I am Louie DiPalma. I cover smart infrastructure on William Blair's equity research team. This is the second day of the 46 Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference. We're pleased to be hosting a hybrid presentation/fireside chat with Sterling Infrastructure's management team, for the fourth consecutive year. When Sterling first attended our conference, the stock price was in the 20s, and now I believe it's in the 900s. There's been a lot of action. We are hosting CEO Joe Cutillo, CFO Nick Grindstaff, and the Vice President of Investor Relations, Noelle, who's sitting in the front row. Following the presentation, there will be a breakout session in the Jenny B room on the second floor. I'm required to inform the audience that a list of conflicts of interest and disclosures are available on the William Blair website. Joe and Nick, please take it away. Thanks, Louie. Thank you, everybody, for coming. When I think back to 2000, I joined the company at the end of 2015 and did our first conferences in 2016, and we'd have two people in the audience. It's nice to see a full audience and we've come a long way. As Louie said, last year we were here, we were at about $6 billion of market cap. Today, we're teetering. We can't quite get to $30 billion, we're at $29.5 billion in market cap. We've had a really nice run. A few things that we're going to do a little bit of a hybrid here, but I want to make sure there's some key takeaways that everybody gets out of today's session. We've had a tremendous run, but we're in the early innings. We really are. We'll talk more about that. The visibility that we have, we're very blessed that we're the first on the sites, and we're the first to see what's coming three to five years out from our customer base, largely in the mission-critical area today. That's very nice. We've built a platform. If you think our growth has been good, we've built a platform to accelerate that growth over the next five years. More importantly than that, we've got a great balance sheet. We're throwing off a tremendous amount of cash to support that growth. We're in one of the most exciting times I've ever seen. Actually, the most exciting time I've ever seen in my career. As I get older and older, I've seen a lot. I don't think people realize what is really going on out there. We're not talking about billions of dollars of activity. We're talking about trillions of dollars. Every time we sit down with our end customers and talk about our end markets, we come back scratching our heads saying, "We have to build more capacity faster than we ever anticipated." Every time we think we're building it fast enough, we have to build it faster. Great time, great end markets. We'll talk more about the company, and then in the breakout session, I'll answer any questions that you have. On this topic of visibility, are the hyperscalers sharing their three-year, five-year, seven-year, 10-year plans with you in terms of what markets they want you to travel with them to, and how does that work? Yeah. It took us a couple of years to get to that point. We've been in a tie with the hyperscalers for the last two to three years that, look, based on what we see coming from you and your peers and competitors, along with the other infrastructure build that's going to be taking place in the U.S., around 2028 you're going to see pharma take off. We've seen multiple onshoring or reshoring of factories. 2030 is when you really see semiconductors start to take off. You start putting this together and compounding it. There's going to be real capacity issues with your key suppliers. We'll grow with you. We'll commit the capacity, but we have to be involved in your three and five-year plans so that we're ahead of this as well. Just in the last year and a half, they've finally started sitting down and sharing that information. We share with them, "Here's our strategic plan. Here's what we're looking at services of adding. Here's where we're looking at going geographically." They share with us, "Here's our build plans and where we're going." In some geographies, we say, "That's great, but we don't plan on going there." In other geographies, that falls. Some of you have heard this in our groups, but I'll tell you, we had a real-life scenario happen in the fourth quarter of last year where one of the hyperscalers came to us and said, "We understand from your strategy you plan on expanding geographically into this new region. Are you still committed to do that?" We said, "Yes, we are. We're going to actually start in 2026." They said, "Great, because, starting around 2028, 2029, we've got nine data campuses." These are campuses today. They're not data centers anymore. They're very large. We got nine data campuses, which we're going to do in one state in this new geography. We want to sit down and understand, are you able to meet this expectation, and what are you committed to, and what are you willing to do? Our guys, doing their job, like they said, they said, "We'll do all nine. Not a problem." They said, "Well, wait a second. We want to make sure you do those nine, and you're going to do the other states and the other regions that we're doing builds with you." We said, "Well, it's not a problem. We'll do all nine." At that time, we were actively on 27 data campuses, okay? Why would we be worried about nine? We got three years of runway. We certainly can build capacity at nine more. Not a big deal. They said, "Well, that's great, but let us give you a little bit more information so that you can commit to it and make sure we're all aligned." We said, "Great." I