period of time. You know, we're going to run from an end market perspective. You know, it's still going to be driven off of interest rates and health of the economy and all that good stuff. We built a plan around the market, end market being not too different than it is today. It's all about how do we drive more participation, and we can talk about that here in a bit. In the renewable space, that's probably where we spent a ton of time trying to figure out. And honestly, if you wanted to get a report every day, you'll hear something a little bit different about what may or may not change with the IRA and when will it change and the priorities of what type of incentives may be modified. We're not anticipating that the IRA is going to get thrown out the door. Obviously, there'll be some executive orders. There'll be some reconciliation that's done. It is a law, so it's not something you can just override and get rid of. But there are pieces of it that I do think the administration will look at and is looking at. And it doesn't necessarily mean it's all going to be bad by any means. So we've done a couple of different scenarios around that. I would say the other area that we hope the administration will spend some time on, and there's a lot of chatter about it as well as how do you actually do something about the bureaucracy associated with permitting and so forth. And, you know, on the surface, that's not just a federal issue. It is a combination of state and federal. So there's work to be done there. But if we can find a way to eliminate some of the time and effort it takes to actually have our customers get in a position where they can move forward with projects when they thought they were going to be able to move forward, that would be very helpful. But the good news is, I think in renewables, this in 2025, putting anything the new administration might do aside, is probably the first year in the last two or three years that we haven't had or won't have a DOC investigation, an executive order, an execution timeline that is associated with the executive order, all wrapped up kind of simultaneously that are causing a lot of, you know, lack of clarity for our customers. So if we can just get our customers to a point where they know what the cost is for them to actually assume in their investment theses for each piece of land they want to develop solar, that's towards goodness. And I see more of that in 2025 than I saw in 2023 and 2024. You might ask, well, Bill, there could be another DOC investigation, another file, another complaint filed for AD/CVD. That is true. But I would say this, the first two investigations were done around four countries with a set of suppliers that supply about 80% of all the panels for the U.S. historically. It's unlikely a third complaint would be taken on for the same four countries and the same suppliers. If there is another complaint, it probably goes against a country or a set of suppliers, and that's okay. That's probably less disruptive than when you're dealing with 80% of your supply chain. So our hope is, yes, there could be more of that. But at the end of the day, I don't think there's a third round of investigations that can be as disruptive as there has been. So let's hope there's not. But ultimately, at the end of the day, you know, this could be the first time we've had some stability, barring any major shift from the administration, which as of today, I'm not anticipating to be a gigantic thing. But, you know, we haven't been great at predicting the last couple of years, but I think the next few months we'll see how this evolves. I think every industry is thinking about what the new administration might do and how it impacts them and that their industry is going to be first. The other thing is it may not work that way, right? There's a lot of different things that I think they want to accomplish. But I do think one of the things the administration is going to go hard after is they're going to attack inflation. I think they're going to do that by attacking the cost of energy. I think they're going to do that by balancing the production of energy. That doesn't take away from renewables, but I do think if we can attack the cost of energy, energy is in everything. It's pervasive in everything we do, business and personal life that brings inflation down. That allows maybe some of these other tactics that are going to be used in negotiating with countries or otherwise around tariffs and things of that nature. I also think the administration is going to find some of that unused spend in a number of these bills and use that to support some other initiatives as well. I always go back to behavior from when Trump was in the White House before. And I know things can be different and are different, but he's the only president, by the way, that I think actually supported renewables by extending the ITC benefits and raising them. And so I do think he believes the industry is solid. I think it creates a lot of jobs. It's good for the economy and so forth. And if anything, I think they'll probably drive more domestic content requirement to actually earn the ITC benefit, which I think is a good thing for somebody like us because ultimately, at the end of the day, if you're a developer and you're looking for that ITC benefit, you can't get it through imported panel. So that means you have to go to racking companies or companies like us to get more domestic content, the credit towards your overall ITC benefit. So that could be something that plays out well for us. And once we get clarity on that, you know, we're in a position to execute on bringing more onshore and/or insourcing to help support something like that. So a couple of different scenarios we're working around, but ultimately, at the end of the day, you can do that forever and never be right. So we've tried to put some bookends out there around the renewables in market space to say what could happen and put our plans in place accordingly. I feel like we'll perform well at the volume levels that we're anticipating regardless now that we've gotten our tracker up and running accordingly. So look forward to that. So, you know, that's how we built the plan for 2025 for renewables. And I think if you think about Agtech, you know, we've got some good momentum there. I think you'll see some of that play through. And then infrastructure I mentioned earlier, I think there's some interesting developments going on