Bowman Consulting Group Ltd. (NASDAQ:BWMN) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Jeff Martin: And then one more, if I could. On the SG&A in the quarter, you had quite a bit of unusual or non-recurring items. You mentioned that you expect it to be — you experienced operating leverage year-over-year for the year on — maybe just wanted to give you an opportunity to kind of dive a little deeper into SG&A in Q1 and particularly stock comp looks like a bit of an outlier?

Bruce Labovitz: Yeah. I think, I’m not sure that there’s a whole lot more color than sort of usual on it. We continue to grow the infrastructure of the company. We’ve talked in the past about how we’re growing some of the infrastructure as we prepare for next phases of our graduation from emerging growth company status. So, there’s some investment there. As Gary talked about, we’ve been announcing, we’ve made some high-level business development investments, as we acknowledge that nominal growth doesn’t — has to be bigger in order to achieve similar rate type growth. Stock comp expense continues to have some drag from pre-IPO, but it is an aspect of our compensation philosophy that we continue to use to attract talent in the market. But I don’t know that there’s any one category necessarily, Jeff, of SG&A that say, okay, well, that’s almost over with. Again, we continue to grow into and try to maintain as lean an organization as we can.

Jeff Martin: Thank you.

Gary Bowman: Thanks, Jeff.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Jean Ramirez with D.A. Davidson. Your line is now open.

Jean Ramirez: This is Jean Ramirez for Brent Thielman. Good morning.

Gary Bowman: Good morning.

Jean Ramirez: Starting with Surdex. Could you talk a little bit more about that seasonality compared to Bowman’s business? And perhaps if you could provide some details about the margin profile, whether it’s lower or higher than Bowman expected or any details around that?

Bruce Labovitz: So, as I guess we telegraphed in the press release about it, their margin profile is slightly higher than Bowman’s overall organization. But I don’t think that, that will necessarily be a pull, because it’s a small percentage of our overall business. So, certainly, contribute positively, we believe, from a margin perspective. They’ve traditionally operated around a 20% margin or so. So, it’s helpful. But it’s not overwhelming in size that it will necessarily fully impact us. From a seasonality perspective, we typically don’t think of our business as having seasonality to it. But we experienced some, let’s say, calendar holiday-oriented seasonality. But this is more of a sort of foundational way they do business.

So, when you’re trying to image the earth, there are seasons where imaging becomes more challenging because of the foliage. Now, in some cases, that is what the customer is looking for them to image, its changes in the green scape, let’s say. So — but there is a little bit more, let’s say, lumpiness to their revenues around what could be — depending on the contracts that they are executing, whether there is more, let’s call it, leaf-on oriented or leaf-off oriented work to be done, it could affect the timing. Not the gross amount of work, but just sort of how the work phases. And weather can be — can impact that business more than it generally would ours in the overall aggregate.

Jean Ramirez: Understood. And if I could, one more. Talking about the revenue guidance increase. What sort of — what is the low-end and high-end of the new guidance range you consider? And what sort of handicap — what is sort of handicapped at the low-end of the range?

Bruce Labovitz: Well, we look at our backlog, we look at the ability to deliver revenue. We narrowed that gap as we go through the year. Historically, we start with a slightly wider gap. It is a people business. It is a business that is often dependent on the timing of funding, the timing of public interactions. Even when they’re private clients and private sector work, it often intersects with public activities, whether that’s commissions, boards and approvals. And so, we start with what we are confident on the low-end that our backlog and momentum will produce and we look at where we think on the high-end if things go right, we can squeeze the additional revenue in and narrow that throughout the course of the year. It’s not really a handicapping of any one event or two events. It’s early in the year. It’s 2,200 people billing work to customers that require milestones and approvals. So, sometimes we just — as we get closer, we have better visibility.

Jean Ramirez: That makes sense. And just adding on to that, with the organic growth rate of the company that has recently slowed down, and you mentioned a couple of reasons why, do you still expect low to mid-teens in 2024, and do you have that line of sight today?