All righty, we'll go ahead and get started. Good morning, everybody. Again, thanks for joining us at the Southwest IDEAS Conference presented by Three Part Advisors. Presenting next, we have the Willdan Group on Nasdaq under symbol WLDN. On behalf of the company, we have Al Kaschalk, Vice President, and Kim Early, CFO. Al, take it away. Thanks, Earl. I'm Al Kaschalk, and I do IR, M&A, and sustainability. And to my right, your left, is Kim Early, our CFO and VP of Finance. So thank you for joining us. Let's get started. So Willdan transitions communities to sustainable energy, clean energy future. And we have three components, really, that drive this business: our grid planning software, which is really where the data center activity takes place, our policy advisory group, it's a consulting business in data analytics, all related to how utilities think about infrastructure, investment, capacity, etc. We focus primarily on the demand side. We're leading energy efficiency and electrification programs, primarily for the utilities, and those drive a lot of cost savings and energy savings, ultimately, to us as consumers. We have long-tenured relationships with municipalities and public agencies and provide a lot of the standard engineering solutions, facility improvements, largely driven by energy consumption reduction. And then fourth, over the last couple of years of some strong execution, we're back in the market in terms of growth through M&A. We have a very strong balance sheet, which we'll pick up on later in the presentation. On the right side of this chart, you see that our net revenue, which is the revenue that we actually get, our contract revenue is around $550 million-$600 million, but our net is in the neighborhood of about $290 million for this year at the midpoint guidance. And that's about a 13% CAGR growth since 2021. On an EBITDA basis here, this is largely a lot of strong performance and execution on the business, and we're tracking towards 25% growth for 2024 relative to 2021, nearly doubling over the last two years our EBITDA. This translates to about a net margin, EBITDA margins, how we measure the business, in the 18% range. Our mix of business is primarily driven by utilities and governments. We have no real, so to speak, federal business. It's all government, municipality on the local side, and we have a small, expanding business on the commercial side, which is a data point for us in terms of our M&A focus. On the right side, at the bottom, you can see we're scale-wise, we're at over 1,700+ employees, 25 states, and 53 offices. Before you get too far along on the office front, keep that in mind, as that's generally based on when we have a contract or work to be done by a client. Sometimes there's requirements to have a small local office. Corporate headquarters is in Anaheim, California. Next slide. We like to talk about engineering as having an approach on the pyramid, and every solution is in these three components. This can help you see where we focus on in terms of our business. The top part of the triangle is our data consulting business. This is the high-end consulting to the governor's offices, C-suite of the utilities, where we're working with them to help solve their problem, which today is about how much demand is growing and where they're going to balance out the coming offline of plants, utility sources, as well as new investment on the renewable side, and the middle part of this triangle is our legacy business, which is engineering, and then at the bottom is the program management. So unlike an EPC, we don't do a lot of self-perform, and this is the major difference in our business model between contract revenue and the net revenue. On the right-hand side, just to show you a little bit how this triangle works and how we like to, quote, land and expand a particular customer, starting at the top part, we say, okay, we're gonna advise a particular government, city, municipality, to some extent a company. We do policy work for them, and then we bleed that down into an actual plan, for us, the decarbonization plan in New York City, and then we roll it out into decarbonization programs, which is the large program management business, so this sales force that we call is our 60 years of legacy business, and the consulting side provides us visibility into what's coming down the road, and we have the sales relationships through this engineering business with the municipalities, that helps us secure the work going forward. Here's a list of our, a select list of tenured clients, and you can see across the board, a lot of these are utilities, but they're also progressive cities, and we generally have our businesses along the coast. You think about progressiveness of electrification and energy, but some very, very highly recognized companies on this list. On the next slide here, not so sure why this didn't pull up, but these are the, seeing a little bit of funkiness going on here. Not sure why that slide isn't advancing, but it should say that this is really the drivers of our, of our business model here. In the top left, you can see the mega trends contributing to the demand and electric growth forecast, and our model is highly dependent on helping a utility, helping a municipality save energy. So when we see for the first time in, you know, 50+ years, we're gonna see load growth for multiple years. This really helps drive us ongoing forward. On the right side, there should be a chart of the data centers. You know, I think most of you know where all of those are located, primarily in Virginia, and we're doing a study there. That's been published that basically says, look, if we're gonna go from 10 GW-15 GW of electricity needed in this area, where should we be placing our facilities and our new infrastructure? And that's advisory work that we're doing for that particular customer. The bottom left, this is something that our consulting group published. And while there's all certain uncertainties about speed and scale, the most important takeaway from this is that on the bottom right, first time in, like I said, 50 years, we're gonna see multi-year, if not a decade, growth in load. And