there. The last thing I'd leave you with before we open up for questions is the M&A environment is actually picking up quite significantly, particularly as it relates to opportunities in both renewables. And I would actually say Ag tech as well, but more so probably in, I'm sorry, I meant to say residential and Ag tech. So in the world of residential, I would say Joe and I are seeing, you know, teasers come across the line, across the wire, you know, probably one or two every other week, it seems like the last few months. I do anticipate the combination of both bolt-on and larger opportunities probably ranging anywhere from $5-$10 million of EBITDA up to $100 million of EBITDA will come into play in the next 12-24 months. We'll be right in the middle of that if those opportunities make sense for us. We are doing a lot of pre-work associated with what we think are these opportunities that are coming with some third parties assessing some things for us. You know, I think we're in a good position. We've got the right balance sheet. Finally, starting to see the activity that's out there. Now it's a matter of finding the ones that we think make most sense for us, bringing them across the finish line, and then obviously executing to build out the basis. But you're going to find more of that in residential and Agtech, I think in the near term than you would in renewables as that end market is still, you know, searching for some stability before I think there's any activity there. So let me stop there, Dan, and we can open up for questions if you'd like at this stage. Yeah that's perfect Great overview. Appreciate it, Bill. Maybe start with Resi. You know, revenue held up pretty well in a tough demand environment through the first half of 2024. And you started to feel the effects of, you know, kind of a slower than expected R&R market by Q3. How do we think about that kind of sluggishness? Do we see that lingering maybe through H1 with a little better H2? What are the keys for Gibraltar to drive further participation gains, you know, in 2025 and beyond? Yeah, I think it's still a bit sluggish. You know, I think it'll pick up as we go. That's the way we built the plan. We know where we're gaining participation. And so I think that's helpful as you build things out. You know, I think a lot of industries are just waiting to see what's going to happen after January 20th and if anything impacts them accordingly. But effectively, I think that'll work itself through pretty quickly, particularly in residential. Like I said, I don't think there's any short-term or regulatory type thing you can do in the near term to drive a change in the repair market as it relates to residential and even the new construction. I mean, interest rates and so forth, mortgage rates are going to be tied to the 10-year, and that's not going to move overnight to where it's going to make things move one way or the other quickly. But I do think the way we think about gaining participation is, look, let's not rely on the market. Let's surgically go through the 40 MSAs and figure out what we're going to do there. So you'll see us roll out more new locations both organically, and you'll see through some of the acquisitions that I think will come to the table, we'll fill in those gaps that will drive our participation forward in the next year or two. And we're excited to have that opportunity. You know, we've obviously got to win those opportunities, but I think we're in a good position to do that. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, buying something is relatively easy. I think being in a position where you have the synergy opportunity where you can create value in a very short period of time makes a lot of sense, and I think we're in a good position to execute around that as well, so that's part of that preliminary work I referenced before in terms of how you get ready for that. But yeah, I think residential, the market's going to continue. You know, it's naturally slower in the first quarter anyway, and then I think it'll pick up, but I think people are just waiting to see if there's anything that they are not anticipating, and, you know, it's going to be business as usual and, you know, kind of game on on the participation side of things. Very helpful. And you did detail some of this certainly in the opening remarks as it relates to renewables. But, you know, any update on the kind of anti-dumping and countervailing duties investigations? Just remind us in terms of timeline. And are those customers still largely on pause as we enter the new year? Would you say things are starting to open up or still more wait-and-see mode at this stage? Yeah, there's a little bit of wait-and-see. We got through the, if you guys remember, the infamous December 3rd date that was tied to the executive order where you had to get panels with the industry we refer to as glass on your racking to avoid any potential duties associated with the outcome from the DOC investigation number one. And so everyone was scrambling to do that. And I think got through that. DOC investigation number two, the final determinations have been pushed out not too far, but in April. Preliminary determinations are out there from not only DOC, but also USITC, U.S. International Trade Commission, so both of those parties have to agree for the final determinations to be finalized, and I think that'll happen, and I think people are just waiting for that finalization because ultimately that's what drives the input cost understanding for a developer or anyone that's going to put a field in place, so it might have been pushed out 30 to 45 days, but I think, you know, that should be behind us no later than the end of April, so I had said coming out of Q3 that Q4 and Q1 really up till April until we get that finalized is going to put people a little bit in a wait-and-see mode. It doesn't mean people are doing nothing. But in terms of signing contracts and inking deals, that's important that they have that understanding before they move forward. Helpful. Excuse me. And in terms of renewables, you know, from a, I guess, supply perspective, but this time last year, you were maybe caught a bit off guard, as you alluded to, by the speed of the transition in demand from fixed tilt to tracker products. I think you said those growing pains are now largely behind you. You know, can you provide, put a little meat on the bone there? And what do we need to have happen to get back