get a call and our guy said, "We have a problem." I said, "What do you mean we have a problem? They're not going to do all nine?" They said, "No, they're doing all nine. We can only do two." As any CEO's response, I said, "What the hell are you talking about? We're going to do nine, right?" They said, "Let me explain to you what these are." These nine, to put it in perspective on how fast this market's growing, but also the size and scope of these jobs and what's happening, those nine are bigger than all the 27 campuses that we were on at the time. Plus all of the data campuses we've ever done in the history of the company. That's one customer, one state. Right? This thing is growing at a rate that I could have never imagined, and every time I tell people, it almost seems unbelievable. Not only is the quantity of centers coming out, but the size of these are growing tremendously. It's important to understand what drives the size. We didn't get into data. They've been building data centers for a long period of time. We didn't do data centers because they were data centers. They were a five-to-10-acre lot and a building. Way too small for us to do and get excited about. When they got to about 100 acres, as land availability got scarce and really expensive in the metropolitan areas and moved out, got to 100 acres, we started doing data centers. When power started to become a little bit of availability problem, nothing near what it was today, they moved up to 200, 300, 400 acres. They put multiple data centers on a campus. We loved that. We thought we were in hog heaven. It was the greatest thing that could happen, right? Fast-forward to today, our parking lots are bigger than 100 acres. The sites we're starting on today are around 1,000 acres plus. Starting in 2027, 2028, they go from 1,000 acres to 3,000 or 4,000 acres. What's driving that? It's the beginning of self-power generation on these sites. From there, the next generation after that is 10,000 acres. After that, we're talking about numbers that are north of 30,000 acres, right? We'll see if they get there and where that comes. You can see the progression of what's taking place. For us, size matters. The bigger it is, the more complex it is, the better we like it. That's what we do. At the end of the day, we're an insurance policy for the end customer because we guarantee that that project will be done on time, every time, and we've done it on time every time. We're a time machine to the general contractor. General contractor has liquidated damages at the end of these. It'll be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. We're the most critical part of the build cycle or build schedule, and we're really the only part that can actually bring in weeks or months with some of the adds we've added in services, by reducing the total time to build or building weeks or months of cushion into the GC's schedule. That's a little bit about what we do. What was the outcome of the story after your contractors said they could only do two out of the nine? Well, we're not doing two. We're going to do nine. Great. We're going to figure it out. We're not going to give up yet. What it led into is we sat down with this hyperscaler and said, "Look, you can't do this like you're planning on doing. Forget us for a minute. You're not going to have enough mechanical contractors. You're not going to have enough electrical contractors. There's just not enough people to build these size scopes the way you're setting up the schedule. Let's sit down and let's look at how to sequence these over a couple year period so that you can get built what you want, you can have the capacity of the key suppliers or contractors that you want to work with, and we'll all work together on schedule." We're working on that now, and we'll lay that out. We're also adding capacity very rapidly in that area. That particular state will be one of the biggest states in data center growth over the next five years in the country. We'll figure it out. It's that collaboration that's starting to happen at a much broader, much deeper level than it has in the past, but it's coming out of necessity. Everybody's racing for the same skill sets. In sum, you're seeing the potential in 2028 for data center campuses in the range of 3,000-4,000 acres? You see it further expanding from there, too? Yeah, it is. They are, right? Yeah. What people have to understand is everybody says, "Well, why can you see three to five years out?" Well, it just happens to take that long from the time you allocate funding to the time you break ground. Data centers historically have been three years. When you put self-power generation on, they move to five. Well, why did they move to five? It's really simple. They're going to gas-powered turbines. Lead time on a gas-powered turbine is about five years. Okay? They're spending $hundreds of millions today buying componentry and stuff for that project five years out. We just announced we're doing our first semiconductor facility. It's the biggest facility ever built in the U.S. I remember when they announced they were going to spend $100 billion on this facility, 10-year project. Everybody came to us and said, "Well, this is great. It's in your footprint. When do you guys start?" We said, "Probably in five years." Everybody said, "What are you talking about? They just said they're going to spend $100 billion. You're talking about five years. It's going to be over in five years." We said, "No, it's not going to start for five years," right? A few months later, everybody's calling saying, "You must have lost the