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spk00: Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Heritage Crystal Clean Incorporated third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time all callers microphones are muted and you will have an opportunity at the end of the presentation to ask questions. Instructions will be provided at that time for you to queue up your question. We ask that all callers limit themselves to one or two questions. Some of the comments we will make today are forward looking. Generally, the words aim, anticipate, believe, could, estimate, expect, intend, may, plan, project, should, will be, will continue, will likely result, would, and similar expressions identify forward looking statements. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include a variety of factors, some of which are beyond our control. These forward-looking statements speak as of today and you should not rely on them as representing our views in the future. We undertake no obligation to update these statements after this call. Please refer to our SEC filings including our annual report on Form 10-K as well as our earnings release posted on our website for a more detailed description of the risk factors that may affect our results. Copies of these documents may be obtained from the SEC or by visiting the investor relations section of our website. Also, please note that certain financial measures we may use on this call such as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or EBITDA, and adjusted EBITDA, are non-GAAP measures. Please see our website for reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP. For more information about our company, please visit our website at www.crystal-clean.com. With us today from the company, are the President and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Brian Riccato, and the Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Mark DeVita. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Brian Riccato.
spk08: Please go ahead, sir.
spk01: Thank you, Brent. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. On behalf of the entire Crystal Clean team, we're very happy to report our record third quarter earnings yesterday, driven by outstanding performances in both business segments. On a total company basis, we performed well during the quarter, exceeding our budget from a revenue, net income, and EBITDA standpoint. Mark will provide additional detail, but total third quarter revenue exceeded expectations at $172.2 million, which helped produce a record adjusted EBITDA of $43.5 million, which was up 37% compared to EBITDA in the third quarter of 2021. Now I'd like to discuss the results in both of our reporting segments. Let's start with the oil business segment. During the third quarter of fiscal 2022, oil business revenue was a record high for a 12-week quarter at $65.5 million, an increase of $14.7 million, or 28.9%, compared to $50.8 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2021. The increase in revenue was mainly due to an increase in our base oil net back of $1.57 per gallon compared to the third quarter of 2021. Oil business segment operating margin decreased slightly to 40.6% in the third quarter of fiscal 2022, compared to a record high of 42.8% in the third quarter of fiscal 2021. The lower operating margin compared to the third quarter of 2021 was mainly due to an increase in transportation-related expenses, increased downtime at the re-refinery, and other inflationary pressures across the segment, which offset an improvement in the spread between the net back on our base oil sales and the price paid or charged to our customers for the removal of their used oil. From an operations perspective, we incurred more downtime at the re-refinery during the quarter compared to the third quarter of last year. This led to a decrease in production of approximately 2 million gallons of base oil compared to the third quarter last year. Despite some challenges, we continued to operate the re-refinery in a safe manner as we extended our record of having no recordable injuries during the past seven consecutive years. Let's now move on to the environmental services segment. As you're aware, we closed the acquisition of Patriot Environmental in the second half of the third quarter. We're very enthusiastic about the employees we've added from Patriot, and we're excited to welcome them to the Crystal Clean team. We continue to have high hopes for the performance of the legacy Patriot business and platform it provides us to grow our industrial and field services business in the central and eastern U.S., The results for the Patriot business are included in our environmental services segment. In the environmental services segment, revenue for the third quarter of 2022 was $106.7 million compared to $72.3 million for the same quarter of 2021. This represents a record high compared to all previous quarters and an increase of $34.3 million or 47.5%. The increase in revenue was due to the increase in demand for our services compared to the prior year quarter and by revenue from acquisitions made during the second half of 