to low to mid-teens operating margins from a demand perspective in that piece of your business? Yeah, you know, from a, you know, whether demand were to change or not, year over year, I feel like we'll deliver a double-digit margin in 2025. And, you know, we're finalizing those things as we speak. For us, it really was more about going through the learning curve of ramping up the new product line in a short period of time while trying to navigate through some of these deadlines that a lot of our customers were dealing with simultaneously. So not to make an excuse, it just kind of worked that way last year. And I think from a supply chain perspective, as well as our internal investments we've made to facilitate more efficient delivery in the field, I think we've got a lot of that behind us now. Yeah, we'll still work out a few kinks here and there, but I think we'll be in pretty good shape going into 2025, much different than we were in 2024. Supply chain, I think, is pretty solid. You know, we catch a little bit of breather towards the end of Q4 and the beginning of Q1, which is always the slowest time for us, particularly as it relates to field install, so you know, we've insourced some things that we didn't have at the beginning of last year. We've got some suppliers ramped up differently than we had before the start of last year, and I think, you know, it's all towards goodness, so, and we put in an internal distribution center. You know, the big thing about Tracker that's different than what you find with fixed Tilt is you're bringing, you're sourcing more products for tracker because it's a more complex product line versus fixed Tilt, which we tend to make internal, and so bringing those out, those external supply components into our business is a little bit different for us, so traditionally, we would manufacture the four or five main components for fixed Tilt and ship to site from our own facility. Now then we start out trying to figure out when demand took off, how do you get 24 different components to that same site, and initially, we're trying to get our suppliers to help us do that effectively, and we've transitioned that to bringing that through a distribution center internal, so when we ship to a site, it's all coming at the same time. That's really critical when you're doing field, obviously, installation. And so that engine is now in place, and we're ramping that up. So that's going to be helpful. Understood. Very helpful. Shifting gears to Ag tech, are you seeing demand? Obviously, you know, strong year bookings in 2024. Are you seeing demand relatively steady, accelerating, decelerating? How do you feel about that as we enter for 2025? Yes, we are. And I think we're seeing, as we speak, you'll see bookings start to materialize also in Q1. And as you know, Dan, from seeing what we're seeing, the size of these projects, you know, a project, whether it's a booking or something you're starting on, whether it lands in one week or two weeks later, it can swing in a big way. But I don't worry too much about quarter to quarter as much as I do the full year. But yeah, we expect our produce business in particular to have a very solid year versus this year based on the backlog we have now and the bookings that are anticipated here in the near term. So we'll talk more about that next month when we do our Q4 earnings call as well as talk about our 2025 plan. Excellent. As a reminder, if you have any questions, feel free to submit them through the portal. You know, the goal every year is to make more money at a higher rate of return, assuming for the moment that we have a relatively flat environment in, you know, residential at least, and we'll see about renewables for much. Is there an opportunity to continue to drive margin improvement in that environment, you know, as we kind of think about the comps versus 2024? Yeah, there is. I think both organically and inorganically, but we expect to grow on top and bottom line. And I think, you know, looking forward to talking through that plan here in about 30 days. But yeah, we feel, based on what we know today and how we built the plans, we feel pretty good about delivering growth on top and bottom line in 2025. Excellent. What are you? I was going to ask about policy, you know, the incoming administration, but I think we touched on that pretty well. Maybe you've typically provided kind of full year revenue and EPS guidance in conjunction with that report in Q4. How would you? Not looking for front-running, but just how would you describe your visibility, you know, entering 2025 compared to maybe, you know, the past several years? You know, I don't know if it's entirely different. I would say that's not true. I mean, the difference I think is on the positive side, Agtech. We have a better view than we would have the last couple of years, and part of that is, you know, the investment that we're seeing flowing into the industry, the broader customer base that we have versus two years ago. I mean, all that plays towards goodness with visibility, particularly when you have large projects, right, so it gives you a little bit more predictability than you would have had otherwise. So that's helpful in the Ag tech space. In the residential space, you know, we don't carry a lot of backlog to start with, so you know, we look at the data from the industry that is helpful, but fundamentally, we're getting weekly views of how POS is, you know, point of sale data is actually flowing from our customers. And so that's the visibility that we get. But, you know, you don't see much beyond two to three weeks in that regard, but that's just par for the course. But we feel like, you know, the plan's built accordingly in the right way around some of the end market assumptions. You know, and on the renewables front, I don't think it's any more or less clear than it would have been the last couple of years. The difference is everyone's waiting to see what the new administration may do with, as I mentioned earlier, the IRA as an example. But hopefully, we don't have as much on the regulatory front that's incremental than what the industry has been dealing with. So I view that, I'm going to say, net positive, but I think at best, you know, at worst case, it's neutral. And we'll learn over the next three or four months what, if anything, changes with the IRA. And, you know, we put some bookend scenarios in place to try to capture as best we want to think about that. But