But if you look at the Dodge Momentum Index, in what’s coming forward, and the momentum index it’s basically nonresidential projects going into planning. And it generally precedes spending in the nonresidential market by about 12 months. And the September index was up about 3%. And while commercial was pretty flat. The institutional piece has gone up quite a bit. And the institutional piece is more public facing. And we’ve seen like the commercial fall off a little bit, but institutional like educational, hospitals, things like that is really kind of a strong point in the construction side. And right now, what they’re projecting is if the interest rates start to maybe moderate a bit by the time we get to middle of the year, that we’re probably expecting a pretty good commercial construction market next year as well as hopefully a continued strength that we’re seeing in the Precast infrastructure side.
So these are just really off modestly. And like I said at the beginning, demand is a little bit lower, not high like it was in 2022, so we’re seeing a little bit more pressure on pricing. But I wouldn’t say it’s across the board. It’s on certain things and the mixes have changed a little bit, like you said. But all in all, I think that market is holding up pretty well based on the interest rate environment that we’ve seen over the last, what, 11 interest rate hikes that the Fed has done. And we’re pretty excited about the way that looks going forward, too, especially with the headwinds of that have been in that business this year and how well it’s still doing so…
Julio Romero: Great. No, that’s really good color there. I appreciate it. And then – maybe if you can speak to ERP a little bit. Did you call out how many days downtime you might have taken in the quarter and maybe how many you expect for next quarter?
Aaron Wilkins: Yes. Julio, what’s happening is, we’re starting to see a better transactional integrity through the course of the business, mostly because we’re just reinforcing process and managing our data, I think, a little bit better than we were initially say, a year ago at this time. We’re obviously getting a lot of help from some consultants to kind of get us – kind of pull through this a little bit, but we’re virtually going to get to a place where we’re on MRP and have a little bit more automation. But I’d say as far as some of the days that we’ve been spending on inventories, that’s improved and we’re still doing inventories. We’re obviously getting better at them so that there’s proven for that reason.
But I would say that now we’re getting to a point where going forward, we’re – especially at two of the three Park plants we’re at a stage where, due to the confidence that we have that we’re not going to have them do an inventory, because one it’s still has a little bit of work to do, I think, a little bit more of a focus. But that’s something that I think is going to continue to improve for us going forward. So I mean, I think to this point, Julio to answer your question on the days, I would say we’ve probably spent three days of the quarter since we probably bought the Park business. And I would say probably the year ago quarter was maybe a little bit more, because we were doing the first initial go-live for ParkUSA. So we had to do a kind of an extra inventory at the launch.
Julio Romero: Got it. Thank you for that. And it sounds like you’re making progress there, for sure. And then just thinking about the share repurchase authorization, how should we kind of think about the cadence of you guys deploying that when you balance that with maybe debt reduction and some other cash uses.
Scott Montross: Well, I think, Julio, the way we’re looking at it is, is the Board approved the $30 million, and we’re new at this, right? So we’ll probably begin to deploy maybe $10 million of that at a time just to start getting our feet wet of that. We’re going to continue to work down our debt as we go Again, like you heard Brent ask the question about cash flow, we’re pretty focused on cash flow so that we can get that debt down and ultimately, to do the things that we need to do to drive shareholder value. And really, the repurchase program is a part of our growth strategy now, right? Because there’s not always a M&A acquisition that’s either readily available or practical right because there’s not always something where you want it?
When you want it? And at the value you want it, right? So it’s may not be readily available. The other thing is when you look at the market still; they’re still relatively frothy as far as multiples in the markets, the things that we’re looking at. So we are very sensitive to what we’re trading at and making sure that we’re doing things that are accretive to the shareholders if we’re doing an acquisition, in absence of being able to do one that makes any sense to continue to drive shareholder value, which is part of our growth strategy, we will – we may very well off to do share repurchases. And that’s why we put that into play. So it’s definitely debt repayment. We’re not going to do anything with share repurchases that get us out of whack with our credit facility or puts us in a position where we can’t do an acquisition when we find one that makes sense.
So we’re going to be pretty careful with it.
Julio Romero: Great to hear. Thanks very much for taking the questions.
Scott Montross: Absolutely.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ted Jackson with Northland Securities. Please proceed with your question.
Ted Jackson: Thanks. Good morning, Scott. Aaron.
Scott Montross: Good morning.
Aaron Wilkins: Good morning, Ted.
Ted Jackson: Yes. TGIF
Scott Montross: TGIF, yes.