2021, as well as the recent Patriot acquisition. Excluding the Patriot acquisition, third quarter revenue grew by 35.3% as we experienced revenue increases across all service lines in the segment when compared to the third quarter of 2021. Environmental services profit before corporate selling general and administrative expenses was $24.8 million, or 23.2% of revenue, compared to $17.3 million, or 23.9% of revenue in the year-ago quarter. The decline in operating margin percentage was mainly driven by higher transportation costs, costs for extraordinarily high inflation and increased rental costs, primarily for rolling stock. The end disposal markets remain in an oversupplied position, and we expect the condition will not improve until mid-July. Now I would like to look forward and discuss our outlook for the future. In our environmental services segment, the third quarter produced a great result from a revenue perspective. We generated double-digit organic revenue growth on a year-over-year basis for the sixth straight quarter. Assuming the overall U.S. economy remains steady, we expect to continue to achieve double-digit revenue growth during the fourth quarter and the legacy crystal clean business. As we move deeper into fiscal 2023, barring a recession, we expect organic revenue growth to moderate our legacy crystal clean business and eventually get back to high single digits. From an operating margin standpoint, we continue to deal with inflationary pressure for many inputs to our service, compared to the prior years, such as third-party waste disposal, transportation, fuel, containers, and other items. Given that we do not own and operate disposal assets in certain parts of the country or for certain types of waste, we continue to experience increased costs and surcharges from many of our disposal vendors. We are working hard to counteract the negative impacts of these items by internalizing more industrial, non-hazardous waste processing. While fuel costs have come off their recent highs from earlier in the year, costs remain stubbornly elevated. We are continuing to monitor the impact inflationary factors are having on our margins, and at this point we expect our operating margin during the fourth quarter to be similar to our third quarter performance. We still believe we can get our operating margin in the environmental services segment back up to the 27% level once inflationary and supply chain conditions subside. From an oil business segment perspective, we have already seen base oil prices soften during the early part of the fourth quarter. Specifically, spot prices for the type of Group 2 base oil we sell are down almost 60 cents per gallon compared to the average during the third quarter. This is partially the result of softening demand. As we get closer to the end of the fourth quarter and into the first quarter of 2023, we expect base oil prices to stay lower compared to the past couple of quarters. On the used oil feedstock side of the business, we have very recently begun to see a slight decline in pay for oil with a dip in the price of crude oil. However, given the recent increase in the price of crude and the typical lag between when the price of crude oil changes and when we're able to decrease our pay for oil, we're expecting pay for oil to be relatively flat during Q4. From a longer-term perspective, we expect to continue to acquire used oil feedstock at a much lower cost relative to crude oil price, as we did for the first three quarters of this year compared to before the IMO 2020 regulation went into effect. We also expect our operating costs and our re-refined rate to remain elevated on a year-over-year basis due to the higher cost of items such as natural gas, hydrogen, nitrogen, and caustic materials. As planned, we are having our longest shutdown of the year along with another shorter planned outage during Q4. These shutdowns should total approximately 15 days. From a profitability perspective, due to all the factors previously mentioned, we expect our old business operating margin to be in the 20% range for the fourth quarter. The outlook I just provided assumes the economy does not fall under recession. Should these assumptions not hold true, this could negatively impact our outlook. Before I turn the call over to Mark, I would like to provide an update on our PFAS strategy. We recently finalized an exclusivity agreement with two of our partners to utilize their foam fractionation technology to remove and concentrate PFAS from high-volume leachate and groundwater streams. The concentrated PFAS waste can then be processed by Patel's Annihilator Unit, which uses heat and pressure to destroy the PFAS in the concentrated waste stream. The combination of these technologies will allow us to provide a turnkey, economically viable solution to treat large-volume PFAS-contaminated wastewater streams. This foam fractionation technology is already being used successfully in Europe, and we're currently operating a unit at our Michigan wastewater plant to successfully treat landfill leachate. With that, Mark will take us through our third quarter financial results. Thanks, Brian.
