David Silver: Yeah, hi. Thank you. I’d like to ask a question firstly on your aviation segment. So clearly not your biggest segment in terms of revenues or absolute profit, but it was the best performer by a wide margin this year, both in revenue growth and in — well, operating income growth and especially margin improvement. So I know there’s a number of initiatives that you’ve undertaken over the last couple of years, which I would say are starting to bear fruit. But on a scale of 1 to 10 or 0 to 100 or whatever, where do you think ABM is in terms of fully exploiting the opportunities from your evolving strategies there? In other words, should we expect another meaningful improvement next year, assuming that, I don’t know, air flight or air travel trends continue as positively as they’ve been? Thank you.
Scott Salmirs: Sure. That’s a good question. So there’s so much going on in aviation that we’re excited about. Firstly, we’ve had a new management team in place for the last couple of years that have been phenomenal, both on the ability to operate the business and then on business development. We’ve been really excited about. And you may remember, David, that we started a few years back, shifting our focus to airports and less on airlines, because we saw all the modernizations that were happening across the country. And the perfect example of that is LaGuardia, just got named the best new airport in the world. Terminal B is like, I don’t know, 80% of that airport. We do everything there. We just got a very large, we call it APS, which is ABM Performance Solutions, which is integrated facility services.
Basically, where the client says, look, you self-perform a bunch of these services, in addition to that, why don’t you take care of all our subcontracted services as well? So basically bundling everything together and letting us run it. So we just got a massive contract at LaGuardia to handle all of Terminal B, also Providence School Systems, we got. So we’re excited about the ability to take this ABM Performance Solutions to airports around the country and our pipeline is growing there. So air travel is up. It continues to be up. Aviation had a really great year. It was also helped, if you remember in Q1, by the parking project that happened in 2022. A lot of the expenses happened in 2022, but we got paid in ’23, so the profit flow-through was about $11 million or $12 million.
So that helped as well. But we were very, very enthusiastic about Aviation and its growth ability for next year. And again, loving the team.
David Silver: Okay. Thank you for that. And I just would like to ask for a clarification on the share repurchase activity this quarter. So there were a couple of comments, certainly already, but I’m just trying to sharpen my understanding. Should I assume that the bulk of the fourth quarter activity was kind of concentrated early in the quarter? In other words, after your stock was quite volatile, 90 days ago. Is that, when the activity was concentrated in, in other words, more opportunistic, or would you say it was spread a little more evenly and hence maybe more, I don’t know, programmatic or more balanced through the quarter? Thank you.
Earl Ellis: Yeah, no, it was definitely more front end loaded. And hence, when we look at the average price, which was $40.82, that is emblematic of kind of like, where it was trading shortly after the Q3 earnings call.
David Silver: Okay, great. Thank you for that. And then last question would be for Scott, I guess. And, Scott, I’d like you to maybe look back a few years and then compare it to today. But in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, and I’m sorry, I should say this is kind of related to your advantages — competitive advantages and your ability to gain new business. But in the immediate aftermath of when the pandemic began, your company was kind of in a very strong position in some ways to capture new business because of your scale, because of your ability to source scarce equipment, better purchasing power, et cetera, as well as staffing, a number of advantages. And we’re kind of in the post [Technical Difficulty] and at least in some parts of your business, commercial real estate, things are structurally a little softer.
But my sense is that your go to market strategy or your value proposition to your core, like bread and butter, industrial or commercial customer, is probably a little bit stronger even than it was a few years ago, just in terms of maybe the enhancements from your internal ELEVATE program and whatnot. But how would you think about, just for the core, kind of bread and butter clientele across education, manufacturing, et cetera, how has your value proposition kind of shifted, let’s say, over the last couple of years and in particular, as you kind of look at the post-pandemic environment, maybe if you could comment on that, that would be helpful?
Scott Salmirs: Yeah, sure. Look, I think for us as a brand, it certainly — I guess our positioning has changed a great deal, because we came through this pandemic different than our competitors, and I think our competitors would admit that too with developing our enhanced clean product, we got so much more exposure on social media. If you remember, we did a commercial, so we’ve become more prevalent. And it’s just a different swagger, I guess, if you will, when we’re pursuing business development and talking to clients. And then you layer on top of that, David, all the investments that we’re making in technology, and to sit across from a client in a presentation and show them a digital dashboard and how we’re monitoring their facilities with this ABM team connect and how very shortly all of our team members in the field are going to have an app that is going to connect them to the client, to us.
