Anthony Colucci
Analyst · B. Riley
Thank you, Ryan. Good evening, everyone, and thank you for listening in today and for your continued interest in Alta. Like Ryan, I want to first thank all of Alta's employees and their families as their efforts, understanding and professionalism have been an inspiration to myself and the senior leadership team during the past few months as we navigate the COVID-19 crisis together as 1 team, in line with one of our guiding principles. I also want to thank Alta's senior leadership team for their guidance, experience and support. You guys have made difficult decisions in tight windows balancing the needs of all of Alta's stakeholders, and you've done it with the proper amounts of due care, expertise and business acumen. Thank you.
My remarks today will focus on 4 areas: a brief recap of financial performance in Q1 2020 versus Q1 '19, focusing on organic figures; pro forma review of trailing 12-month financial metrics, given that the leaseback is now behind us and Flagler and Liftech are now part of the Alta story. I'll touch on our capital structure and focus on 3/31 leverage and liquidity levels. And lastly, I would like to present the impact COVID-19 has had on Alta from a financial perspective and give some insights into our financial playbook, which I've coined the MMR or Measure, Mitigate and Recover. This acronym mimics our financial management philosophy over the past 2 months.
First, financial performance in Q1, and I'll be focusing specifically on organic metrics. Overall, we believe we had a solid quarter. Revenue grew to $118 million for the quarter or 15% on an organic basis, with 2/3 of that growth coming from the CE segment. Product support was up 11% on an organic basis across the enterprise. Gross profit grew to almost $30 million for the quarter or up 8% on an organic basis. Despite that revenue growth, EBITDA on an organic basis was up just over $1 million, primarily due to the margin pressure in our legacy CE business, an increase in necessary SG&A costs related to being public and the impact COVID-19 had on our rental business in the last 2 weeks of March.
Going segment by segment, a few highlights. Our Industrial segment was up 11.6% organically with sales -- the sales in rental departments being the primary drivers of that growth. That segment saw 38% of its revenue come from the all-important, high-margin product support departments. In the Industrial business, Q1 saw stable margins in each department across the segment as the Industrial segment continues to benefit from a large and more mature field population relative to our construction business.
For Construction, in Q1, we continue to see the growth in maturation of this segment, 18.6% organic revenue growth overall with almost 30% growth in the product support departments. As opposed to the 38% of the total revenue in the Industrial segment, product support accounted for 27% of total revenue for Construction in Q1, showing its relative youth versus the industrial segment. Important to note that in Q1 of 2019, the product support mix of revenue was 24% for the segment, showing it remains on the path toward maturation. Overall, management is pleased with Q1 performance, especially given some of the organic growth figures and the headwinds that developed toward the end of the quarter.
Having discussed Q1, at this point, I'd like to turn our attention to some of our enterprise-wide pro forma numbers, which are inclusive of the acquisitions of NITCO, Flagler and Liftech, all of which impact our trailing 12-month performance metrics and assume that Alta had owned each of the companies for the entirety of the time frames noted. Specifically, we have Q1 2020 pro forma revenue of $208 million and $18.8 million in adjusted EBITDA.
Now it's important to note that the seasonality of our business suggests that approximately 20% of our fiscal year EBITDA is usually generated in Q1. Applying this factor to the $18.8 million of pro forma EBITDA will put us just around $94 million of EBITDA, assuming no growth from some of our target acquisitions. This figure would not be too far off of where we expected to be during our recent capital raise process.
Also of note, on an enterprise-wide basis, is that our segment revenue has shifted and is more heavily weighted to our Construction segment. On a pro forma basis, revenue is now 52% Construction, 48% Industrial versus 44% Construction, 46% Industrial, pre-IPO and the acquisitions of Liftech and Flagler. As the Construction segment inherently has slightly lower gross margin profile than Industrial, this revenue mix shift will impact our consolidated margin percentage trends going forward. But importantly, the added volume will certainly be additive to the nominal amount of gross profit the business is generating.
I'd like to get into the third area of my prepared remarks on the capital structure. A few key points. Our capital structure and liquidity position remains a strength for us as we navigate these current business conditions. As Ryan mentioned in his comments, we have more liquidity than we expected early on in Q1, given the larger-than-anticipated amount of stockholders that rolled into Alta's equity. As of 3/31, the company held $150 million in cash liquidity. That liquidity is driven off of a $247 million collateralized borrowing base related to our ABL revolver and a $97 million net draw of that same revolver.
Moving on to leverage, which finished the quarter at 3.1x net debt-to-trailing 12-month EBITDA and senior leverage of 1.4x debt to -- senior debt to trailing 12 months EBITDA, giving us a comfortable amount of room covenant-wise. I also want to point out for those that may not be familiar that given the recent capital raise, all of our debt maturities are long dated and nothing of significance is scheduled to mature for approximately 5 years.