spk06: I want to wish everyone a great morning. It's a pleasure to be with you today. In the third quarter of 2022, we generated $172.2 million of revenue compared to $123.2 million in the same quarter of 2021, an increase of $49 million, or 39.8%. The increase in revenue was mainly driven by higher base oil selling prices, higher demand for our products and services, and to a lesser extent, by revenue from acquisitions. Net income was a record high, $23.2 million. or 98 cents per diluted share for the third quarter of 2022. This compares the net income of 18.5 million or 79 cents per diluted share in the year earlier quarter, which represents a diluted earnings per share increase of 24.1% compared to the third quarter of 2021. I'd like to begin our segment results discussion with our oil business segment. Oil business segment third quarter revenues of 65.5 million were a record high for a 12-week quarter and represent an increase of 14.7 million or 28.9% compared to the third quarter fiscal 2021. As Brian mentioned, the increase in net back, which is our sales price net of freight charges, was the catalyst for higher revenue. On a sequential basis, our base oil net back increased by 68 cents per gallon compared to the second quarter of 2022. The 10.3 million gallons of base oil sold during the quarter represents a decrease of approximately 0.9 million gallons compared to the third quarter of 2021. The decrease in sales was primarily due to lower base oil production in the third quarter compared to the third quarter of last year. From a used oil collection perspective, our route truck loading efficiency increased by 2.2% in the third quarter of 2022 compared to the third quarter of 2021. This increase was achieved in spite of the fact that we increased the number of used oil collection sales and service representatives by approximately 11% during the quarter compared to the third quarter of 2021. The increased efficiency combined with more reps led to a 14% increase in internally collected used oil volume during the quarter compared to the third quarter last year. The increase between our net pay for oil during the third quarter of fiscal 2021 compared to the third quarter of fiscal 2022, was 30 cents per gallon. Sequentially, our pay for oil increased by 9 cents per gallon from the second quarter of 2022 to the third quarter of 2022. The cost of third-party used oil feedstock also increased during the quarter by 35 cents per gallon compared to the third quarter of 2021 on relatively flat volume. However, on a sequential basis, the cost of third-party feedstock decreased by 6 cents per gallon. This decrease was made possible by the increase in internally used oil collection volume I mentioned earlier. As previously mentioned, our re-refinery experienced more downtime than expected during this past quarter, and as a result, produced base oil at a rate of 89% of our nameplate capacity, or 10.5 million gallons. Lower production volume, along with higher hydrogen, natural gas, and catalyst costs led to an increase in our operating costs at every refinery of approximately 51% on a per gallon basis compared to the third quarter of last year. From a profitability standpoint, oil business segment profit before corporate SG&A expense increased by 4.8 million, or 22.2%, to 26.6 million, which represents an all-time record. The operating margin was 40.6% in the third quarter of 2022, compared to 42.8% in the third quarter of fiscal 2021. The decrease in operating margin percentage was mainly due to higher transportation, maintenance, and labor expenses, as well as the higher operating costs at the re-refinery I mentioned earlier. These higher costs offset an improvement in the spread between our base oil net back and our average paper oil. This spread increased by $1.26 per gallon compared to the third quarter of 2021, It was up by 59 cents per gallon compared to the second quarter of 2022. Now let's discuss the environmental services segment results. Environmental services segment reported revenue of $106.7 million, an increase of $34.3 million or 47.5% compared to the year-ago quarter. The 47.5% increase in revenue was mainly due to an increase in demand for services compared to the prior year quarter, and by revenue from acquisitions. Revenue from acquisitions closed during the second half of fiscal 2021 accounted for 5.5% of the year-over-year growth during the third quarter of fiscal 2022. Revenue from the Patriot acquisition during the third quarter was $13 million, which represents 12.2% of the revenue growth for the segment compared to the third quarter of fiscal 2021. Overall organic revenue from the third quarter last year to the third quarter this year increased by 29.8%. The revenue increase from organic growth was driven by improvement in both price and volume in all service lines. Environmental services profit before corporate selling general and administrative expenses was a 12-week quarter record of 24.8 million or 23.2% of revenue. In addition to the factors Brian mentioned earlier, Operating margin percentage was also negatively impacted by higher costs for rolling stock repairs. Our overall corporate SG&A expense of $18.6 million represents an increase of $4.2 million, or 29.4%, compared to the year-ago quarter, driven by an increase in salaries and benefits, as well as amortization of intangibles from acquisitions made during the second half of 2021. As a percentage of revenue, corporate SG&A expense during the third quarter decreased to 10.8% compared to 11.7% during the third quarter last year. EBITDA of $41.3 million was an all-time record and up 34.9% compared to $30.6 million in the year-ago quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA of $43.5 million in the third quarter was also an all-time record. The company's effective income tax rate for the third quarter of fiscal 2022 was 27.8% compared to 25.1% in the third quarter of fiscal 2021. The rate increase is principally attributable to the increased impact of certain non-deductible, non-recurring expenses. Looking at the balance sheet, we had a net decrease of $48 million in cash during the third quarter of fiscal 2022. which resulted in a balance of $25.7 million of cash on hand at the end of the quarter. The main driver of the decrease is the funding of the Patriot acquisition. Our primary sources of liquidity for the quarter were cash flows from operations and funds available to borrow under our revolving bank credit facility. We initially borrowed $115 million on our revolving loan to fund the Patriot acquisition, and as of the end of the third quarter, we had $100 million outstanding under this loan. As of today, we have $90 million outstanding on our revolving loan. During the third quarter, we generated $19.2 million in cash flow from operations and $11 million of free cash flow. As we work to integrate Patriot into our business, at this point, we are on track to realize the cost synergies we projected and we previously spoke about. As we continue to pay down our debt, we are also looking for additional acquisition opportunities to drive further inorganic growth for the future, From a financial reporting perspective, I want to inform our investors and analysts that as of January 1st, 2023, we will begin reporting our financial results on a calendar quarter basis. To recap, we are excited with the strong top line growth we're generating in our environmental services segment, and we're pleased but not yet satisfied with the operating margin we were able to generate in the ES segment during the third quarter. While inflationary challenges are also impacting the oil business segment, we remain focused on spread management and improving the operating efficiency at the re-refinery during the remainder of the year. This concludes our prepared remarks. I will now turn control of the call over to the operator to take your questions.
spk00: At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, Again, press star one. Your first question comes from the line of Jim Ricutti with Needham & Company. Your line is open.
spk04: Thank you. Good morning. Brian, I wanted to go back to the comment you made about your expectations for margins, operating margins in the oil business for Q4, which are below, I guess, what you were thinking about exiting Q2 in the last call. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what some of the contributing factors might be to that.
spk01: Yeah, the largest contributing factor is the fact that we have roughly 15 days scheduled in the quarter to do maintenance work at the re-refinery. And the second component of the... margin projections are related to base oil pricing. And obviously with crude oil pricing going up a little bit in the fourth quarter, we don't expect to see much of a change. As you heard in our prepared remarks, the used motor oil will be relatively flat quarter over quarter from a pricing standpoint. But all in all, it's still going to be a good quarter for us in that oil.
spk06: Yeah, I mean, it is below.
spk08: It's not a ton below where we set, but
spk04: I think Brian covered it. Got it. And then just a follow-up question, if I may. I'm sorry, go ahead, if I didn't mean to interrupt.
spk01: No, just a production follow-up. We're kind of in the range of 13.5 to 14 million gallons projected for Q4.
spk04: Got it. Thank you. And just on the follow-up question, just looking at the ES business, it looks like you're – encouraged so far with Patriot. And congratulations, by the way, on paying down as much of the debt as you have. But I'm wondering how we might think about pricing in the broader ES business. Have you gotten the full benefit of the price increases that you put through at the end of Q2? And what are you considering as you look at the combined ES business from a pricing standpoint? Yeah, we're...
spk06: We're very happy with the pricing we've achieved in all but one of the lines of business. We have double-digit price increases, part of the story of the overall revenue increase. Volume increases is a big part in our wastewater vacuum business. But in parts cleaning, containerized waste, the biggest part, they're close to half and half, but the biggest part is actually price. So we believe that we've received that benefit. There are some systems improvements we're going to put in place, which may get us a tiny more, but then it really gets into how we think about price going forward because I think most of what, if not all of what we're going to get from those previous increases is already in. And maybe, Brian, you can speak to what we're thinking about going forward for the rest of the year for price and as we head into 23.
spk01: Yeah, given our prepared remark comments about the third-party disposal market, we are certainly at an oversupply position for the sites that are processing industrial waste. So we fully expect to see some additional price increases from our vendors that we're shipping our industrial hazardous waste to. So we're certainly going to consider another price increase as we move into the fourth quarter. We haven't decided yet on how broad that will be, but we will have another price increase before the end of the year.
spk08: Got it. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thanks.
spk00: Your next question is from the line of Kevin Steinke with Barrington Research. Your line is open. Hey, Kevin.
