As I said before, I think it’s a 9- to 12-month kind of startup and optimization. I think so as you get into maybe the third quarter of 2024, we’ll be going through that process. And then at that point, you’re going to start to see those benefits trickle in. So it’s not going to be like flipping a switch, right? You’re going to be gaining a little bit as you go through, but it’s going to be in the second half of ’24, I think, before you start to see the full benefit of that investment.
Alfred Funai: Okay, thank you.
Daniel Jones: Thanks, Alfred.
Operator: Thank you. We have a follow-up question from Julio Romero from Sidoti & Company, LLC. Please go ahead.
Julio Romero: Hey, guys, thanks for taking the follow up. As we look to ’24, kind of how do we see the cadence of volumes trending? I know you saw this kind of sequential quarter-over-quarter ramp in ’23. Does ’24 follow the same path or do you kind of more — expect a more traditional seasonality of construction kind of cadence?
Bret Eckert: No, I can’t touch that, Julio. I mean, it’s an interesting. You can see the trend in ’23. We’ve never had that trend before. I think if you unpack ’23 a little bit, right, you went into the year with a lot of pontificators and a lot of doom and gloom, right. And so as people landed in, we did see and we talked about this in our first quarter earnings call a destocking at the distributor level in March and it trickled into April, right. And we talked about in the call that at the end of the day, we’re glad we got that piece behind us. And then once you do that, a distributor really has to align with a supplier that they can count on. And that plays right into our service model. When you typically see the distributor is build back up their inventories or build up inventories into the summer months second and third quarter, they then have to go through a level of destocking and they’ll take those down by the end of the year.
And that has some effect on the ebb and flow between the quarters that you typically seen. Because they took them down and never really built them back up significantly, we weren’t impacted by that drawdown of those inventories in the fourth quarter. I think our service model is still a differentiator, right. We had a somewhat supporting copper price in the fourth quarter, as Daniel talked about, a $0.40 move within the quarter is significant. And that helps a ton with regard to our ability to service the market very quickly. So I think it’s everything you talked about. Now, what you can look to for ’24, that’s very difficult to see. You’ve got an election this year. You had inflation data that came out a little hot in December and everyone’s trying to digest the rate cuts.
Again tell me what copper is going to do and I’ll give you — I give you a better sense, but it’s hard to take one from the other. I think you just look at the trend and what was accomplished in ’23 and we’ll see where it takes us as we get into ’24.
Julio Romero: Fair enough, there. And then, Daniel, you talked about the success the team has had in terms of kind of evaluating bottlenecks and alleviating those bottlenecks. And you also mentioned you got plenty of machine capacity. I guess, if you will, I guess what would be the biggest bottleneck kind of left on the table? Would it be labor or would there be another kind of factor there?
Daniel Jones: Yeah, good question. The labor piece is still a challenge. It was certainly significantly better in ’23 toward the back end versus the way we started the year. When we look at numbers specifically related to ’23 in the hiring and the onboarding piece and the expense that goes into all the pre-employment testing and what have you and training versus ’22, huge improvement. The quality of the candidates significantly better. We’ve had 30 some odd years of hiring folks with never having a layoff in that process. As long as we’re doing the things, we think we learned coming through COVID. They seem to be working in our favor at this point. The labor piece is manageable. It’s not as severe and as bad as it was. It’s certainly a lot better.
Freight came in quite a bit better. A lot of the bottlenecks that we were maybe whining a little bit about have kind of cleared up. On the construction process itself, great team members, Hill & Wilkinson, Potter Concrete, Humphreys Electric, Hindon plumbing, Cold Services, Anchor, Sterling, those guys really did a fantastic job for us on getting these buildings up and ready to run from a quality perspective. And it’s the A team, which we like to wait on and require in our projects, but couldn’t be happier with all of it. Don’t really know of a significant bottleneck. That’s in front of us right now. Other than all the hype and the talk that goes into the political atmosphere, we have no control over whatsoever. The things that we have to say in right now Julio, I think we’ve got a pretty good handle on.
We’ve got the right guy or the right girl with backups in each spot. And the momentum that you were talking about in ’23 for us anyway certainly has not been a let up starting off this year. We’re just anxious to see where this copper thing ends up. Super tight. Around three day’s supply above ground in the world. It’s an incredibly tight situation, It’s fun. It’s a robust market. We’re having a lot of success with our partners and we’ve got a great team around us in all aspects and we’ll see where this takes us.
Julio Romero: Understood. I appreciate you guys taking the follow up questions and best of luck in the first quarter.
Bret Eckert: Thanks, Julio.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from line of Brent Thielman of D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.
Brent Thielman: Hey, thanks for taking the follow up. Daniel, I mean, tough results for aluminum. I guess anything to point to for that product line that may suggest we’re seeing some stabilization?
