BrightView Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:BV) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Brett Urban: Yeah. Hey, Luke, how are you doing this morning. I appreciate the question. Yes. As Dale mentioned, profitable growth is going to be our guiding factor moving forward. And I think as you heard in previous calls, previous quarters, we were growing, but margin was not. And I think as you look at this year and you normalize for snow, which we’ve talked about quite a bit and the margin profile has improved significantly, not only in Development business and our Maintenance business but corporate segment as well. If you think about organic growth for the quarter, look, I think that drive towards profitable growth and high-quality business will continue in the near term as we move forward. We’re still getting favorable benefits on pricing.

We’re still being strategic in those efforts of about 50 basis points with our pricing efforts. We did last year with heightened fuel, have fuel surcharges that were in our top line of about 50 basis points as well. So those two things sort of offset from a jump-off point, Q4 over Q4. And then as Dale mentioned, there’s a heightened focus on One BrightView, bringing all of our businesses together, whether it be golf or aggregator business, et cetera. And I think if you look at our core underlying land business, we saw very stable demand and growth in that business, offset by maybe some contraction in our noncore businesses. But as we move forward under Dale’s leadership and really towards One BrightView, you’ll see that alignment of the businesses, especially over the medium to long term.

Unidentified Analyst: Great, thanks so much for that color there. And then maybe switching gears here. Just on your guidance for 2024, it looks like you’re assuming maintenance land organic growth somewhere between down 2% — up 2%. Can you share what you’re assuming in both those situations? And maybe if you could give us a sense, breakdown just between pricing and volume expectations as we head into next year?

Dale Asplund: Yeah. I think, obviously, it’s a good question. I think if you look at what we’ve done for guidance is we gave a full annual guide on revenue. And really in that annual revenue guide of $2.825 billion to $2.975 billion, we’ve also given a range for where we believe our snow revenue will come out, which is $210 million to $270 million. Our Development business, which had an outstanding year last year, we think will continue to grow slightly. So we give a range because we don’t want to really break down exactly each component. We think potentially, as we go through Q1 here, we’ll see a similar trend to what we saw in Q4 as we focus our employees so that we can look to enhance our employees so they can make sure they drive retention with our customers.

So I know that the change to give annual guide is a little different. So one way I think everybody should think about those numbers is our Q1 would normally be roughly about 22.5% of our total revenue. And then that snow business, you could consider roughly about 25% of it coming in Q1, 75% coming in Q2. And that probably would allow you to kind of back into your assumptions, looking at last year’s development by quarter of where we think revenue will grow over the next couple of months on maintenance. I hope that gives you enough on the pieces. But Brett, do you got anything you want to add or…

Brett Urban: No, I’m just — when you look at the change in guidance, we’re going from prior years where we would only provide Q1 guidance at this point in time. We would not provide Q2 or full year. So now we’re going out and providing a full year guide. And I think in that land guide, as you can see it on Slide 16 in the presentation, it’s minus 2% to positive 2%. And like as Dale mentioned, we are working through our guiding factor of profitable growth and through that profitable growth mantra and bringing together as One BrightView, what we experienced in Q4 of a revenue impact, we’ll probably experience in land in Q1 and in the early half of ’24. But as One BrightView gains traction as we take care of our employees and in turn, they take care of our customers, we’re going to get back to that profitable growth over the medium and longer term in this business.

Just important to note, too, just one last factor. Q1 of last year, we did have a hurricane impact in the business of about $7 million. We don’t see any type of unusual events like that happening right now for this quarter.

Unidentified Analyst: Great. Thanks so much.

Operator: Our next question comes from Phil Ng from Jefferies. Phil, your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst: Hey, guys. This is [Maggie] (ph) on for Phil.

Dale Asplund: Good morning, Maggie. I wanted to start out on free cash flow. You had a really impressive step up this year. Can you talk about the nonrecurring benefit from this year and any of the other moving pieces that kind of get you to that fiscal ’24 guidance? And then on the CapEx side, the guide implies a pretty big increase next year. Is that more of a catch-up for the business? Or is this a reasonable level to assume going forward?