Bill Bosway: Yeah. It’s a good question and we have talked about this a lot the last year so. We made a decision couple of years ago when things really started to push demand down in an industry that take advantage of this opportunity to figure out how to scale your business in a much different way, such that you can — you have more levers to drive the profitability of this business and then when volume comes back, you should be in a better position to have converted a higher rate. It’s pretty common sensible stuff, obviously, but ultimately for us when you think about our quote to cash processes, everything we do from making sure that business systems are tied together and in a much tighter way than they had been in the past from estimating all the way through release to fab to install in the field.
And tightening that was a big effort for us and that’s where I talked earlier about, hey, keeping our investments going into digitizing our businesses, this is really critical in our construction-oriented businesses like Renewables, because we weren’t as high there. Therefore, we weren’t scalable and if you are not scalable with good systems you have a chance of making more mistakes in a construction business where you are doing 400, 500 fields a year. So we have really tightened it up. The team has done a fantastic job of bringing the systems and tying them together such that we are much more scalable and we are less mistake driven on these construction projects and that’s really critical number one, because you can’t afford to do that.
Secondly, when you have this type of business, you also have to be very much linked in with supply chain and manufacturing. I know it sounds very common sensible to think about the project that may have been quoted in January of one year and finalized in January the next year. So making sure you don’t get it out of whack with an inflationary environment such that it really impacts your P&L, tightening up that quote process, I think, that when you released the fab, so you lock down actual input cost you have [Technical Difficulty] today than it was before. So we don’t have near as much exposure. Thirdly, it’s really product lines and how you mix sales and the impact that has on margin. So if you recall, our portfolio is pretty broad. We have an eBOS solution that has been growing quite well.
We have a fixed-tilt, we have tracker and we have a new tracker and that was launched a year and a half ago that really started to take off. So you mix well on your margins and your product lines as you drive your cost reduction and these new products are being very impactful for us. And then, thirdly or lastly, when you think about in the field, so we like the fact that we install a lot of things, because it opens up another revenue and profit stream for us, but it is construction. And so just like buttoning up inside your four walls with estimating and manufacturing, et cetera. You have got to be world-class in the field as well and you got to be efficient and so forth. So we have done a lot of work in all four buckets and we have done it in an environment where volumes have been down.
And so my point everybody is, if at the end the day you believe or feel like the only lever you have is volume to drive your margin then that’s a tough position to be in. We feel like where we have multiple levers to now pull in a much more effective way than we did before. So it’s really those four buckets over the last two years and we worked really hard on to be in today’s position. So as some of these headwinds ease on this industry and the volume starts to come back, yes, we should be in a better position to convert accordingly than we would have been two years ago. So that’s a long answer to your question, but it’s a pretty short answer relative to all the work that’s actually been done, but that’s how we would characterize it for you.
Julio Romero: Thank you for the color. That makes sense. Second question I have is, has permitting delays abated at all and what are you hearing from your customers in terms of where the local government office — offices are ramping up capacity to alleviate the permitting bottleneck?
Bill Bosway: Yeah. I would say it’s still — it’s probably similar to what it was last quarter and when you think about, our customers are doing projects all over the country. So it really comes down to each experience they are having regard — based on where the field is that they are working on. So it’s hard for me to give you a specific answer across each project. But what I would tell you in general is, it’s the number one challenge right now for our customers. I think the only the positive in that as they don’t feel like that’s a structural issue. That is a big change. It’s just a ramp-up capacity issue. And I think they are optimistic that, that’s going to get — it’s going to continue to improve, but it really comes down to each local municipality that you are working with to get the permitting in the first place and that’s where it gets — it’s case-by-case.
