Limbach (NASDAQ:LMB) Chief Executive Officer Mike McCann outlined the company’s customer focus, go-to-market evolution, and acquisition playbook during an investor discussion at ROTH Capital Partners’ 38th annual conference. The mechanical, electrical, and plumbing services provider emphasized its shift toward larger, mission-critical customers with multi-site footprints, and described how labor constraints and increasing facility complexity are changing buying behavior across its end markets.
Ideal customers: scaled, mission-critical operators
McCann said Limbach performs best with customers that have “scale,” contrasting small local customers with three or four facilities against organizations with 80 or 90 facilities. He pointed to large national healthcare operators as a representative example, describing how Limbach can approach their needs programmatically—working locally where it has geographic coverage while also helping customers plan across multi-year capital programs.
Labor constraints and complexity are reshaping demand
McCann described industry changes over the last 18 to 24 months, citing tighter availability of craft labor (including mechanical, electrical, and plumbing trades) alongside increasing technology requirements in facilities. He said customers are placing greater value on consistency and quality across multiple locations and are willing to pay more for that consistency, which he framed as an advantage for larger providers operating on a national basis.
He also said labor constraints extend beyond contractors to facility owners themselves. McCann noted that customers increasingly ask Limbach for help augmenting facility staff, and sometimes seek support in managing programs rather than only having technicians perform field work. In his view, owners’ internal capability to manage complex facilities has diminished, and customers may accept less-than-ideal staffing and rely more on outside partners over time.
Sales and organization: enabling local execution while building national accounts
McCann said organizational changes made earlier in the year reflect the company’s maturation as it shifted from general contractor relationships (GCR), which he characterized as more transactional and bid-driven, toward owner-direct relationships (ODR) in existing buildings. He said Limbach hired roughly 40 people per year over the last three years to build sales capability, and while staffing is “not fully baked,” the pace of hiring has moderated compared with prior years.
He described two sales-focused roles intended to support growth:
- Sales enablement leadership: An executive tasked with improving productivity across about 120 salespeople through process, tools, coaching, and support in closing deals.
- National accounts leadership: A role focused on expanding multi-site relationships, primarily in industrial manufacturing, healthcare, and data centers, typically building from existing local relationships rather than cold outreach.
McCann said the intent is to combine a “core local growth rate” with incremental growth from national relationships, with the two roles working together to connect enterprise-level relationships to local facilities.
How relationships grow: on-site presence, maintenance, and capital projects
McCann detailed how Limbach seeks to deepen share within existing local relationships, often by placing an on-site account manager at a facility to learn the building and identify issues proactively. He said that approach often leads to a maintenance contract or on-site staffing and can later expand into larger capital projects after the company has built credibility and assembled the operational and financial case for upgrades.
He provided an example of evaluating equipment with a high repair history and making a replacement case that includes repair avoidance, efficiency gains, and potential utility rebates. He framed the strategy as linking recurring operations spending with capital spending—an interaction he described using “CapEx and OpEx.”
McCann also said Limbach has learned over the last 18 months that some capital projects are funded at corporate headquarters rather than at the facility level, requiring the company to sell at multiple organizational levels. He said Limbach tailors messaging to different stakeholders, discussing return on invested capital and net present value with finance leaders while emphasizing uptime and value with facility managers.
On customer “stickiness,” McCann said revenue often grows out of maintenance contracts and on-site staffing, and the company tracks performance over time. He emphasized the need to “zipper” relationships from the top of an organization to the bottom to better understand buying decisions and to smooth spending patterns. As one example, he described a healthcare customer whose annual operating spend fluctuated because issues were addressed until budgets ran out, and said the customer asked Limbach to develop a more consistent multi-hospital program.
Margins, M&A priorities, and the data center opportunity
McCann discussed margin ambitions and how acquisitions affect reported results. He said Limbach has completed six deals since December 2021 and that, if those acquisitions were removed, the company’s margin would be about 28.2%. He said the company’s goal is to lift that legacy margin from roughly 28% toward 35% and eventually 40%, while noting that geographic expansion through acquisitions initially comes in at lower margins and requires improvement over time.
He attributed margin opportunity to providing “customer solutions that cannot be commoditized,” including engineered solutions, national-level design-build offerings, and “margin layering” when Limbach can both mark up an overall project and self-perform installation. He also cited an acquisition in North Carolina that provides specialized air handling equipment for “dirty air-type” environments, describing it as a model where the business can generate margin both on projects and components.
On acquisitions, McCann said targets should align with Limbach’s strategy of combining national reach with local relationships and becoming an “indispensable partner” to building owners. He outlined priorities that include expanding into additional metropolitan areas where Limbach does not yet have coverage, particularly building on its footprint in the Southeast and Midwest, and adding professional services that can accelerate penetration in vertical markets. He said the company is interested in capabilities such as commissioning and on-site engineering and is not focused on acquiring firms primarily to produce drawings, but rather teams with senior-level customer relationships.
McCann also addressed data centers, saying Limbach has worked in and around the space for roughly 10 years in the Columbus market across new builds, infrastructure, service and maintenance, and retrofit work. He said the company has been cautious about expanding beyond Columbus, but noted that customer demand increased toward the end of last year due to the volume of spending and a shortage of labor in the sector. He said Limbach is building a vertical market team to pursue opportunities beyond its local base. McCann stated that data centers represent less than 5% of current revenue, and said the company would not be building the team without seeing significant opportunity.
Finally, McCann addressed investor questions about how the owner-direct model is portrayed. He said the company is building a long-term strategy that may not always match short-term expectations and offered additional metrics, including that average owner-direct project size is about $240,000 compared with $2.7 million for GCR projects. He also said 27% of owner-direct revenue in 2025 was “quick burning,” which he noted some investors classify as recurring.
In discussing integration of a larger acquisition, Pioneer Power, McCann said the company’s approach begins with completing “phase one” integration work—systems, benefits, and accounting—followed by a “value creation” phase focused on raising margins through steps such as customer focus, contract renegotiation, and sales investment. He referenced a prior acquisition from December 2021 where margins improved from 13.4% to above 28% as an example of the company’s playbook.
About Limbach (NASDAQ:LMB)
Limbach Holdings, Inc (NASDAQ: LMB) is a U.S.-based mechanical construction firm specializing in the design, installation and maintenance of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, piping, plumbing and sheet metal fabrication. The company delivers comprehensive mechanical solutions to commercial, institutional, health care, education, government and industrial clients, drawing on its in-house engineering, prefabrication and construction management capabilities.
The company’s service offerings encompass full-scope mechanical construction, including energy system design, direct digital controls and building automation, retrofits, testing and balancing, preventive maintenance programs and emergency response services.
