Ameresco, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Amoresco Incorporated third quarter 2023 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question at that time, please press star 1-1 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Mrs. Layla Dillon, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Communications. Ms. Dillon, you may begin.

Thank you, Howard, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for today's call. Joining me here are George Sakolaris, Amoresco's Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer. Doran Hull, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. And Mark Chiplock, Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer. Before I turn the call over to George, I would like to make a brief statement regarding forward-looking remarks. Today's earnings materials contain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our expectations. All forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to today's earnings materials, the Safe Harbor language on slide two, and our SEC filings for a discussion of the major risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ from those in our forward-looking statements. In addition, we use several non-GAAP measures when presenting our financial results. We have included the reconciliations to these measures in our supplemental financial information. I will now turn the call over to George. George?

Thank you, Leila, and good afternoon, everyone. We ended the quarter with a record total project backlog of $3.7 billion, which was up 14% sequentially and 41% versus last year. We added an impressive $700 million in new project awards during the quarter, bringing our year-to-day awards of $1.7 billion, more than double last year's level. And we anticipate that our new awards will continue to grow given the 35% increase in proposal activity as compared to last year's levels. This backlog together with our energy asset and operation remainder visibility, gives us over $7.2 billion in total multi-year visibility of profitable revenue, supporting our confidence in MRS Corp's long-term growth. We did, however, face a number of industry-wide and company-specific challenges, which impacted our third quarter results. We are very disappointed. We are pleased with the progress we made in building our long-term business momentum. We also added over 50 megawatts of assets in development in Q3, ending the quarter with almost 600 megawatts of assets in development and construction. This is a 30% increase from the 460 megawatts at the end of last year. While our long-term prospects have never been better, I did want to comment on some of the recent industry challenges. In our project business, we are seeing longer cycles when converting our awarded projects into contracted backlog. These contracts are being delayed, and some customers are taking longer to proceed with the actual implementation of project work. It's important to note that we have not experienced any cancellations just a lengthening of the same sales cycle in moving awards to contracts and like others in the industry we also continue to face supply chain delays on certain components as well as tightness in the labor market our energy asset business has been challenged by both downtime at some of our biogas plants, as well as delays in the development and construction of some of our assets, especially our larger, more complicated plants such as RNG. While assets always incur downtime, the levels we have faced over the last few quarters have been considerably greater than budgeted. driven by several factors out of our control, including adverse weather conditions and utility interruptions. The asset construction timetables have stretched as a result of industry-wide component labor shortages, as well as administrative bottlenecks. Again, while these delays are frustrating, it's important to keep in mind that all of these profitable assets will be built It's just taking longer than originally anticipated. As the company continues to grow, we are optimizing the operational structure at MRS Code to bring more uniformity and scalability across all of our geographies and business units. We are making these changes to increase our ability to react to changing market conditions more quickly and to drive increased corporate efficiency. And with our tremendous project backlog, we have increased our focus on project execution and cash flow generation. Further, in light of the continued industry challenges impacting conversion times and execution, we are revisiting some of our assumptions around guidance. Doran will provide more details on the numbers during his financial review. However, even with these challenges, We couldn't be more optimistic about our future. MRSCO is highly profitable, and we continue to expect substantial growth in 2024 and beyond. I will now turn the call over to Doran to comment on our financial performance and outlook. Doran? Thank you, George, and good afternoon, everyone.