job. You must not be getting it." We said, "The job's not even out. It's going to be five years." Well, we were off. I'll admit, we were wrong. It was four years and seven months from the time they announced the funding till the time we broke ground on that project. These things really do take that much time, and they have to be planning that far ahead to break ground on time. The visibility we have is tremendous. If you step back and you sit there and you're in my shoes, I feel pretty good today. We are looking out with our customers three to five years. Five, starting on five because of the power. The semiconductors are five years out. Typical projects today take us three years to do site development. These larger projects will take closer to five years. If I see what's coming three to five years out, I put three to five years on it. I got somewhere between, call it, eight to 10 years of visibility of what's coming. Now, with the add of electrical as part of our portfolio, you add two years to the end of that, right? As we continue to grow out electrical, that gives us more opportunities there. Probably over the next 36 months, we'll start adding mechanical. Mechanical's kind of in that two-year window on the back end. I've never been in a position, I've never been in a company that has had this sort of visibility. As crazy as it sounds that it takes five years or three years to get a project going, it's the greatest thing for us because it does give us that visibility. They have to start that far ahead. On this topic of accelerating demand and data center, the sizes of campuses growing from previously 100 acres to 1,000 to 10,000, these orders of magnitude growth, do you think that there's any viability to the political opposition to these data centers in different states? Yeah. That was the top headline in The Wall Street Journal this morning in terms of opposition. Yeah How do you think that plays out? Yeah. Well, there's definitely opposition, but I think each state is different. We could go around, and not to get political, there's some states that don't want anything, and there's some states that are very open to maybe too much, right? You could argue. We have not, knock on wood, we have not seen anything delayed or stopped over protests or anything like that. The only thing we have seen is there have been, I'll call it unrealistic expectations on some of these projects, where if it historically has taken three years from start to having power, having permitting and all that stuff, a lot of the hyperscalers say, "Well, how do we do it in two?" The reality is, there's only so much you can squeeze out of that, and they end up doing it in three. Everybody says, "Well, that project got pushed." For us, that project didn't get pushed because we knew it wasn't going to start until that timeframe, and it never got in the schedule anyway, right? When we get it in the schedule, we're breaking ground, when we know, so it doesn't get delayed. In candor, I've never said this in my career, I wish they would push some and slow them down and stretch them out. They're really coming so fast and so furious, and we're certainly getting stretched meeting some of the demands and expectations. Not only are we doing what are the typical cycle, which are easy to plan, we generally keep capacity for emergencies. What's an emergency? It's not our emergency, it's our customer's emergency, and we happen to be on one right now, where we get the call that they have a project outside of our regions in a footprint that we generally don't want to do work. Project gets behind, they call us, "Can you come bail us out?" We'll go there. We're in one right now in a state we don't want to be in, but we'll do it for a major customer, and we'll get that project back on schedule. We charge a lot for it, but we get them back on schedule. We do that. As they're throwing this stuff at us, we're running out of that excess capacity, and they've got to plan a little better as we're building more capacity quicker. Great. Along those lines, previously, your data center focus has been in the Plateau region of the Southeast, the Greater Atlanta area, South Carolina, North Carolina. What's changed over the past six months? Has it been that the customers have become so desperate that they're willing to meet you where you wanted for pricing? Is that what's changed? What's been the dynamic such that now you're experiencing success in Texas and perhaps the Midwest? Yeah the Northwest? What's changed? Everybody has different strategies. Our philosophy's really simple. When you have really good customers, listen to them, help them, and move where they want you to move. We have expanded geographically not where we have said we wanted to, but where our customers have told us they're going. You will see sometime this year, we will expand into the upper Northwest. People will say, "Well, why are you going to the upper Northwest? There's nothing up there." They're right, okay, today. I believe, if I'm a betting person, that in 2027 and 2028, some very large projects just happen to come out in the upper Northwest by some of our really good customers. Guess what? We're going to be there to support them. We let the customers tell us where to go. What's been really interesting, though, is how we've been able to shift assets and resources to help support that growth. When I started this journey, 95% of our business was low bid, heavy highway. If anybody wants to get into a bad business or something, go there. It's terrible. Super high risk, super low reward, really challenging customers, let's just