Leadership Reflections... Yearend Reflections from Bruce and Dan
As we launch into 2023, we believe it is wise to pause and share some of the yearend reflections from our finance and operations leaders. See their insights below and leverage their perspectives to begin the new year with your eyes fixed on success for the future. We delivered in 2022, and we have what it takes to do it again.
From Bruce Bever, Chief Finance Officer:
In true yearend fashion, November and December is best characterized in many ways as "controlled chaos" in the finance world. It’s our last and final opportunity to finalize and maximize customer billings, which in turn maximizes revenue recognition and cash flow while also ensuring that we thoroughly recognize our liabilities/costs to appropriately match against those revenues which enable us to accurately compare financial performance with operational performance. This also ensures minimal negative financial impact in the current 2023 year for financial items related to the prior 2022 year. This all occurs while managing workloads and schedules around the holidays to ensure appropriate work life balance at a time when it means the most. The various teams involved - as usual - did a great job, and I am very proud.
The Company once again delivered our financial plan and commitments, slightly exceeding budget, in what again proved to be a very challenging year in many respects. Our business is constantly changing, growing in some areas and contracting in others. Keeping the supporting functions aligned with the current Company demands is always challenging in this environment. Growing pains are inevitable, and we are doing are best to navigate and mitigate.
In total for 2022, we exceeded our planned executed hours by 88K or 2.1% resulting in a before tax profit that exceed plan by slightly more than half a million dollars (new construct). This is quite amazing when you consider that after the third quarter, we were behind plan by 203,000 hours and $1.5M before tax profit. Our Q4 was extraordinary, exceeding the original plan by nearly 300K hours or one-third. Our ability to accommodate such large increases in volume while keeping fixed overhead costs (relatively) flat has always been and will always be a tremendous value add for our customer and shareholder.
We are still going through the motions of crunching all the data on an individual divisional basis. Preliminarily from a numbers perspective, the business is looking very healthy overall. Even where the business has contracted, our remediation plans have shown success and the downside mitigated.
Many thanks again to all the hard work and dedication this year, especially to all the operational and functional teams that worked through holidays and weekends to ensure we show our APM in the best possible light!
From Dan Reinhardt, Chief Operations Officer:
In 2022 we expected that our Company was going to return to normal operations, post pandemic. As we moved through the year, we found that the old normal was gone and the new normal was a true moving target. Our customers expressed and continue to bring new challenges and pressures; our shareholder is in the midst of unprecedented change; and we, APM, are navigating through all of it. 2022 was an intense, pressure-packed year, but it was also a year in which we delivered well from many operational aspects. We continued driving our value add through several initiatives including Project Superintendents, Live Outage, inception of No-FE, Safety Champions, Renewables, and some new Technician Programs, all while meeting the demands of the core businesses, Gas and Steam.
We are positioned well for 2023, and I believe we will be a key piece of the GE Vernova business starting in 2024. Keep your oars in the water and keep pulling as we venture to exciting waters ahead. Thank you for all you have done and will do this year to make APM great!
- Jake