Willdan Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:WLDN) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Greg Kitt: And then on contract expansions that you had, you talked about the California IOUs, First Energy and then Con Ed, is there some change in how you’re working with those customers? Or was that every couple of years, you just get a dramatically larger budget flush? Wondering if those customers are looking at us more like a partner in giving you a little bit more lead time versus, hey, it just all kind of shows up at the end of the year.

Mike Bieber: No, I think you’re exactly right, Greg. That’s a result of us earning their trust throughout the year. The California IOU programs, you know the story. Those are new programs, new clients, we had to earn their trust before they would come to us with that kind of year-end extension, with that kind of problem really. And we appreciate the opportunity to deliver, and we did that for them. The same thing with First Energy, we had to earn their trust. That was a difficult program. It was a small program, but it started off Rocky. And as we got into it and approached the end of the first year, they came to us with a problem we were able to solve. Again, we earned their trust. Con Ed is a client that has trusted us for years. And when they have these issues, they come to us, and we deliver for them. So that’s what happened.

Greg Kitt: Congratulations, and thank you for your hard work.

Operator: Next question is a follow-up from Moshe Katri from Wedbush Securities. Your line is now live.

Moshe Katri: This is for Mike. Maybe talk a bit about the Company’s strategy and positioning under your leadership. Any changes or what should we expect on an ongoing basis?

Mike Bieber: Thanks for the question. I’ve worked with Tom for a number of years. He’s been my mentor and he’s still the Chairman of the Board. Having said that, the differences between us are probably that Tom is a little more business development-focused, and I’m probably a little more operationally focused. It’s just our nature, and it was the nature of our partnership. I’ll bring that to Willdan. And if there’s anything I’ll spend more time on, it’s developing that operational excellence that leads to the contract expansions and other opportunities I talked about. That’s something I’m going to focus on. Other than that, we’re on a good course. Tom started us down a good path and the opportunities are for us to capture at this point, so I thank him for it.

Moshe Katri: And what about kind of coming out with some new offerings that will make the business a bit more recurring in nature?

Mike Bieber: We’ve talked about that. A lot of our business acts more like an annuity. And the energy efficiency programs very much behave that way. The funding doesn’t change that much year-over-year. They’re like steady building blocks that you build the business on top of. So, our business already behaves very much like recurring revenue, for the most part. The area that we’re trying to do better at is the software area where the revenue recognition standards cause it to be lumpy. The customers want to capitalize that software rather than expense it, which causes us to have to recognize all the revenue upfront. The things we’ve done to augment that, I mentioned our pairing services with software, which we were not doing very well two years ago. Now the average software license that we signed is about half services, which is up from almost no services before a couple of years ago. So that’s the one area we’re trying to smooth out.

Moshe Katri: And consulting in terms of the role of the consulting business, looking at this more as a kind of a network effect, I guess.