those kilowatt hours are important to driving demand for our business. I mentioned earlier about the cleaned-up balance sheet. We recently completed and announced an acquisition of Enica Engineering. It's located in the New York area. It's really energy operations and building automation solutions. The smaller size, $10 million of revenue, creating 20 to 25% margins and earnings. But importantly, this provides us entry into a highly differentiated commercial energy consulting business. And if I would say that the downtime for, as many of you know, for a pharmaceutical company is very critical in terms of a lost revenue company. These are the automation systems that we work with at this. And it can work with that now we see opportunities to expand. So this falls directly in the line of expand landing something, expanding relationships, and going global or national with these companies. We expect more of these in the future. I mentioned earlier sort of our mix of revenue by market. And just to highlight, these are some sample projects. And I just wanna, for those of you who may be newer to the audience, to our story, you know, our contract types here are around 40%, 40, 44% fixed, 38% unit price, and then the balance around 20% is T&M. Just a reminder, we don't carry the same amount of risk as an EPC, as some of you like to think of us as. We don't self-perform a lot of the work, and then we don't have the technical risk. You know, the other more important thing is in EPC, you may have more process risk or contracts where there's fixed price, and you have issues that come up. We don't have a lot of process risk in the work that we do. I just wanna highlight here on the top left, this LL97 is work that we did for the governor's office. Many of you have seen this in other clients in terms of the changes in the energy infrastructure in New York and companies getting penalties to need to comply now with this. This is something that we were very supportive in producing the plan for the city. The bottom right just takes a little longer. The Clark County School District is a very exciting opportunity for us. This falls in the program management business, but this is a large program for us, fifth largest school district in the nation and provides a lot of feedstock, so to speak, for newer opportunities going forward. A quick word on our marketplace and who we compete with. Given the components of the triangle I talked about on the engineering front, we do have a lot of non-public companies that we compete with, and each segment has its own competitors. There's a good example. Primarily on the engineering front, those are largely private equity-backed companies. And then on the program management side, you know, we probably run more into McKinstry and Burns & McDonnell than than any of these others that are mentioned on there. We have a software that we talked about. This is very important from for those of you that are engineers or have experience with utilities. They do a lot of things in-house, slow to change. The positive thing about it is, you know, they're big and they're good cash payers. And so we use our software as a tool to help them through all the data stack of information, kilowatt hours, etc., to grow this business, to help them do their planning, to basically come down to the optimal level of investment based on a whole host of factors out there, over the next 5, 10 years. We can talk more about this later if you'd like, but this is really forecasting distribution, consumption, and a lot of data intelligence. And the primary tool there we use is LoadSEER, to drive that, plus the Pathways model and forecasting. Quick word on sustainability. Remember, this is really our business, right? We're delivering to clients measurable results. We continue to have to report this. Our models, in a lot of cases, our revenue models or earnings models are based on deemed savings, kilowatt hours. And so we kind of technically get paid on an hour of energy that we save, kilowatt hour we save. But this is very important to the culture of our organization. A lot of graduates and PhDs like this aspect about helping our clients, communities, delivering impact on the environment. Quick word on our metrics here on the third quarter. We just reported, back at the end of October, first of November. The piece here that I think is important to highlight is the improvement in EBITDA. We look at our business year-over-year, and we measure it that way, and the biggest piece there is the continued improvement in the performance of the business that we've driven. This doesn't really have an unusual item from the standpoint of like a software sales or something for a tough comparison, but it really highlights is our continued improvement on our utility programs. The difference between net and contract revenue, there's a function of, again, higher program management revenue lead to net, lower net revenue. So the growth is gonna be a little bit off. On the full year, which is even more important, nine months to date, you can see that we're tracking back north of the $40 million for a year to date, nine months, and on an EPS basis, 80% growth. Some of that benefit on EPS is due to the tax efficiency of our business. We have this 179D credit that we get, based on our work that we do. On the balance sheet front, this is really great stuff here, in my opinion, because what it does is it allows us to go and land and expand and on our new opportunities in the marketplace. Importantly, though, we look at the free cash flow of almost $2.30 a share, nine months to date. You know, that's impressive. We don't have a lot of recurring CapEx. We have sort of the standard, some of our software, some of our program management business that we do, that's used at the clients. At the end of the day, we're measured on our metrics on a net debt adjusted EBITDA basis. That's less than one time. On a total liquidity basis, we have over $100 million. Importantly, this liquidity is providing us opportunities to grow through M&A, and we have a very strong pipeline of deals. Here's a quick summary of our targets, financial targets for the year. You know, not too