Brian Kinstlinger: And just one last follow up, sorry. If you mentioned a Chief Growth Officer, as you guys have looked at the business, the market opportunity, is there a need for more business development folks? Is there planned hires coming to add to the business capture team?
Zach Parker: Great question. Yes, we made that move strategically because we were, it was very important for us first to be able to have a vision and a view of an integrated one DLH, right? And we didn’t really have that when we had both our existing heritage business development team, as well as those, as the new capabilities across our new newly acquired companies. So the CGL really allowed us to look across the enterprise, and that was quite frankly, extremely instrumental in our ability to win both of the domains that we bid for the Defense Health Agency. During this year, we have committed to — in the past year to growth in that in our growth organization that includes business development capture and proposal operations.
We have a good budget going into this year to continue expansion there because that organic growth is now continuing to be a very, very top priority for us. So yes, you’ll see a fair amount of continued expansion in our investment for organic growth.
Operator: Our next question comes from Debra Fiakas with Crystal Equity Research. Please go ahead.
Debra Fiakas: Thank you. And thank you for taking my questions. I would like to perhaps return again to the pipeline question that was asked previously and maybe take a look at it from a little different vantage point. You had a very good organic growth rate, if you want to call it that. The growth rates excluding the FEMA contract this last year. And I wonder, do the bidding opportunities and the programs that you’ve been talking about this morning, do they provide for that same pace of growth? Higher, lower?
Kathryn JohnBull: Thanks for joining us, Debra. It’s good to have you join the crowd of interest to parties for DLH. Those pipeline opportunities do help. They are a channel for organic growth. Of course, it would be easiest and first channel for us is to grow our presence on our existing set of contracts. And we actively work that path of organic growth every day as we interact with our customers and look for additional opportunities to be of service and support for them. But in addition to that, of course, these pipeline opportunities really provide a significant and accelerator to organic growth because they’re additive to the base of contracts that we have in hand presently. And so, you know, while we’re, we are enjoying, as you said, an industry very competitive to the industry organic growth rate.
It is deriving mostly from expansion on current contracts and sums the meaningful incremental awards. But our expectation is that the pursuit of these additional awards that are in our pipeline are going to really accelerate that meaningfully, particularly as Zach mentioned earlier, leveraging those IDIQ vehicles that we’ve recently secured as task orders start to flow underneath those IDIQs.
Debra Fiakas: Okay. Thank you. And then if I could just ask that follow up question, and this is in regard to again to the top line, but from the vantage point of the backlog, there seems to be, to me a pretty significant portion that’s not funded. Is this something to be concerned about or does it speak less to the magnitude of sales and more perhaps to the pace you have to wait for funding in order to get started on a program? Thank you.
Kathryn JohnBull: Yes. It is not something that we’re concerned about. It’s a required disclosure, but it is really a function of the behaviors of the particular customers we have that some of them choose to fund annually. And of course that makes, that’s administratively most efficient and effective. Some of them choose to fund on quarterly intervals. And so depending on where they are in that funding cycle, whether they get it done right before the end of the quarter or immediately thereafter, that’s what’s going to affect how much moves out of unfunded and into funded. But generally speaking, the customer inclination is to, the funding is all, is in support of programs and represents, sorry, excuse me. The backlog, I should say, represents their expectation of the services they need in order to execute the programs.
And so it’s highly probable that dollars will move from the unfunded bucket to the funded bucket, based on whatever administrative cycle they choose to adopt.
Zach Parker: And Debra, we just a few years, several years ago, we were intentionally conservative on making sure that we published that way, because as Kathryn indicated, there are agencies as well as peer companies that will look at the full contract peer performance ceiling. But we wanted to make sure that we were really, really given the shareholders the funded piece in the most conservative fashion.
Operator: The next question comes from Joe Gomes with Noble Capital.