say. Today, less than 5% of our business is in that. The last piece of that business, of which we're closing down in Texas, we've shifted all their utility and underground assets to West Texas. They're now doing data centers. Much better return. Who I would say is probably one of the best, if not the best highway business in the country is our business in Utah. Margins are two times anybody else's. Really good company. Sometime in this year, probably in the third quarter, they will actually produce more revenue from e-infrastructure than they do for transportation. We will continue to shift those assets and those resources there. Why do we do that? We happen to have a hyperscaler that wanted to do a job in Idaho, and we weren't going from Atlanta to Idaho. We said we could use the yellow iron and operators from our transportation business, along with our project management from our southeast business, and put them together. That went from a pilot project to now they will have more revenue coming out of data centers out of the Rocky Mountain areas and into West Texas, than they do transportation. That's good. We follow them. Yeah. It's how we got in the electrical business. I'd like to tell you we're so smart that we decided to get in the electrical business. Our customers are asking us, "Why don't you do the electrical? Why don't you incorporate that into the site civil?" We said, "Sounds like a great idea." We did an experiment. We like to walk before we run. We're pretty conservative. Even though our numbers are pretty good, we're very conservative. We did a little pilot project. We bought a small company in Georgia, tri-utility business. We said, "If we could double this business in a year." It's not a bad goal, right? Double it in a year. "We'll get into the electrical business." We quadrupled the business in less than six months. We said, "Well, we better get in the electrical business," right? This works. The model works. Our customers were more than receptive to it. We got into the electrical business. The better news is we bought CEC around last September. We thought it'd take us about a year to really get them into data centers and leverage our capabilities. We filled up their capacity in three months, and we're trying like hell to grow their capacity as fast as we can. It's been an unbelievable success, unbelievable reception from the customers, and the question is, how do we add more? Are the margins when you are pursuing these data center jobs and executing them outside of your core southeast market, are they just as favorable as in the southeast? Yeah. Well, the nice thing is we have pretty good margins. Not good enough in my book, can always be better, and we'll continue to grow those margins. A couple things. When we go into a new geography and we use assets from our transportation business, the pricing's the same. The margins aren't quite as good. The reason for that is their equipment suite is smaller, right? We're continuing to upsize their equipment suite. Their margins will be as good. They're not quite as vertically integrated as we are through some of the other areas, but as we get critical mass, we'll do the vertical integration. Their margins will get there. That's one of the many reasons why we say our margins will continue to increase. Yeah. You like our margins, they're great, but we have opportunities to really grow that as we go. The other piece is the electrical margins are lower. Historically, the electrical business is lower. Why? I don't know. We'll figure it out. We've got some great margin expansion opportunity, and you'll see over the next 12 to 18 months some really nice margin improvements in the electrical business as we incorporate that into the site development side. We're going to exit some markets and redistribute those assets to higher return stuff. Great. You just mentioned how the CEC business, which is the electrical business, is capacity constrained. How are you trying to address that? Well, electrical's a little more complicated to add capacity than our site. Generally, we don't have an issue with site. We literally have hundreds of people that want to come work for us as operators. The electrical side is constrained with just a combination of things. Pure number of certified electricians out there in the world is not unlimited. There's a lot of apprentices, but you also have a tiered structure where you have to have senior people over junior people, and the ratios get off if you have too many apprentices. We're doing four things. The good old-fashioned way is steal them, right? It's really simple. When we say steal them, we're not going after the big companies. We actually are peers with big companies, but 100-person shops and less that can't do work on large mission critical stuff tend to do work on smaller projects. We're looking for crews that are traveling crews. If you're in a small shop, you're working on a project for three to six months and moving, we can take and put them on a job for two years. We can pay them more, just because the jobs get higher pay. We'll steal some. Can you steal all of them? No, the reality is. We get a fair share. That's one. Two, we need to get more aggressive on acquisitions of what I'll call small 100 to 200 people shops and convert their customer base to ours. Take electricians off what they're doing, we'll put them on mission-critical stuff and go from there. In addition, one of the things we're looking at. Oh, before I go there, we have a university for our electricians, which is great. The downside of it is it takes four years to start someone and be a