So we’re able to kind of move from one market to the other, use our backlog to fill holes and provide a lot more stability. And so we’re in a much better place than we have been in prior years. Rich you followed us for a long time, and you watch the cycles, and so we’re in a much better place.
Richard Ryan: Sure. Thanks for that. One last one on capital allocation. When you look back, Graham had a nominal dividend that was eliminated during the tough couple of years you had. Now that you’re back in compliance does the dividend come back up and the discussion format at the Board level, or how should we look at your capital allocation priorities over the next few years?
Chris Thome: Yes. Rich, as Dan and I laid out, last year when we released our long-term strategic plan, our capital allocation starts with organic growth, right? We feel we have an abundance of capital, organic growth opportunities to take advantage of. From there, if we have excess capital, we’ll use it to pay down debt. And then hopefully, within the next few years, we can start looking at M&A again. And then after that, we would look to returning that back to shareholders. So we’re comfortable with the capital allocation strategy that we have.
Richard Ryan: Okay, great. Again, great job in the execution, guys. Thanks.
Dan Thoren: Thank you, Rich.
Chris Thome: Thanks, Rich.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of e of Brett Kearney with Gabelli. Please proceed with your question.
Brett Kearney: Hi, guys. Good morning, and congrats on the continued momentum.
Chris Thome: Hey, thanks Brett.
Dan Thoren: Good morning, Brett.
Brett Kearney: Dan, absolutely agree with your assessment of the landscape in U.S gets potentially even global manufacturing the ability for differentiation through reliability and performance. I guess, can you talk about the opportunities you’re seeing, some of the investments you’re making, the ERP system, you noted some digital and automated tools to kind of cement, I guess that vision for differentiation you see across the platforms.
Dan Thoren: Yes, let me hit generally. And then I’ll give you some specific examples. This continual improvement, continual investment in our business is in our minds extremely important. It’s kind of like compounding and investing. When we’re investing capital continually and wise — and wisely in our business, it becomes incrementally stronger kind of like your bank account does as you continue to put money in there and compound. So we loved the notion of continuing to invest in ourselves and building a better company in the process. If we don’t, it’s — this — there’s an engineering term called entropy, that basically means everything starts to come apart. So your processes drift, you don’t have as well trained employees, and ultimately, you have lower performance in investing, inflation is that entropy.
If you’re not continuing to invest, the value of your investment starts to become less. So they kind of go hand in hand which is really kind of kind of interesting. So we are continuing to invest in our businesses. Just last year, we put some significant money into Barber-Nichols to expand their capacity to support the Mark 48 program. And that facility our GM Matt Malone in Denver has told me that, facility is within a week of going live. The Navy is excited about it. Our customer, our direct customer SAIC is really excited about it. And essentially that kind of foresight of investing in that is going to serve the Navy well as the geopolitical tensions continue to rise, and we’ve all read more and more about that. So that was one investment that we’ve made.