spk07: Hey, Kevin. Hey, good morning. When we think about your expectation of kind of a normalization of organic growth in the environmental services segment, to the high single digits, kind of where it was more historically as you move into 2023. I mean, should we just think about that as less pricing benefits driving that, you know, more difficult comps or any other factors you might highlight there?
spk01: You know, I think from a color standpoint, you had a so much pent-up demand in the industrial waste market that it led to outsized growth. For those of us that could execute on picking up waste streams out in the fields, we were able to capture some market share over the course of the last 18 months, which led to our outsized growth. We expect that to continue as we move into Q4 and probably into Q1 until the disposal markets begin to clean themselves up. Obviously, we intend to hang on to those customers because we're going to service the heck out of them. But we do expect growth to moderate back to a more normalized level. And we are forecasting manufacturing to slow down with a slowdown in the overall economic conditions. So that's why we're projecting later in the year that we'll begin to see growth moderate. Well, and I think you also hit on it.
spk06: Obviously, the primary thing is what Brian mentioned, but you're darn right about harder comps. We've been thrilled with what we've been doing. But, you know, almost 30% organic this past quarter is phenomenal. And, you know, we were in the upper 20s last quarter and lower 20s the quarter before that. So, you know, as you get into that second half of next year, it's no cakewalk.
spk01: Yeah, we are excited about, you know, growth opportunities in some of our emerging businesses. I talked about PFAS. We have the battery JV that we think will begin to gain some traction next year as more and more People convert to EV vehicles. So we're pretty excited about our growth prospects as we look out into next year. And we will pull off some additional tuck-ins.
spk08: We're not going to stop.
spk07: Okay, great. That's good commentary. Just a couple more, if I could, here. You mentioned more downtime, I think, than planned for the re-refinery and the third quarter. Could you just dig into that a little bit more in terms of the factors that were behind that?
spk01: Yeah, nothing really major. I mean, we had our normal pigging cycle. We found some thin metal. We did some work on a heater, which extended the turnaround by a couple of days. Obviously, demand has slowed, so as you're making a lot of base oil, you've got to move it out. You've got to You guys have read about the issues with some of the additives in the base oil market, which slowed down some of our customer orders. So we had to slow down production a little bit because we don't have a very large tank farm system at the re-refinery. That's something we're going to look at down the road to add some additional storage capabilities. So nothing major, just a few issues that cost us some production. You've got the rail car issues, too.
spk06: And another challenge that, again, didn't really impact it, or we would have called it out more strongly, but in the business, we've been on allocation on hydrogen, too. So if we hadn't had some of the other issues, we might have been talking about that. Correct. It didn't impact us, but it would have. Right. So that's a specter that, assuming that gets resolved, we're not going to have that headwind anymore, but... When that pops up, that's always a challenge.
spk01: If you guys remember last year, we had record production. I think it was a little bit north of 50. We're still going to be in the 47 to 48 million gallons for the year. We're just fresh off a board meeting, and we're still contemplating expanding our plant, at least the front-end component of our plant. We have additional hydro-treating capacity at the plant.
spk08: We'll see how the market develops over the next year.
spk07: all right great and then um just one last one in terms of um the patriot environmental acquisition early on here uh can you talk about i guess how quickly you can get that uh ways to pass that they brought to you integrated and um um you know starting to benefit you in terms of uh not having to use third parties as much i i don't know if it's you know, a meaningful chunk there in terms of waste capacity, but, you know, maybe just how that can help you going forward and also your efforts to internalize more just organically.
spk01: Yeah, our efforts organically are starting to be very productive, and we're on pace right now to process 85,000 containers internally this year. That's our current run rate, and We certainly have challenged our people to get that number up. As I think I stated on the last phone call, we want to get into the mid-150s by the end of next year. Internal containers of the 275,000 containers we're processing. And obviously with Patriot, they had two CWTs. We had two CWTs in the western half of the U.S. The Patriot senior leadership team will be running our two sites. We're going to add vacuum truck capacity out in the western marketplaces to begin to feed those four facilities. We've got the PFAS opportunity out west. So not a lot of drums that are going to be shipped into the Patriot fixed facilities. We're going to expand that capacity over the next year, but that's probably more of a 2024 initiative as we get the permits modified and get ourselves set up to push drums into those sites. But that's the ultimate game plan we have. 10 active wastewater treatment plants today. Quite a few of them are taking containers, and our ultimate goal is to get them all taking containers so we can cut some of our logistics costs as well.