as I mentioned earlier also, I mean, if you want a new opinion, all you have to do is open your email every day, and people will tell you what they think is going to happen or not happen. And so there's a lot of people in Washington trying to figure that out. And I just, I know it won't be exactly as it is, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's a bad thing. So we built our plan around the business that we have in our backlog and the bookings that we know that are coming. And I suspect, you know, we'll learn more in the next four to six weeks to see what, if anything, is going to impact the IRA, and we'll take it from there. So, as I said earlier, I just think our customer base is looking more for just clarity as it is anything else. And just give us a set of rules we can operate with and guidelines on how to do it, and we'll be fine. But stop changing the rules is part of it. So, you know, hopefully we'll get that sooner than later. Understood. Maybe time for one or two more. Just maybe you could drill down a little bit because you alluded to this in the opportunity set for M&A. Some of the new markets in RESI that you entered, both organically and inorganically, over the last, you know, 12 months—what the impact has been, what the impact could be in terms of growth potential going forward. As you look at, you know, the map, where do you see the biggest opportunity to expand on a go-forward basis? Yeah. Well, we've identified, I think it's—so we're in, you know, there's 40 MSAs that really make up the bulk of the industry in terms of how it's served. The reason we think about MSAs is if you think about where contractors buy from, about they buy about 80% of their needs are served through the wholesaler. When we started this journey back in 2019, about 70% of our business went through big box retail, 30% wholesale. Today, it's 60% through wholesale and 30% through retail. And we're going to continue to drive our MSA presence because that's going to get us more access to more wholesalers. So wherever we currently are, there's opportunity to grow. And wherever we're not, there's opportunity, obviously, to penetrate. So organically, we've identified, I think, the next 12 MSAs that we will be targeting. We've got a schedule in terms of how we're going to do that and where we're going to do that. We have a dedicated team we've carved out to do that. And then inorganically, through M&A, we're going to fill in gaps that way as well. So we know exactly where we're not. We know where we are, and we know where we need to improve where we are. So the acquisitions that I think will help us will be the ones that will fill in the gaps where we're not and/or strengthen us where we are. And so between the 12 markets that right now we currently have planned to do organically and some of the M&A opportunities we expect to happen, you know, come to market here in the next 12 months, we feel like we can really fill out in a stronger way the 40 MSAs that we've been tracking for some time and build out our presence that way. So I'm excited about that opportunity. It's one of those milestones we've worked really hard on the last year and a half to get in a position. As you recall, Dan, we bought a small company in Salt Lake. Subsequently, we positioned ourselves in Boise. Those are two of the markets. And then we've positioned ourselves in Denver. And Boise and Denver, we're just getting started. Those would be nice incremental adds for us in 2025 that can generate some business for us. So it's those kinds of initiatives and activities across these other remaining 10 or 11 MSAs that we're going to work hard on, particularly in 2025 and early 2026. So that should position us better in residential. Excellent. Probably time for one more, and I'll hand it back for closing remarks. But you alluded to this, Bill. In terms of M&A, it sounds like 2025 could be a bigger year. Pipeline is getting bigger from a competitive standpoint. Has private equity backed the way at all? And where are you seeing the most opportunity and, you know, what could a larger size deal look like? Yeah. I think on a small size, it's $5-$10 million of EBITDA. On a large size, it's 100, you know, maybe 120 million of EBITDA. In between, there's, I'd say, probably, you know, between 10 and 15 processes that we expect to continue and/or get started in the next 12-18 months. Some of these we don't have the start date finalized, but just, you know, having our fingers in the marketplace where we know things are coming. Then we have some things that obviously we've been in discussions with or that are active processes as we speak. Some of those are, you know, private exclusive kind of processes, and some of those are going to be competitive open processes. I think, you know, the multiples are going to range anywhere between 6 and probably 10, depending on the deal and the size. You know, where it's 10, obviously, you know, there's going to be, there's got to be, for us, a path of synergy that's going to bring that in at a multiple that's much lower than 10 with synergies before we would execute, and we get that. I said earlier, there's some preliminary work that we're doing with some third parties to go out and really assess these larger opportunities in preparation before these processes even get started. We've kicked those off for probably a month now or so. I anticipate some of those processes will get started in the next six months, and we'll be right there at the front of it, seeing what we think. Yeah, probably for the first time in the last two years, there's a pipeline out there that looks actionable that people are going to move forward with. And as we've talked in the past, we are engaged in a number of these before, but they all stopped. Some restarted, some didn't. But, you know, a lot of stop-start, I think, as I mentioned earlier, we're seeing much more activity, a lot in residential or building products in general. And we're probably getting a teaser one or two a week, it seems like. And then there's some in Ag tech as well. So yeah, rich with opportunity. We'll figure out what makes most sense for us. We'll leave it there and look forward to hearing more in a month or so, and obviously in the coming weeks and months. Bill, Joe, thank you very much for the time today. And as always, if we can help follow it up at all, please let us know. Great. Thanks, Dan. I appreciate it. Thanks for everyone that joined the call.