Michael Dudas: Okay. So yeah, moving — continuing on the thoughts on RPS. I know it’s only been 10 days and such, but maybe you could share a little bit about your expectations relative to managing the new employees retention expectations? Are there any significant senior people that need around the — or joining the team? And relative to that and the margin question you just touched on before, have these margins in more Tetra Tech expertise and value proposition adds to the — through the contract base of RPS, or are there things RPS can do better to extract those better margins amongst their — especially their government clients?
Dan Batrack: Well, so two questions there. One retention, the second is increasing the margins or project execution. With respect to retention, it is new. We do have retention programs here in Tetra Tech. We have equity positions that we will provide access to Tetra Tech stock, as we do with Tetra Tech staff that actually is a component of retention. We actually want every employee to be an owner of the company and have same alignment as our outside shareholders. So we are putting that in place. We certainly have selected a retention of stock awards that vest over multi-years for select areas across the top to make sure that they own a piece of the rock and they’re part of the organization and that vests over multi-years as does for every Tetra Tech employee and the existing management of Tetra Tech here.
I will say RPS’s turnover currently or I shouldn’t say currently, prior to our acquisition is higher than Tetra Tech, quite a bit higher. And Tetra Tech’s overall turnover rate is right around 10% slightly below that. But the turnover rate of Tetra Tech when you’ve been here more than five years at the company is in the order of sort of circa 1% is quite low. And what I’m looking to achieve is actually to put that type of career stickiness with the people at RPS. This is not a next step in their career. This is the next landing spot where they will continue their career all the way through retirement for those that want to be high-end technical engineers and scientists. I expect they have a home here forever and that they’ll help make Tetra Tech better than we were before they joined us, and it provides our clients extraordinary levels of institutional knowledge consistency.
Tetra Tech is not going anywhere. The next recession is not impacting our business. And in fact if you look at 2008, we grew through that. If you look at the pandemic we were up through that. And so the tougher things get the better home this is for those employees. Now with respect to can they run better? I do think that they have been hampered and they have been restricted with respect to a lack of a single ERP system in their back office. I think that the ability for their project management and technical staff to have real-time understanding of where they are decisions-making to be made immediately with respect to immediate access of percent complete accessing of knowledge systems across the entire organization is substantially higher at Tetra Tech.
We’ve just been — we’re — I don’t know one to two decades ahead of where RPS is on that journey and we’re going to move what was another five or 10-year journey for them. We’re going to move that into 12 to 24-month period, and they’ll be on our systems. And so I think that will help provide new solutions for their clients and which then will result into better performance by ourselves, and better delivery and value propositions for all of our collective clients and the 100,000 projects. So with respect to efficiency and how are we going to drive the higher margins not just on cost, it’s going to be giving them the tools that they can even do their existing jobs better than what they had done prior to joining Tetra Tech.
