We also are getting closer to the engineering community, the ownership of the general contracting level to make sure that we’re solving problems for them across multiple customer groups. And then lastly, although we stay very true to the individual trade that’s doing the work, whether that’s the waterworks contractor, the fire protection contractor, the commercial mechanical contractor or the industrial contractor, we do add value by bringing those customer groups together on the site especially when there’s such scale and complexity on some of these projects. And so that’s playing out as we had hoped, and we continue to work and invest in what those capabilities look like.
Brian Biros: Got it. And a follow-up on the waterworks acquisition announced. Can you just any more color on kind of the acquisition that the Waterworks metering distributor in Texas to kind of how that fits into the larger M&A strategy you guys for you either on a product basis or a geography basis?
Kevin Murphy : So if you look at our core waterworks business on core products and pipe out and fitting for residential, commercial and municipal applications, it’s been well built out across the whole of the United States, and we maintain a very strong position inside that business. We have in the past many years, been working to build out water and wastewater treatment plant capabilities, metering and metering technology capabilities. And so what you’ve seen with this acquisition is meters and metering technology capabilities in the State of Texas, so that we cannot only service that market, but also get closer to that municipal customer because that relationship serves us well across the whole of our business. And you’ll see us continue to work to build out meters and metering technology, urban green infrastructure and sold stabilization.
It’s been a key part of our acquisition strategy as we complement what’s already a strong business across the whole of the United States.
Operator: Our next question comes from Sam Darkatsh from Raymond James.
Sam Darkatsh: Two questions, and these are both kind of follow-ups to a certain degree. Bill, you mentioned that you expect the debt leverage to remain at the low end of the range for the foreseeable future. But you obviously can’t always control when really attractive things come to market. I was just curious as to what the organization’s bandwidth and appetite is and making larger scale M&A right now, perhaps away from the core business? And I asked this in light of the fact that obviously there’s a major energy PVF player that’s extensively looking into a sale, and you’re seemingly one of the only strategic players with the balance sheet to comfortably ingest such a transaction. So I’m just curious as to the interest, maybe not with that particular situation in particular, but in general, for larger scale M&A right now with the organization.
Bill Brundage: Yes, Sam, I’ll start to talk a little bit about how we view leverage and capacity from an acquisition standpoint. And I think Kevin will probably weigh in on the strategy side of how we’re thinking about customer groups and large-scale M&A. To your point, operating at the low end of our range gives us quite a bit of flexibility, if you think about roughly $3 billion EBITDA business, 1 to 2 turn leverage range gives us roughly $3 billion of capacity were we to scale all the way up to 2x. We intend to operate towards the low end to give ourselves the capacity to scale up in general, what you’ve seen out of us and what our industry lends itself to are 10,000-plus small to medium-sized competitors. And so to Kevin’s point earlier in the day, we’ve done over 50 acquisitions in the last 5 years, mostly in that small to medium-sized range.
Sometimes, those are a bit lumpy and they come together. You saw only one this quarter. Sometimes we’ll do 3, 4, 5, 6 in a quarter. So we want to maintain that capacity.
Kevin Murphy : To Bill’s point, the bolt-on acquisition strategy, both capabilities as well as geographic has served us well. And quite frankly, the industry is built out that way. When you think about platform acquisition or larger scale acquisition, we will, in fact, look at that as we look at customer group expansion. We very much look at the customer that we need to serve and the capabilities that we need to bring to serve that customer and then as importantly or maybe more importantly, how does that fit into the project as a whole and what our relevance is on that project. And you’ve highlighted energy transition and maybe even sustainability as a catalyst for what we would look at. And so it’s fair to say that we continue to look at how our individual customers today, especially in a multi-trade environment are operating both residentially and non-residentially and how do we best serve them.