much more to say other than that, we generally like to try and provide reasonable targets, and we work to achieve better results than that. The one thing that will change in this in terms of 2024 is that the tax rate certainly has been beneficial. Again, truly a function of strong success on our program management business where we can take the tax credit for the work that we do. These, the next slides, are just all of the reconciliation items, but I wanna go to this slide here, which is the history of expanding our capabilities, just to give you a snapshot of where we've been and how we've grown. This is a favorite slide of our former CEO, and but it also provides a good picture at the bottom there of some of the cycles that we go through in, as a business, but we're very strong in terms of the performance here, so we're excited about the road ahead. We have a lot of tailwinds in terms of the electrification, the energy transition. We have the balance sheet to execute on that now, and we have a group of folks at the company that wanna grow. And so with that, I'd be happy to take questions, both Kim and I. And again, thank you for your time. With the phase-out of any coal generating plants, does that have any effect on your business? And then second question, with the Trump administration, even though your business is mostly local government, local utilities, will the change in administration have any effect on your business? Right. Let me just repeat the question, and then Kim, you can address them. One is the first question about the mothballing of coal plants and other energy sources, the effect on our business, and then two, the change in administration. Yeah, I don't think the nuclear mothballing has a lot to do for us, except for the fact that our planning and analytics group that works at that high-level consulting, they, of course, are helping to analyze that whole question of demand versus supply and how they balance that out. So that enters into the equation there as part of their analysis. But I wouldn't say that nuclear question is really directly feeding much of the work that we're doing. And as far as the presidential election, we don't think that it really would have a significant impact on our demand. It's mostly state-level kinds of mandates and local-level kinds of mandates that are more important drivers to us overall. I suppose tax policy, as Al mentioned, where we get a fairly substantial benefit from a provision called 179D that was amplified in the Inflation Reduction Act that was done. I suppose they could mess with that at some point, although no one has actually mentioned that as being on their agenda. But beyond that, we don't think that that's really gonna be a major event for us. Thank you. These state and municipalities, and even some of the utility programs, have they relied on federal funding to some degree? Yeah. The question is, are the state and local programs and utilities dependent on federal funding? Do you wanna? Yeah, the answer's no. Most of the funding for these kinds of programs, these utility programs, comes out of a surcharge on most electric bills that really funds the energy efficiency programs. So they're really funded, by a mandate that the regulators, pass through and, and the utilities bill it into a, pool that's allocated to fund, these kinds of, of programs. Some of the municipal, on the municipal side of the business, that funding does come out of, their own, general budgeting. They maybe raise that through bonds. We actually have a group that's part of that, municipal advisory thing that helps them plan financing, actually for the kinds of, projects that we do and set up special tax districts or whatever methodology they wanna use to fund, certain of the programs. The Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bills haven't really filtered through a lot of money to the municipalities for what we do. So they're funded kind of general out of the municipality's general capital funds. And that business, by the way, has been, surprisingly enough, at the municipal level, that's been growing at like double digits. So we've been pleasantly surprised by the strength of demand at the municipal level for funding these kinds of programs. Any other questions or? Nope. Well, yeah. Yeah. You emphasize that you guys don't self-perform a lot of the company work, but who are you using to perform? Repeat the question. Yeah. Thank you. We mentioned about not doing a lot of self-performing work and on the program management business. Who are we subcontracting out or who's performing that work for us? Kim? A lot of the work that gets done is through you know electrical subcontractors and some mechanical subcontractors that do that work. So we have a fairly reliable stable contractors that we work with on a regular basis but also sometimes depending on the locality we're using local contractors as part of those programs. And we would generally get you know a fixed price commitment from them that's tied into where we've kind of hedged off any of that exposure into their obligation as opposed to our obligation. And sometimes I think it's fair to say that the contracts will require us to subcontract out. So we know going in that X% of the. Yeah. And in a lot of those fixed price contracts probably 80% of the work is subcontracted out. And we're maybe doing 20% of the oversight kind of work. So for that reason, we, I won't say we embrace more as a percentage of the business, but we feel like it's really de-risked in terms of the opportunity. There's always that small item where you may have issue. Well, go ahead. Stock has doubled in the past year. Do you have a feeling about why that's happened and do you have the coming year the same type of environment that the Willdan's stock continues to climb? So our stock has doubled in the past year was the question. I'm aware of that. Sorry. You know, what's changing or what may change or why would the strength continue, I guess is fair. Kim, do you wanna take us through that? First and foremost, our earnings have doubled as well over the last year. So that's obviously, as you guys know, a big driver for where those things come