Bowman Consulting Group Ltd.

considered forward-looking statements under federal security laws. As described in the company's filings with the FEC, these statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause future results to differ from those expressed, and the company is not obligated to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements. In addition, on today's call, the company will discuss certain non-GAAP financial information such as adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, and net service billing. You can find this information, together with the reconciliations of the most directly comparable gap information in the company's earning press release, filed with the SEC and on the company's investor relations website at investors.bowman.com. Management will deliver prepared remarks, after which they will take questions from research analysts. Replays of the call will be available on the company's investor relations website. Mr. Bowman, you may begin your prepared remarks.

Okay, thank you, Becky. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining our fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. Chris Leibovitz, our CFO, is with me this morning. Welcome to all our employees who are listening to the call today, especially to the newest Bowman employees. I'm going to start today's call with some introductory remarks and then Bruce will cover our financial performance. I'll wrap up the call with closing statements about 2025 before opening it up to Q&A. 2024 was a very successful year for Bowman on multiple fronts. We posted record net service billings, net income, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted EBITDA margin. We had the strongest fourth quarter in our history. It's generated as much operating cash flow as we did for all of 2023, and it nearly doubled what we generated in the first nine months of 2024. Bookings were especially strong in the second half of the year with our book to burn ratio once again exceeding 1.0. We entered 2025 with a record backlog of $399 million. and that provides great visibility to our continued revenue growth. During the year, we made eight strategic acquisitions that enabled us to enter new geographies and expand service offerings across all our markets. We augmented these acquisitions with new leadership, systems, and capital to accelerate their growth potential. Throughout the company, these acquisitions added depth and expertise in practice areas such as bridge design, water and wastewater, utilities, fire protection, and sustainability. The addition of CertX earlier in the year greatly enhanced our technical services with advanced and high-altitude geospatial solutions. Geospatial is a source of substantial new business in 2024 from both new and returning customers. This practice area enables us to achieve incumbency with clients early on in projects, and it is a significant generator of cross-selling opportunities. With that, let me turn the call over to Bruce to discuss financial results, after which I'll give a little more color on our markets and our positive outlook for 2025. Bruce?

Thanks, Gary. Welcome, everybody. Today I'm going to touch on the highlights of the fourth quarter and the fiscal year. Okay, let's turn to slide four. Gross revenue for the fourth quarter was $113 million. This represents a 22% increase over last year's fourth quarter. Net revenue, a non-GAAP result, was similarly up 23 percent over last year at 98.6 million. These results both exceeded consensus estimates. We continue to operate in the high 80s range in terms of net revenue as a percentage of gross revenue. Net income for the quarter increased 13.6 million dollars to 5.9 million, or 34 cents per share basic and 33 cents diluted. This compares to a net loss of $7.7 million, or negative 59 cents per share, both basic and diluted last year. During the quarter, our tax benefit was $5.4 million, resulting from increases in our R&D tax credits, windfall tax gains on stock vesting, and other UTP-related accrual reversals. Adjusted EBITDA, another non-GAAP metric, was $17 million for the quarter, which represents a 17.2 margin on net revenue. This is a big improvement from earlier in the year and reflects in part our labor realignment efforts in the third quarter. Adjusted earnings per share for the quarter, also a non-GAAP metric, more than doubled to 72 cents basic and 71 cents diluted as compared to 33 cents and 31 cents respectively last year. Turning to slide five, gross revenue for the full year ended at $426.6 million, our first year over $400 million. This represents a 23% increase over last year and sets us up to meet our five-year goal of a $500 million run rate. Net revenue was up 25% over last year at $379.7 million. These results also exceeded consensus estimates. Net income for the year increased by $9.6 million to a profit of $3 million or 18 cents per share basic and 17 cents per share diluted. As compared to a loss of $6.6 million, or negative 53 cents per share. Last year, we committed to restoring GAAP profitability and pleased to be here today reporting a year that was profitable on a GAAP basis. Adjusted EBITDA was 59.5 million for the year, which represents a 15.7% margin on net revenue and 26.6% year-over-year increase. While we're not at our annual goal of high-teens margins yet, this does represent our fourth consecutive year of margin improvement. Adjusted earnings per share for the year was $1.23 basic and $1.20 diluted, an increase from $1.12 and $1.03 respectively. As we look to 2025, I would once again expect GAAP expense associated with non-cash stock compensation to be reduced in the absolute and as a percentage of revenue. Turning to slide six, here we show the breakdown of gross revenue by market. Building infrastructure continued to be our largest market at 51% of gross revenue, with commercial, residential, and municipal representing 23%, 18%, and 10% of gross revenue, respectively. Additional sub-market breakdowns for building infrastructure can be seen on this chart on this slide. Transportation represented 21% of gross revenue, with about two-thirds being from public client engagement. Power, utilities, and energy represented 18 percent, with around 75 percent being from traditional energy and grid-related assignments. The balance is emerging markets, including mining, water, environmental, and this year, aerial imaging and mapping. Beginning in 2025, we will break aerial imaging and mapping out based on in-market application. This may cause year-over-year comparisons with emerging markets to be a bit challenging. Let's turn to slide seven. Organic growth of net revenue is 8.5% in the quarter and 13% for the year. Looking at organic growth by market, emerging markets led the pack, followed by transportation, power utilities and energy, and then building infrastructure. Again, a reminder that we would expect to see the growth rate for emerging markets moderate as we shift aerial mapping and imagery in 2025. Let's now turn to slide eight to review cash flow, liquidity, and capitalization. At year end, we had approximately $7 million of cash on hand with roughly $60 million available under our $100 million revolver and sufficient access to CapEx lease financing. We're currently in the final stages of increasing our revolver limit to $140 million. At year end, we had approximately $95 million of net debt and a leverage ratio of 1.6 on trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA. I can say with confidence that we have plenty of capacity to borrow in what we believe will be a market of opportunity to fund strategic growth initiatives, technology investments, and M&A. During the fourth quarter, we turned a corner on cash conversion, generating nearly $12 million in cash flows from operating activities in the quarter and over $24 million for the year, more than double last year. Our cash flow improvement was derived in large part reductions in unbilled revenue and in our working capital. During 2024, we repurchased $34 million of stock with around $11 million purchased from employees to cover taxes associated with vesting and $23 million from open market repurchases under a repurchase authorization. Since year end, we've purchased an additional $4 million of stock under a repurchase authorization. We now have $11 million remaining under our current authorization. Given what we know to be the quality of our earnings, it's our belief that our equity is highly undervalued. As such, we intend to continue to allocate a portion of our available capital to the repurchase of our common stock until such time as we feel value has been rebalanced. Turning to slide nine, backlog grew more than 30% during 2024 to just under $400 million at year end. This is a $20 million increase from Q3. Bruce Cotter, Around 70% of the increase being organically generated as opposed to acquired new orders have started the year strong stronger than usual at over $100 million so far this quarter, giving us reason to expect continued backlog growth throughout 2025 now going to turn the call back over to Gary.