Marc Riddick: Great. And then just to shift back to the work order question. I was sort of curious about something. One of the things that – your quarter end at the end of January – at the end of January, and if I remember correctly, we had literally no snow in New York City your entire first quarter, which, there were times where a couple of good snowstorms through the country could have been pretty helpful with those kind of orders? I was wondering if – is there any extent to which that had any impact or maybe what you saw there or was that kind of a net, net now over the year?
Scott Salmirs: Yes, it’s probably not significant from a financial standpoint. It’s funny, if you talk to the team running the Northeast, they wouldn’t like the snowstorm too, I guess. But when you talk about kind of an $8 billion revenue company, it becomes insignificant.
Marc Riddick: Got you, thank you very much.
Scott Salmirs: You got it.
Operator: Thank you Our next question comes from the line of David Silver with CL King & Associates. Please proceed with your question.
David Silver: Yes, hi good morning, thank you. I would like to maybe start just with a question about the trend in your Education segment. So I think you called out – during your prepared remarks, you called out some new wins that you thought would be meaningful in terms of growth trend going forward? So a couple of questions, but maybe could you characterize the value proposition or what drove that unusually good trend that you called out? And then secondly, would this be the type of new Education business that tends to carry with it maybe some ATS work possibilities? So kind of what are the drivers behind that recent pickup in business in your Education segment?
Scott Salmirs: Yes. Look, it’s like anything else. I think there’s a couple of things. One, we have new leadership on our Education account over the past year or so, and it’s paying real dividends for us. And there’s just a renewed focus on value-added clients and it’s just paid off, David. Our margins are still trending higher than they were pre-COVID. And if you look at an operating margin of 5.5% in this labor environment — because what you have to remember is Education for us is almost all nonunion. And nonunion is where the pressure is on wage growth, right, because it’s not part of a collective bargaining agreement where it’s kind of a predicted wage growth. So you have higher wage growth, you have higher turnover, a lot more use of overtime.
So we’re super proud of the financial discipline and what we’ve been able to do in the Education Group. And we just think there’s just tremendous opportunity. We’ve been investing in business development people in that area. We have new leadership, in fact, even on the business development side. So — and our pipeline is bigger than it’s ever been before. So yes, I’m glad you asked that question because we’re super proud of how we’ve moved the Education Group from where it was maybe two or three years ago to where it is today. So —
David Silver: And then just maybe a follow-on comment about the potential for ATS work to flow from that would be helpful. Thank you.
Scott Salmirs: Yes, I think that’s right. The relationship — the working relationship between our Technical Solutions Group and the Education Group is super powerful. And so not only am I excited about the cross-selling opportunities, but I have to tell you, probably every single presentation we’ve been on for new business in the last year has included the Technical Solutions Group even if it was a janitorial contract because we’re talking about the power to cross-sell. Because that’s not a bad word, right? For clients that’s value-add. So we’ll go into a presentation on janitorial and say to them, by the way, if there’s an energy efficiency contract or potential here, if there’s EV charging potential. And if clients make decisions based on the breadth and scope of your portfolio. So it may not be immediate, David, but it’s now in the background and it’s part of our book of services. So I think it’s going to be big in the future for us.
David Silver: Very good. Thanks. I’d like to maybe shift over to your RavenVolt business. Admittedly, I’m still getting up to speed on microgrids and whatnot. But a new scan that I did before this call, I mean, it just kind of indicates that at least for high-profile microgrid projects, there tend to be, I don’t know, a lot of delays, some pushback from the local utilities and this and that, in other words, things that don’t maybe necessarily suspend — sorry, cancel the business, but maybe building in more delays or more bureaucratic or administrative tasks before you can get to work. Could you comment since you’ve closed on RavenVolt, has there been a change in the operating environment? I mean, is there a more extended time period from when you identify the opportunity to when you sign a contract to when you actually can complete the work? Or is it kind of going as you anticipated when you first made the investment in RavenVolt? Thank you.
Scott Salmirs: Yes, sure. There are a couple of things to unpack there. First of all, I’ll start by saying we’re as thrilled with RavenVolt acquisition and the team and the leadership as we’ve ever been from the day we bought them. So that’s not changed. And in terms of the utilities and the pushback, I’m surprised that you’re hearing that. We’re not seeing that as much because there’s so much talk out there about the electrical grids, around the country’s ability to handle all the demand that’s going to be put on from EV chargers, that microgrids and a lot of places is a welcome change to go off power grid and get power. So maybe there’s some more administrative work. But like in terms of kind of utilities’ desire for microgrids, we haven’t seen a major change in that.
And if there’s anything that’s out there as a little bit of a headwind the microgrids, I’d say it’s the same thing in our bundled energy solutions group which is using a lot of the same equipment. There’s supply chain issues which I talked about earlier. Granted, it’s great that they’re stabilizing now and we’re getting a hold of it and we’re preordering. So we’re doing all that good stuff. But I think it’s really about supply chain. It’s really about supply chain. And we seem to be handling and being proactive on it and, again, not backing off on the performance. And we think it’s just going to be a second half story.
