Joe Hart: Yes. It starts with an expansion of our geographic footprint. We’ve begun to do work over in the Southeast region, the Texas, adjacent states of like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, states that are within, I’ll say a 4-to-6-hour drive from Dallas or Houston, et cetera. And we do the same thing up out of our Chicago headquarters, expanding into, whether it’s Wisconsin or into Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, et cetera. So we expand share with an expansion of geography. But we also are trying to go deeper into all 4 of the carriers. Last year, we had a big push with one of the new carriers, DISH Wireless. And this year, we’re trying to expand our business with Verizon and T-Mobile. We’ve always been for more than 25 years; Fulton Technologies has been a fairly standard supplier to AT&T.
Unidentified Analyst: And wherever you expand, you find you’re able to get more jobs because you do a better job than the local suppliers, or is it that there is — sorry, go ahead.
Joe Hart: Yes. That’s certainly the game plan. But last year, we expanded into 2 markets where the customer didn’t deliver the volume and continuity of work that they had, I’ll say, promised. So we ended up finishing the sites we had and we withdrew from those 2 cities. But we also expanded into about 8 other markets that we weren’t in previous to last year and it worked just fine. And the goal is go in on the back of one carrier and then add business from another two, maybe three carriers once you’re there and plant your roots.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Thanks for taking. Good luck.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from George Gaspar, who is a Private Investor. Please proceed with your question.
Unidentified Analyst: Thank you. Good day to everyone. Joe, first question would be, if you could give me the — give us the counts on your employment situation and your due diligence at the end of the year and how you’re seeing that going forward? In other words, your crew count at the end of the year, and how did that change maybe in the last quarter of the year and then your management of the Telco operation? And if I recall, you maybe had 300 or so working in that division. Can you update us on where you’re at on employment and where you see yourselves at this point as we get closer to the end of the first quarter?
Joe Hart: Sure. I’ll try to answer your questions but as I always remind you that there’s a little bit of a competitive information aspect to this, George. So I’ll be a little bit vague. But when we hit the big holiday periods like Thanksgiving, Christmas and we hit the cold weather months or bad weather months, we probably drop our crew count back into around the mid-20s. And then, we’re currently back up in the mid-30s here in early March. So the weather has improved, the work has picked up. I think our goal is to try to be up in the mid-40s to maybe 50s on crew count this year. And you’ve asked me this question every quarter now for about year-and-a-half. So I know you’re familiar with it, but to any new listeners, the crew count on the Wireless side equates to revenue.
So that’s a clear bellwether. But we also try to mitigate our risk with crew count on the Wireless side where we use somewhere between 50% to 60%, sometimes 65% of subcontractor crews and our in-house crews, which is our own personnel probably average in that 35% to 45% range. So we try to offset the risk of the peaks and valleys in the production year by using subcontractors that when we don’t have sufficient workload, we don’t have any guarantee to use them. So that helps us keep our costs under control and keep our overhead under control.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. All right. And then on the Telco side, are you still standing pretty clear about the same employment status? I thought I remember it was maybe 300, but I may be way wrong on that.
Joe Hart: Yes. You’re way too high. We’re under 200. I mean remember that Nave Communications is essentially a virtual company. We have only a handful of key sales employees. All the inventory and the pick, pack and ship, and the test and repair of boards and things like that is done by our 3PL partner, Palco Telecom, out of Huntsville, Alabama. And Nave had a huge year, and it was done by that same handful of employees who worked a lot of hours and a lot of extra days to make this expansion year happen. And on the Triton side, they had about a roughly 50% increase in their business this past year. And we added probably less than half a dozen headcount throughout the year. So I think a good job managing the production efficiencies in 2022.
Unidentified Analyst: That sounds very good. Thank you. The next question would be back on the Wireless side in terms of the tower work that you’re doing. Has it changed very much relative to the assumptions that your customers are looking for it to get done? And could you possibly give us a thought in this tower business if there’s some more opportunity for significant change-out on towers from equipment that’s on them now and possibly where the customers want to really go upscale from where they were installing equipment 2 and 3 years ago? Any thoughts on that?
Joe Hart: Sure, many. I don’t think the work has changed between last year and this coming year. In any 3G, 4G, 5G cycle, they start in the major metropolitan urban areas, expand into the suburbs. They cover the highway corridors and then they start expanding coverage out to the rural or secondary, tertiary cities to cover an entire state. So we’ve just finished probably the second year of 5G. So the location of the sites will tend to be, won’t be in Dallas, but it will be out in Longview and Midland and other parts of Texas. And then, in ensuing year or two after that, it will be out in the outlying rural areas. So geographically, you’re kind of constantly moving, but then right behind that, after about the third or fourth year, you’ll be back in those urban areas, expanding capacity, adding frequencies, adding radios, changing out antennas to the next generation of technology.
So the work is always, it’s moving outward and then it’s moving back, I’ll say, location-wise. And then, yes, the technology is constantly improving. So the carriers are constantly trying to have the latest and greatest and highest-quality signals being sent out to their subscribers. So I just think it’s a robust food chain that’s constantly improving and constantly changing out, but it’s not really reducing the space that they need on the towers. I’ll say the tower owners, they have their own earnings releases where you can read up from Crown Castle and American Tower, and you can read about their 5 and 10 year forecast for leasing space out on the ground and on the tower. So I think that’s just going to continue to evolve and grow. And every country is going to need 2x or 3x the number of macro cell sites that they have today, because the cell sites are shrinking in diameter as the speed and the bandwidth increases and the demand for video streaming, et cetera, et cetera, requires faster speeds, higher bandwidths, which shrinks the cells, which then creates holes, which creates a need for more cells.
So this is a business that’s going to be constantly growing like an amoeba and that’s why they call it cellular, right? It’s a honeycomb and the edge of all the cells have to touch for your calls to be handed off from cell to cell to cell as you’re driving in your car. So this need for growth and expansion on cell sites never really goes away. There is some natural ebb and flow at the start of one of the big G cycles compared to its later use, but it’s always growing.