spk06: Based on our current activity or pre-acquisition activity, Kevin, this isn't a big piece dollar-wise, at least from a cost synergy standpoint. The real opportunity there is really kind of a revenue synergy because it's a chicken-egg. we weren't as dense and we didn't have as much business out there because we didn't have the infrastructure to support it on the wastewater vac side. So now that we do, we can go out and get the business and be more competitive. And therein lies the benefit from the deal as opposed to, oh, we got all this water already that we're going to internalize in the western part of the U.S.
spk07: Okay, understood. Thanks for taking the questions.
spk08: No, thank you.
spk00: Your next question is from the line of Brian Butler with Stiefel. Your line is open.
spk10: Come on, guys.
spk00: Thank you.
spk10: Thank you. I guess let's start on – I just want to go back to the used oil piece of the business. And when you think about those margins kind of being more normalized in the fourth quarter in the 20% range, is that the right place that you guys are trying to manage that business to when you think about your ability to price or to, I guess, push through surcharges on the feedstock? Or, you know, how should we think about that in a more normalized, you know, spread environment on what you can and can't manage from a margin perspective there?
spk01: Yeah, Brian, I think we've talked about, you know, mid-20s as a more normalized operating margin. You know, the market has fairly long used Motorola today. I mean, I'm We've had issues, as you may recall years ago, making sure we had enough feedstock in the winter months. Right now, we don't have that issue. The market's long. We're collecting now almost all the volume we need to feed the re-refinery. So we're confident that as crude oil pricing moderates a bit, it's so volatile right now that we can drive the price of used motor oil down based on the fact that We're seeing long conditions in used motor oil, so we think we'll get our spread back as we begin to move into next year, you know, off the backs of used motor oil as base oil pricing moderates, which it has. I mean, as we talked about in our opening remarks, down 60 cents quarter over quarter, and we think we can get a lot of that back from used motor oil, but we're targeting, you know, the mid-20 range for the business and more normal conditions.
spk08: Okay, that's helpful.
spk10: When you look at that single-digit growth on environmental services, kind of in a non-recession environment, maybe we could talk a little bit, what kind of sensitivity do you think is there versus the past? I mean, obviously the business is very different than from 2009, but you guys had a lot of headwind in 2009 when we saw a recession. How should investors think about this sensitivity if we are in a a recessionary environment? I mean, is this, you know, you can see double-digit declines in revenues in the environmental services business, or is this really kind of matured as a business and it's going to be much less than that?
spk06: Well, you've done your homework because that, as I'm sure you know, but for the rest of the people on the call, that's roughly what we experienced from the Great Recession, and if it's aptly named, Who knows if the next one, if it's on top of us already or imminent, is going to be that deep. But I think your question is kind of leading to where I want to go, which is this is a different business, especially from the environmental services side. We're much more diversified. The Patriot acquisition even accentuates that as far as customer base. I mean, generally, we're pretty diversified anyway, but we're even less industry-centric now. We have... even more exposure to governmental or other entities that are a lot of times less affected because they have their appropriations or whatnot. So I think that is really the floor scenario barring a really deep, deep recession that we should actually trend a little better than what we did in that even if it's a moderate recession than what we had in 2009 as far as lack of growth or any type of downturn. from the ES side of the business.
spk08: Okay, that's helpful.
spk10: And then one last one, if I can sneak it in. Just on the acquisitions and your thoughts going forward, maybe just give a little color on, I guess, what does that environment look like now from availability and kind of a cost perspective of, you know, is there attractive opportunities out there? And do you become more aggressive if there is a downturn and, you know, the market for everything comes down a little bit?
spk01: Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right, which is why we are certainly of the belief that we'll get another deal done next year. You know, we still have geographic holes relative to field service and industrial services. We like southeast. We like the Gulf Coast. So we're going to be aggressive in trying to fill those holes. We have 100,000 customers currently, of which they have a lot of project work. to go down this path of internalizing those activities and growing that piece of our business. We've very successfully grown the field services business. All of the work has been subbed out to third parties. We now have the capabilities out west to internalize that activity and continue to grow it. We're going to do the same in these other market places. It is going to take very difficult to find personnel, so we'll have to do it with tuck-in acquisitions to build the base of the business and then begin recruiting off the base.
