BrightView Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:BV) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Dale Asplund : Yes. So we don’t want to obviously give inter-quarter numbers. But what we can indicate to everybody, we have confidence in our range, and we feel like Brett had said in his opening comments, Andy, where we are as we work through Q1 and January, we feel we’re pretty close to where we were last year, which makes us feel very comfortable that we will land in that range. And I just remind everybody, last year, February and March were relatively low snowfall. And that still got us to $210 million of revenue. So we actually think there could be more of that upside. That’s why we kept that range with a midpoint somewhere around 240. But we’re very, very comfortable, Andy. We’re going to get in the low end minimum and probably more towards the midpoint of that range when we think about it if it snows like what we’ve seen in the past in February and March.

Operator: Our next question comes from Tim Mulrooney with William Blair.

Tim Mulrooney: Yes. So Brett, if I’m doing the math right, it looks like the maintenance land business was down about 5% organically if you exclude that 3.2 million acquisitions. Am I doing the math right there?

Brett Urban : Yes. On the total, you’re doing the math, right, Tim, it’s about $19 million for land.

Tim Mulrooney: For maintenance land. Yes, yes. Excluding snow. So my question is, did that hit your expectations? Or was it a little softer than you expected? And I’m asking because based on the midpoint of your guidance for this segment for about flat organic for the full year, starting the first quarter down 5%, flat for the full year at the midpoint, it looks like you’d be expecting a pretty strong second half of the year. Am I thinking about that the right way?

Brett Urban : You are thinking about that the right way, Tim. As you look at our first quarter, we did — we’re not giving quarterly guidance. We came out last — at the end of Q4, gave annual guidance. And we tried to say the first couple of quarters may be a little choppy and more towards the negative 2% or a little bit more than that end and then the back half of the year would be flat to the positive end. But a couple of things to call out there in Q1. We did expect right around where we land. And the biggest piece that we really didn’t talk a lot about at the end of Q4, and we’re not really talking a lot about now, but it’s the hurricane we had last year. We had Hurricane Ian come through the southeastern part of the United States.

That was roughly half of our land and this came from that hurricane year-over-year comp. And the other half is essentially what we expected by focusing on our core business, deemphasizing our non-core business, and continuing to work through the profitable growth. Tim, I think as you move into the last 9 months of the year, I think you’d expect, there won’t be a comp for hurricane in Q2, but there will be some of that work still ongoing with focusing on our core business, deemphasizing, as Dale mentioned, our non-core business, specifically our aggregator business called BES. And we are working through snow now. But when it comes to land, we’ll have a fulsome update here at the end of Q2 because we’re actively working through negotiations with clients now, and we expect those to be done — primarily done here by the end of Q2, and we’ll give an update on, if any, impact will come from that business, what that looks like for Q2, 3 and 4.

Tim Mulrooney: That was very clear. Thank you for walking me through that. So I got that. I wanted to ask about your — switching gears here a little bit to the ancillary work, which I know you highlighted some softness in the ancillary business this quarter. And maybe you even made reference to it last quarter too, I don’t remember. But my questions on the ancillary are, #1, curious what you think is driving that decline in demand. Would just be interested in your perspective. And because I know that out of scope work can sometimes be helpful to margins, and I would assume that’s something you might have seen more of. And #2, sorry, what percent of your maintenance land business would you estimate is a player revenue versus base contract revenue? I think I remember on the IPO, it was like 75-25. I don’t know if that ratio is still relevant. Sorry to cut you out there, Brett.

Brett Urban : Yes, no problem, Tim, sorry to cut you. I’ll start with the second question. Yes. Ancillary to the total land revenue is about 75-25, maybe even 70-30 range or what’s contract, other specialty services versus pure ancillaries. So that’s kind of generally the way if you take the full land, the land revenue. But back to your original question, we did see declines in Q1. Majority was Ian. If you think about the total, Hurricane Ian that happened last year, think about the total Q1 comp, all that hurricane revenue was ancillary revenue. That came to the southeastern part of the United States. And as you sit here today, we really didn’t have any ancillary issue in Q4 coming out of last year. We don’t expect to see any ancillary challenges in the back half of this year or back 3 quarters of this year.

Our ancillary backlogs are at an all-time high. We — some of that’s dependent on seasonality and weather as we put it in the ground. If it snows a lot more here in Q2, we may do a little bit less ancillary in Q2, but the backlogs are at an all-time high. If you look at that number, which we track, we don’t disclose total, but it’s up roughly about 10% year-over-year and what we’re bidding and customers are buying, and that’s specifically in the land business.

Tim Mulrooney: So actually — that’s good to be here because I kind of think about that as a good sign of demand generally. If folks are willing to spend a little bit more on this or that throughout the year. So there’s no signs of a decline in demand. It’s just…

Brett Urban : Yes, Tim — I think that’s an important —

Tim Mulrooney: Kind of a hurricane comp issue.