certified electrician, right? It's a long process. They're an apprentice, they're working with us, but it's a long process, and we can't run thousands of people through that a year, which we'd like to have. The benefit of that is these people are incredibly loyal to us. Very seldom do we lose anybody that's gone through the university. The last is what we're doing with prefab and modularization, and it's really simple. Whatever we can build in the factory and not build in the field, I don't need a certified electrician to build, and I've freed up electrical capacity in the field. It's a lot cheaper for me to build it in a factory. An operator in a factory, not quite but roughly half the price of an electrician in the field. We just tripled the size of our prefab and manufacturing operation, brought in some world-class manufacturing folks who have worked for me in the past and are setting up the operation. In just a short period of time, we've just about doubled the throughput of the modules that we're putting out, or the prefabbed racks that we put into duct banks. We're doing panels, and we're just going to continue to what we say is, "The next thing you touch, how do we incorporate that into the module and go from there? Are these changes in terms of the steps you're taking to increase capacity, have they been effective to the point that, do you think that CEC can maintain its current revenue growth? Yeah Are these capacity constraints so severe that this could become a very serious issue? No, we'll continue to grow. Okay. Yeah, we'll figure it out. No, it's not insurmountable. I will tell you, we filled it up faster than we thought. Yeah. We had these plans. Now it's how do we accelerate these? We really didn't anticipate we would have a joint project where CEC and Plateau or RLW are working together on a new data center until the next generation of data centers came out. We thought that would happen in the second half of this year. We were on jobs in January. That's the receptivity that we received from the customer base. They actually took existing jobs and changed the contracts and put us on them. It's been very successful. We're excited about it. We just have to grow faster. Great, have you continued to see traction in terms of CEC partner with Plateau and RLW for data center jobs? I think on the last quarter earnings, you mentioned I think a couple in which there were the joint jobs. Yeah. Is this becoming very commonplace? Yeah. If we had more capacity- Yeah we'd be on five or six. Right now, the limiter to how many we're on is us. Yeah. That's what we're scrambling to figure out, and we have the same opportunity in the Southeast. If I had 1,000 electricians in the Southeast, I could put them on data centers on jobs that we're on today. It's unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. Because of this dynamic in terms of how you've been limiting the number of projects, when would you expect CEC to potentially perform? They're doing that today. electricians. They're already doing that? Yeah. Okay. On the joint jobs, we're doing both external and internal. Great. The challenge is it takes three to 500 electricians to do an internal job. Yeah, we don't have 10,000. We'd like to, but we don't. Yeah. Yeah. We're doing both. Yeah. What's happened is our customers are pretty demanding. As soon as we do the external. Yeah To be honest. As soon as we do the external, the next thing they ask is, "When can you do the internal?" The day we signed the contract to do the semiconductor facility, we signed it, and they said, "That's great. Can you do the electrical?" We said, "We don't have union operations in the Northeast." They're seeing very quickly how to tie this stuff together. The demand is really there, so it's exciting. Just in terms of the market opportunity, I know this isn't really relevant since it's so supply-constrained, but what is the ratio of the number of internal electricians versus external for a project? Yeah. The way to think of a project, let me just walk through and give you kind of the scope of a, call it a $5 billion data campus, 300, 400 acres. Call it 300, just to make the math easy. It would generally have five data centers on it, okay? Our scope of site development would be roughly $300 million. We do 100% of the site development. There's two packages. There's an external piece and an internal piece. The external piece, per building, so five buildings, per building is roughly $50 million. The internal package is roughly $300 million to $500 million, depending on the complexity. We do 100% of the site. Very seldom would anybody do 100% of the electrical. The way the electrical packages are, they're split up where we would do building one, a competitor would do building two. About the time we're done with building one, building three would start. Our crews would move over to building three. Whoever's doing building two would then do building four, and you kind of cycle through. A lot of people have asked us, "Is XYZ a competitor or somebody else?" I would say no, they're complementary because in a lot of cases, we'll be on the same jobs. We're just working the next building over. Frankly, we would prefer to have a top-rate peer, okay, there on site with us versus some local that isn't safe, so not coordinated on their job sites and causing more problems than they're helping. As strange as it sounds, we're complementary to each other if we do it right, personally. Thank you, Joe. That is all the time that we have. We are going to reconvene on the second floor in the Jenny B Room. Okay. Thanks everyone. Thanks.