Brian Gray: No, I think I mean we’ve got the backlog to go out and work. We’ve got the crews back to work, trained. We’ve got inventory. So, I think we’re well-prepared to hit the ground running in the second quarter. There can be some seasonal impacts in the second quarter as we begin to work in some of those northern states. But right now, I would say that we’re very well-prepared. Plants are where they need to be. We put some new plants and some sites that traditionally might be on the road traveling. I think it’s important plants in the fixed payments and commercial sites. And so I think right now everything that we see with the backlog that we’ve got, pricing momentum that we’ve got that we’re going to gear for a solid year again Garik.
Garik Shmois: Okay, great. And just lastly just wanted to follow up on Brent’s question on aggregates pricing. Is there any way to parse out how much mix whether product or geographic mix benefited? Obviously, it’s a seasonally slow quarter, I don’t want to read too much into it but it was a fairly impressive year-over-year improvement, would I be reading too much into there could be potential upside to your aggregates pricing guidance. Just anything to kind of call out in the first quarter that might have been a bit more unusual than the underlying pricing in aggregate?
Brian Gray: Yes, I mean I’ll just give you one example. So, our volumes were up — I’m sorry volumes were down by a little over 400,000 tons and 200,000 of those tons were from — there was a pit run project that we had last year in Idaho. And as you know our pit run basically raw material is sold at a lower price. And so just that alone — that one job with the volumes we’re talking about can have a pretty significant impact both on our volumes being down by 13% and yet our prices are up by 15%. And so as we look at it on an annualized basis, we still feel very committed and strong that our aggregate volumes should be flat to slightly down, maybe a low single-digits and that our pricing should be in that mid to high single-digits.
So, that’s one example. I mean there’s other examples. There was a project that last year in Hawaii, we’re doing some contract crushing again at a lower selling price. And this year, we don’t have. That was the tune of about 130,000 tons, so that would impact. That’s just timing of projects. I mean it’s not that large. We’re concerned that those jobs are going away. They’re just impact jobs that you have one quarter versus the other quarter. And in the first quarter, those can have more significant swings as a percentage of the total. So, that’s kind of — those are two examples that led to the higher 15% improvement in pricing and the lower volumes down by 13%.
Garik Shmois: Okay, that’s great color. Appreciate it. And I guess I’ll stop there and pass it on.
Brian Gray: Thanks Garik.
Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And your next question will be from Ian Zaffino at Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.
Ian Zaffino: Hi. Great. Thank you very much. I wanted to ask on the pricing outlook, how much of your book have you moved to call it, dynamic pricing versus annual or some annual letters? And how are you thinking about that inside your guidance for the up pricing? Thanks.
Brian Gray: We’ve talked about that — rolling out dynamic pricing, it’s a process and you don’t do it overnight. You don’t do it one quarter and frankly, you don’t do it in one year. And so we are in the process of implementing that throughout all of our segments, all of our regions. We’re in the process of continuing to do training, continue to roll out tools to assist our sales teams to provide that commercial excellence to optimize pricing and implement that dynamic pricing. Frankly, in some of our markets we’re still hiring the sales professionals to help us implement that that dynamic pricing, which as you know, is we’re asking our customers for all their projects they recall and we would quote those materials just in time to take in consideration our current cost structure.
Look at our current backlog, look at the proximity of that job to our locations and optimized pricing. And so, that process, I mean there’s some training done with our customers. And so, we are in the early phases of that. It’s been built into our guidance when we gave our guidance in February. So we can know where we’re at in the process. We certainly had some good traction. It would be during last year that led to our hitting our adjusted EBITDA goals two years earlier. And so commercial excellence, dynamic pricing and certainly was a part of that. But we are in the early innings of that rollout. So that — but that is baked into our guidance.
Ian Zaffino: Okay. Understood. And then, can you maybe talk about the acquisition environment for rock at the moment aggregates and whatever multiples you’re seeing and what should we expect here, because there’s been organic growth and then you did ready-mix deal. But how are we thinking about just in general multiples and sort of where they’ve gone and the likelihood of seeing something sometime in the next quarter? Thanks.
Brian Gray: Yes. No, we’re really excited about the growth opportunities this year at Knife River both the organic growth and we’re certainly adding reserves. Strategic reserve increases next to our existing sites as part of our organic. But the M&A, we have an active pipeline. And we certainly have bolstered our corporate development team and continue to add resources in that area and tell you that Management and our Board all of us are very focused on those opportunities. And there are a lot of them that we’re working on and many of those are pure-play aggregate sites, pure-play aggregate locations and businesses that are existing right now in the markets that we serve. We certainly are very focused in those markets that we can continue to bolt-on and tuck-in operations that have those immediate synergies within the region that we’re operating in today.