spk08: Okay, great. Thank you very much for taking my question.
spk00: Yeah, thank you. Your next question is from the line of Michael Hoffman with Stiefel. Your line is open.
spk03: Hi. Thank you for taking a follow-on from Stiefel. So the questions I have for you are broader. You had a record quarter. You have a diversity of a business mix. which proves that even when there's pluses and minuses, you can deliver record results. I get your prudence in giving all of the sort of things that we're tailing, but are you actually seeing any weakness? Are you actually experiencing any of that in the context of the customer base?
spk01: We're not seeing any weakness currently, Michael. We're unbelievably busy to the point where we're struggling to get the work done, driven by the fact that, as you know, the industry, as well as you do, third-party disposal sites are still struggling to staff up you know run seven days a week you know plant upsets as you know in our industry we've had incineration issues which is backed up that waste stream which we're having to leave out the field which is impacting our revenue so we haven't seen any of it yet which is why we're suggesting that the fourth quarter and q1 are going to look really good you know We've got to temper our expectations as we look out into the longer-term future, expecting that the market will begin to moderate a bit. But we're bullish on the next couple of quarters.
spk03: And when I think about – I know you don't give guidance, but the street didn't model in Patriot for the quarter, so it was understated. If I think of Patriot, it's $10 million a month at 15% margin, sort of tack that on. Is that the right way to think about it?
spk01: Yeah, not a bad way to look at it. You know, currently we're running a little bit more than $10 million a month. We've got a lot of good things working on the Patriot front.
spk03: Okay. So I take that, you know, for the fourth quarter, add in that factor where the street is at 136. Street numbers would come in a little bit on the base of the original legacy, but because of what you're saying in used oil, the environmental solutions would be flat sequentially and therefore I add in Patriot and I'm up from where we are and then I'm up in 23 because I get nine months of Patriot or eight months of Patriot plus, unless you really think there's an economic downturn early, you're going into next year on up numbers once the 22 is revised up. Is that the right way to think about it?
spk01: That's right. And look, Michael, nobody's given us any credit for whole PFAS opportunity. Even though the regulations aren't driving it, companies are concerned about how they manage wastewater that has PFAS contamination. I do think we're at the leading edge of it and probably ahead of a lot of our competitors with our total turnkey package. I'm pretty excited about that. We certainly haven't forecasted any meaningful revenue for next year, but we've already got currently managing two landfills today, managing their leachate stream, and their PFAS contaminated with the equipment that we have under a JV agreement. We're damn excited about it. It's working well.
spk03: All right. If I could squeeze then one last one in. I mean, my comment about PFAS is I'm not sure the market gives credit until EPA issues its final rules. So you've got a year, year and a half to wait for that. But, you know, the reality is there, and you've got a product and a technology. But the bigger message is you can continue to de-lever through your own cash. You have a likelihood that you're going to be up year over year in EBITDA. And even if we do have a recession, you're still likely up just on a narrower basis. That's the way the street should think about where the stock, the fundamentals are. Yes.
spk06: And if I could add one, again, one of the things, Michael, that Brian said about, you know, you're guiding around 20% in oil for Q4. Is that the new normal?
spk00: Remember...
spk06: And this is not a new part of our cycle. We always have in one quarter, it's almost always Q4, but sometimes it's not, but usually it is. When you have that extra downtime of that extended planned shutdown, that's not going to be your peak. That's going to be, I don't know if it's trough, but it's certainly below the mid-range. So just intuitively, when you hear that, that alone, forget all the other factors of you know, the cost things that were inflationary struggles there on that side of the business or challenges, that's always, you know, that's going to be below wherever our normal is.
spk03: Yeah, I get it. You're not taking out fixed cost where you do a 15-day turnaround. You've got to carry those plus the lower production. That's right. Okay.
spk08: All right. All right. Thank you, Michael. I don't.
spk00: Your next question is from the line of Zane Karimi with DA Davidson. Your line is open.
