We still expect to grow the business revenue, but margin has to come along with it, which we showed in ’23, and we expect margin to come along within in ’24. And that may mean not growing at 10% to 15%, that may be growing at 5% with higher margins.
Dale Asplund: Yeah. And George, let me jump on in, I think Development has been — I mean I would just add, George, I think the Development business for us has been a key area of growth. Where we need to get better as a team is finding a way to convert that Development business that we generate to new Maintenance business. And that’s where that One BrightView will come into play. We have one of the top 50 specialty companies in construction in North America, and they do some of the biggest development on landscaping projects in the country. We need to find a way to make sure we have a successful handoff from that development to our Maintenance team as One BrightView. So this is the lead-in to help that organic growth on Maintenance.
So I like that it keeps growing and our team in the field continues to enhance and beautify our communities. Now we just need to convert that over to future maintenance revenue so we can get the Maintenance group growing just as fast as the Development group.
George Tong: Very helpful. Thank you.
Operator: Our next question comes Andy Wittmann from Baird. Andy, your line is now open.
Andy Wittmann: Great, thanks and good morning and thank you for taking my questions. I have several questions, but I think maybe the one I’ll start with has to do with, I guess, Project Liberty and other business transformation costs. The question being, obviously, Project Liberty has been in flight for some time now, and many of the actions have already been taken and some of the cost benefits realized in 2023. I was just wondering how much cost benefit from actions already taken so far on Project Liberty are going to be benefiting your profit margins in 2024. In other words, what hasn’t been recognized in the annual run rate of those cost reductions so far? Maybe Brett, if you could talk about related items to that, what do you expect for the business transformation cost here in 2024?
Dale Asplund: Yeah. So that’s a great question, Andy. I would just say at a high level, Project Liberty was focused on some initial benefits from cost saves. And if you go back, it started out as Project Accelerate. So I think we’ve seen a lot of that. We still have an area to go when it comes to the procurement initiative that we’ll work through in 2024. But as you’ve heard, we’re going to try to transition from primarily those cost save initiatives to more of that One BrightView approach, where we can focus on customer retention and on new account conversion to make sure we’re growing the business at the same time so we can leverage size and scale. But Brett can probably give you the numbers. Obviously, the benefit we said that would come in 2024, $20 million is embedded in our guidance that you see coming out with the midpoint EBITDA at $325 million, but I’ll let Brett talk to what he feels came in during ’23 and where we’re at towards our run rate for ’24.
Brett Urban: Yeah. Andy, look, as you think about 2023, we said on our last call, we saw about $2 million or so realization from Project Accelerate, which was just a cost-cutting initiative essentially. And then as we morphed into Project Liberty in our Q3 call, we mentioned that we would see $20 million plus of savings related to the entire project. We saw roughly another $2 million to $3 million savings come through Q4 related to the original Accelerate and some early signs of Liberty. But I think as you think about our guidance for ’24 and Liberty now morphs into One BrightView. One BrightView is just going to be the way we operate the business. We’re going to take care of our customers, who in turn take care to our employees who are in turn take care of our customers.
And if you think about our guide for 2024, we’re guiding at a midpoint of 60 basis points of margin expansion. We’re guiding at a midpoint of $26 million of EBITDA growth that’s inclusive of One BrightView or as previously talked about as Project Liberty. And to able to get to that transformational cost, able to get to that to get the Project Liberty aka One BrightView and move that needle forward, we don’t expect any significant increase in transformational costs above what we had this year, right? This year, we went through a CEO change. We had some business transformation cost that was related to that and some transition to the new CEO. We don’t expect the transformation of getting from Liberty to One BrightView in the way we operate the business to have any type of significant impact on our cash flow that hasn’t been already included in our guidance.
Andy Wittmann: Okay. That’s really clear on the transformation cost. So I heard a couple of million dollars in 3Q saved maybe $3 million in 4Q saved. So the implication mean that if you’re going for $20 million you’ve got about $15 million coming — benefiting the ’24 EBITDA. Is that the quick summary?
