Bill Bosway: Yes, we’ve been on this trajectory for a bit of time Dan. I think it’s — we’ve got a good ground game going now. We’ve got our supply chain linked with the business in a much stronger way. If you recall way back — go back three years when — or two years whenever it was it’s hard to imagine these days. But when supply chain really took off this business at the same time like renewables and anything else when steel is really going haywire. This was also a business that we weren’t necessarily linked closely with contracts and supply chain locking that in. So, our input costs were aligned with our pricing. And arguably you could say in this business it’s even more of a challenge because you may sign projects two or three years previous to a change, right?
And so we work through all that and subsequently have come back and change the way we manage a lot of our TCs with this business. So I think that’s helped take some of the variability out and some of the surprises on the business, and it then has allowed us to focus on really doing a lot of more 80/20. We’ve been investing in quarterly in 80/20, but also some new automation in this business. And I think that’s really helped in the margin profile. We’ve also 80/20 from a customer perspective, look at our product lines, to see where we were and where we’re not making money and then really honed in on how do we actually generate better margins. And then we just got good top line opportunities that we’re able to take advantage of. Arguably, some of those, we wouldn’t have touched three or four years ago, because we weren’t in the position to make the type of money we wanted to and now we are.
So that’s facilitating more growth. Obviously, you have the infrastructure bill that has given our customers more visibility beyond the year with federal funding. So I think that’s helped — and I just think we’ve gained more business than we were in the past. So as I mentioned in my comments, bookings were up 18% sequentially. We’re trying to overcome arguably the largest job we ever had we signed in late 2022 or started in early 2023. So that’s why backlog was a little wonky for the quarter, but the reality is that will correct itself just with the momentum we have. So we don’t see the end market slowing down a whole lot right now. We’ve got some other products that we’re working on as well. I think will help us down the road. And we still have another couple of years of the infrastructure bill that I think will support the industry.
So right now, it’s a pretty solid outlook for the end market, and we feel good about the type of performance that we’ve achieved, and we think we can maintain. Go ahead.
Tim Murphy: If you look sequentially last year, our second quarter margins were a lot higher than our first last year. And so we’ll see improvement, but I wouldn’t expect 800 basis points off of what we did last year for the remainder of the year just to be set that expectation.
Daniel Moore : Yes. That makes sense. Last for me, just going back to M&A, it sounds like near-term resi is more likely. And it sounds like the dialogues are picking back up. Is that simply a function of availability or strategic as well as you look to build out some of your geographic penetration.
Bill Bosway : Well, I mean, I think I would characterize it mainly as strategic, number one. Again, I think there’s going to be an organic and inorganic play as we expand into the markets I mentioned earlier. And then there’s some other opportunities that we are finding pretty interesting as well that we’ve been engaged with and been engaged with for some time. And I think I mentioned in previous calls, where we’re in processes that stopped that have — that look to be restarting. So we will — hopefully, we’ll see those things happen as we expect, and as they do, we’ll participate and we’ll see which those that make most sense for us when we get gross baseline. But there’s definitely more activity now than more potential now than there was the last 12, 18, 24 months.
And it’s mainly residential. And I’d say that, Dan, probably as much of a function of what Agtech and renewables as an industry are going through, right? It’s not a robust M&A environment necessarily in renewables just because there’s a lot of moving parts, and I think sellers and buyers are kind of holding patterns tile work through some of these things as we’ve all discussed in the last couple of years. And valuations have changed dramatically in the last two or three years. So there’s a lot of nuances there that I think, in the renewal space. And I think Agtech’s some similar things going on yet a little bit different. So, we’ve said, and we said a couple of years ago, we’ve got to get those two businesses running, get them generating the type of performance that we expect.
And then we’ll focus on additional opportunities maybe to bolt on or build them out. But we got our first responsibilities making sure they get up and running. And that’s really 90% of Gibraltar right there, right? So that’s the way we continue to look at it.
Daniel Moore : All right. Thank you again.
Bill Bosway : All righty.
Operator: Thank you. And we have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. I’ll now turn the call back over to Bill Bosway for closing remarks.
Bill Bosway : Great. Again, thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Coming up, we do plan to present at the Seaport Third Annual Growth Discovery Conference and the CJS Summer conference. So thanks again for your ongoing support of Gibraltar, and I hope you guys have a great day and good rest of the week. Thank you.
Operator: And this concludes today’s conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.