spk08: Hey, good morning, Brian and Mark. Good morning. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you guys? Oh, we're good. Great.
spk09: Well, first off, congratulations on the closure of Patriot. It looks to be a strong business with a solid opportunity to expand the ES base you guys already have, but Now, that being said, with the integration just starting, how has the process been? Can you speak to any operational or core cultural differences? And then just to tack on, now that you have it under the brand, where do you see the most incremental opportunity? Has anything changed since last time we spoke?
spk01: No real operational integration issues. Communication level's been outstanding. We have one person that's running the legacy 16 Patriot locations. We've got a tremendous relationship with them, good operator. The operating team is excited that we have the balance sheet to support their growth opportunities. From a synergy standpoint, we did reduce some headcount. What we projected we would reduce, and we've added a bunch of rolling stock, and we'll be adding rolling stock that will help them grow the business. So no cultural negatives so far. We certainly have a lot of work to do on the back office integration. That'll take some time to get through, but operationally everything's solid, and they're running some of our legacy businesses. Communication is outstanding so far. And then in terms of growth, I think we touched on it in our prepared remarks. We love to, you know, we're not going to be a hardcore industrial cleaning business, but we love the industrial service businesses as it plays out with our, you know, 90 to 100,000 customers. They have issues that they need help with, and now we have labor and people that are very good operationally that can go in and do, you know, long-term returning activities within our generator location. So that's going to be the focus of growth.
spk09: Thank you for that. And just shifting gears a little bit, just to the ES business as a whole, you know, another strong quarter. It looked like it was driven a lot by field service and the parts cleaning containerized waste dynamic there. But can you spend a moment to explain what tailwinds or catalysts on the quarter really drove those results?
spk06: I mean, I just think it's the same thing, Zane, if you look back the last couple quarters. Really the two biggest pushes in the legacy side are the containerized waste, of course, and that was leading the way up until some of the challenges Brian mentioned earlier really started to impact us. And we are literally, not in a big way, but we're literally turning some people away for now or have been. But it's still relatively strong. But our wastewater vacuum, we're starting to get our feet under us in some of the acquisitions that we did a little more than a year ago. We did struggle early on with some of those. So it's really those two businesses, not that parts cleaning, I mean, it's been great too. Certainly much better than it was if you go back even a couple years pre-pandemic. But it's really been those two businesses. And it really gets back to having a culture and understanding rewarding our people from a compensation level that when opportunity knocks, they can take advantage of it. That is the key because we've seen that through macroeconomic issues, industry issues, different approaches by competitors, the phone is ringing more than it ever has for people calling us. We're used to, with our commissioned approach, knocking on doors and generating all of that potential market share gains by a proactive approach, but now it's been all augmented by the fact that customers, or not just customers, but generally people in the marketplace, generators, are calling us more than they have in the past because they can't get the service from their current provider. And when you layer that onto the already strong foundation of that proactive approach, the two combined give you a pretty powerful result, which we've seen in 20-plus percent organic growth. I don't know, Brian, if you see it differently. No, I absolutely agree with that.
spk09: Okay. Thank you for the color there. And if I may, one more. I'd like to revisit how you guys have been working around inflation and how you're dealing with it. In particular, looking at your ability to pass along prices to customers through a number of price increases through this year. But as you look towards 2023, how are you planning on managing further potential inflation in How do you believe customer acceptance of price increases has changed since the beginning of 2022?
spk01: Yeah, our pricing on average is up 12% to 15% on each of our segments. And we haven't had much pushback. I mean, our customers are raising prices just like we are. I mean, everybody's experiencing inflationary conditions. We have seen inflation moderate on just general commodities. over the past couple of quarters, not on transportation disposal related services. So as we talked about in our prepared remarks, we're certainly going to have to look at another price increase because we expect to see it from the end disposal companies. Fuel costs, operating costs, driver wages, all of that's continuing to be a bit of a struggle and we're still seeing inflationary conditions there. So we're going to have to raise prices again. commodities to begin to moderate as we move into 2023. We continue to try to perform as hard as we can for our customers to make sure they get their money's worth.
spk08: Thank you. Thank you.
spk00: There are no further questions at this time. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating. This concludes today's conference call.
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