from. We felt like we were undervalued for a while. We didn't run into some significant challenges during the COVID period, where we were turned off and prevented from actually calling on clients or being in their facilities. That had a significant impact on a lot of our work, and we started some new programs in California that had to be restructured. The utilities were trying something new. Those programs kind of all got restructured. That's kind of put the momentum back into our business, and that chart that Al was showing earlier you kind of saw a dip, and now we're rising out of that at double-digit rates, so you know, it was $510 million in revenue in 2023. We're gonna be high 500s, as we emerge in 2024. Our margins have gone from low double-digit EBITDA margins on net revenue to 18%-19% kinds of numbers this year. The cash flow is almost equal to our EBITDA, and you know, with all the dynamics in the marketplace, we do foresee the opportunity for continued double-digit kinds of growth rates in the future and our ability to invest in broadening and deepening our skills and service offerings to the marketplace, so I think that ability to make continued progress, I think we've got eight or nine consecutive quarters of continued growth in there that we've been able to attract a lot more attention now than we had before. I think there's, you know, kind of a general recognition that we're in a market that has a lot of opportunity built into it. Based on what you just said, if you look at that chart, it's like moguls and ski slope, you know, in terms of 73, 62, 78, up, down, up, down, up, down throughout a 15-year history, you know, upturns in different quarters. Yeah. And the question is, is that still something just the nature of your business, jobs coming in, do we expect that to continue even though in the next year or two, as you just described, things look extremely favorable? Let me just repeat the question. I think the question of, I mean, summarize the volatility of the revenue or top line, has that been leveled out or what's the landscape look like? Yeah. I don't think our business is an up-down business a whole lot. I mean, there was in 2008, you know, in the great recession, there was a fair amount of reduction. We were less heavily focused on the energy business at that point in time, and it was more a municipal reduction that went on at that period of time with new construction all slowing down. But that dip in the middle that we saw there was all related to the COVID issue. 40% of our business was turned off on March 19th, 2020, and it took almost two years for those programs to get turned back on and ramp back up, all because of the restrictions on personal contact. A lot of our business depends on our ability to go into facilities, interact with the teams there, audit those facilities, and make that work. So unless we have another pandemic that makes that kind of a challenge to us, we're not. We don't think that we're in a kind of an up-down kind of a business. The other thing, and we should probably fix this chart to show this, is that if we looked at this on a net revenue basis, it's a much kind of a straighter line. There is a little more volatility at the top line because large-scale construction projects, for instance, we just signed this $120 million Clark County School District kind of project. That'll have a lot of variation from period to period in a gross revenue thing, just depending upon the scale of installations at any one point in time. But if you looked at it on a net revenue kind of a basis, it's gonna be a much smoother kind of a line that runs through there. And we tend to analyze our P&L more on this net revenue number than we do on a gross revenue number. Thank you. You mentioned doing some small acquisitions along your total industry level. Is there some major consolidation going on? And we'll repeat the question here that we talked about doing some small acquisitions. Are there bigger, larger acquisitions in the industry marketplace? Kim, do you wanna talk to that? I don't think that there's a major consolidation going on. There is, the market is somewhat fragmented. There's a fair number of players. There's only a few players in this energy efficiency space of the kind of scale that we're at. CLEAResult and Franklin Energy are private equity-owned firms. We're all doing this kind of tuck-in kind of acquisitions to expand things, but there's not a major consolidation going on. That's a difference in trend than what you might expect in, you know, kind of the engineering consulting world. Is PG&E a large customer for you guys? I think it was a California wildfire risk and, you know, the lawsuits that might, you know, have an impact on the business. The question is, is PG&E a large customer to Willdan and is their business having an impact on us? Yeah. PG&E is a major customer of ours. They're one of our top 10 largest customers. They might be number four or five. We'd have a couple of different programs with them. One is in handling energy efficiency programs for public entity kinds of customers of theirs, and a second one is working on. It's a statewide program actually that PG&E administers for new construction programs. So we do get a lot of revenue out of PG&E and SCE and to a lesser extent SDG&E in the California public utilities, and though they've been struggling with a lot of issues related to the fires and other issues they have. Again, these programs are kind of a targeted program funded through a separate kind of a charge that the CPUC has established. So they have goals that are unrelated to the rest of their business of them trying to achieve certain energy efficiency goals and energy savings through these programs that we administer. So it has not really had an impact on us. And we've actually expanded that business, with PG&E quite a bit over the last three years and, probably more than double what we were doing three years ago with them. Well, if there's any further questions, if not, thank you for your time. And if anyone has any questions, my contact information is up there on the board and happy to field any questions you have. Thank you for your time.