Waste Connections, Inc. (NYSE:WCN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Worthing Jackman: Sure. Obviously, last year was intentional, and we talked a lot about what intentional meant to us through the years. Look, and I won’t spend much time on this, but to me, growth is not about top line growth and growth in the business, it’s more about the personal and professional development and growth of our leaders, right? I mean our leaders have spent exhausting amount of effort looking after their people through a very challenging time, pandemic, health, welfare issues, et cetera. And so our leaders just need to remember to invest in themselves and their own personal growth. And obviously, we will further that based on the amount of discretionary to be — I don’t view the training is the discretionary, but we put a lot of effort and a lot of dollars into training and development.

And so as a reminder of our leaders to take care of themselves, don’t forget to take care of themselves and grow personally while they look after others as serving leaders. And obviously, gratitude is shifting the DNA of any servant leader in recognizing and appreciating their employees and all the good benefits that come from that. And so it just — it’s a chance to reflect on individuals and how grateful we all are to be part of this organization and keep that front and centre as we move forward.

Operator: Next question will be from Chris Murray, ATB Capital Markets.

Chris Murray: Maybe turning back to the CapEx question a little bit. I guess, a couple of parts to this. First, if you look at this is the CapEx as a percentage of revenue, it’s going to be a little bit higher this year with, I guess, the catch-ups. I guess a couple of things to think about. One, as we move into kind of later years and out of ’22 and things start to normalize, is there any reason to believe the CapEx doesn’t step back to kind of historical levels kind of around 10% of revenue? And then second, just looking at the cost line. You’ve kind of mentioned labor and fuel a little bit, but does getting these additional vehicles or maybe some other things, is there anything that you can talk about in terms of cost reductions or cost improvement in the margin that look to maybe generate margins over and above what you can just reprise?

Worthing Jackman: Yes, I’ll take a part of it. I mean, from a from how we run the business standpoint, there’s not some great investment that’s going to recklessly take out 7,000 heads and change the labor profile of this business. I mean are we — do we automate and push the local communities to automate? Is that their decision? Yes. And so in some cases, it’s a very long dialogue, but we have a couple of markets that we’ll be automating that will help on the labor side. Obviously, I think we’ve just celebrated our 50th robot to go into our recycling facilities. And obviously, each one theoretically should take up. If you double shifted three to four headcount in each per robot deployed. I’ll be curious to see if looking at headcount, if that’s actually happened or not.

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