Joseph Cutillo
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, Jennifer. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today’s call. I would like to start off by saying, wow, what a great finish to a truly amazing and transformational year for Sterling, its employees and its shareholders. The fourth quarter capped off one of the – our best years in recent history. The continued outstanding performance of Sterling's core businesses, combined with the record performance of our recent acquisition, Tealstone, enabled us, for the first time since 2010, to be profitable in the fourth quarter. Compared to the fourth quarter prior year, our revenue was up 51%. Our gross profit was up 278%, and our net income was up 149%. These results are truly amazing, and I'd like to take a second to thank the 1700-plus Sterling employees out there for the great job they are doing and ask them to keep up the good work. As I said earlier, 2017 was truly a transformational year for the Company. In addition to the great financial performance, which I'll talk about shortly, we made significant progress making our jobsite safer for our employees and customers. In 2017, we reduced both lost time and reportable incidents by over 10%. We continued to add talent as we built out the rest of our management team. We refinanced the Company and made a game-changing acquisition. We remain disciplined at the bid table and continue to improve our execution. Our 2017 jobs, on average, performed $900,000 above the estimated margin compared to our 2016 jobs, which performed at $6.3 million below our estimated margins. All this happened while we were distracted by Hurricanes, Wildfires and Mudslides. In addition, we were relisted on the Russell 2000 Index, increased our average daily share volume by over 200% and outperformed both our peers and the S&P 500. For the full year 2017, our revenue was up 39% or $268 million, our gross profit grew by 111%, our net income increased by 226% or $21 million. In addition, our cash balance ended north of $84 million. We exceeded our original guidance and approximated the midpoint of our revised guidance. Our backlog remained relatively flat. However, our backlog at the end of 2017 as $115 million less of shared joint-venture revenue does not include any Tealstone residential backlog and has a gross margin 200 basis points higher from the prior year. We continue to make significant progress towards diversifying our customer base and ended the year with approximately 30% of our backlog in non-heavy highway. Our core markets remain robust, and we have positioned the Company for an outstanding 2018. For full-year 2018, we will grow our total revenues to over $1 billion and we will more than double our net income to be between $23 million and $26 million. With that, I would like to turn it over to Ron to discuss our fourth quarter, full-year and 2018 guidance in more detail. Ron?