Want to spend a minute on capital allocation. A few comments here. First, management halted the stock buyback program that was announced in late February, almost as soon as it started. And that buyback program has been halted until further notice. In total, the company bought back just less than $3 million of ALTG before the program was ceased.
Moving on to rental fleet and our plan there. To start, it's important to note that the impact of COVID-19 on our rental fleet utilization was different amongst our segments and geos. One size certainly did not fit all in this regard. For instance, our Florida construction rental fleet held up better than our Michigan construction rental fleet utilization wise. Having said that, our plan, as it always has been, is to target a benchmark level of utilization across our fleet, and we're paying close attention to these utilization levels. While there's no doubt that our utilization was impacted in April, we see it coming back in May as restrictions lift.
At this point, we don't have any plan to drastically reduce the fleet, but we will be prudent and mindful of our utilization statistics as we constantly monitor our fleet and size it appropriately given business conditions. Also, I wanted to highlight that our fleet is relatively youthful, just about 40 months old on average. And we have room to age our fleet without investing in CapEx in the short run.
For the last portion of my prepared remarks, I'd like to present the impact COVID-19 has had on Alta from a revenue and earnings perspective. I should note there are some slides in our presentation, which was just released prior to our call that presents the impact of COVID-19 in greater detail than what I will get into verbally here today. I encourage everybody on today's call to review our presentation and the COVID-19 slide specifically.
First, I'd like to point out that our geographic and market diversity have acted as a tailwind to our business throughout the pandemic. And to be certain, our size and that diversity makes Alta more apt to handle a situation like this versus any other time in the company's history. We are thankful for our growth.
In terms of impact, I mentioned previously on the call, my acronym MMR or Measure, Mitigate and Recover. First, I'd like to focus on the measure portion of that acronym. The measure that management has been focused on daily is the demand for labor hours of our skilled technicians. This is a metric that we believe gives us real-time data on business activity levels in our various geographies and segments.
In the middle of March, starting with the automotive shutdown in Southeast Michigan, we incurred what was effectively an immediate 25% to 30% reduction in demand for labor hours across our service operation. A few items of note: one, we believe we found a floor on this metric in mid-April. Two, we believe we have been seeing upticks from that floor on this metric as May has gone along.
Now for the second M in the acronym, Mitigation. As Ryan mentioned, management has taken measures to offset what we believe to be a short-term lack of demand for our skilled labor in segments of our rental fleet. First, it's times like these where the dealership model shows its strength. Specifically, over 2/3 of Alta's normal cash costs are variable, allowing for natural cost relief in the sales and parts departments. Second, Alta's management team's expertise and experience in navigating a downturn led to quick reactions to the lack of demand by reducing the supply of labor, as Ryan has suggested on a temporary basis, as difficult as that decision may be. This quick decision-making allowed for Alta to hold labor utilization at benchmark levels. For those that are unfamiliar, labor utilization is defined as our technicians billable hours divided by the total supply of technician billable hours -- or technician labor hours.
In holding labor utilization, I can't emphasize enough how valuable leadership and experience in making these difficult decisions have helped us in the past 2 months. So what does it all mean in terms of impact? From an illustrative perspective, in an average month, setting aside seasonality and based on our trailing 12-month EBITDA of $93 million, Alta would average approximately $70 million in revenue and $7.8 million in EBITDA on a monthly basis. Given the departmental revenue impacts we observed in April, our internal modeling suggests that an unmitigated or worst-case scenario would reduce that $7.8 million of EBITDA to $2.4 million, taking EBITDA margin down to 4.1%.
We've also internally modeled out what we believe to be a best-case scenario, where the revenue impact would be offset by a 100% variable cost structure. In this scenario, EBITDA would drop from $7.8 million to $6.6 million of EBITDA.
Now having laid out the best and worst-case scenarios for this illustrative month and based on what we know as of now, we believe our mitigation efforts will help us to retrace approximately half of the gap between the best and worst-case scenarios or roughly $4.5 million in EBITDA in this worst-case downside scenario.
Lastly, as it relates to COVID-19 and its impact, I want to focus on the last letter of the acronym, Recovery. As I mentioned earlier, we believe we saw a bottom in mid-April. And since then, as industries and geographies started to open up, we have seen upticks in our labor hour metrics and rental utilization. It's early yet, but we've seen an approximately 20% to 25% retracement since mid-April on these key metrics and have started calling our skilled labor force back to work.
Last point. We took great care in doing what we could to make our cost measures and in particular, a reduction in workforce field as temporary as possible by doing things such as keeping health benefits in place for furloughed employees, with the seminal idea that we weren't saying goodbye to our valued colleagues, but we're saying, "See you soon." And from what we can see, barring no setbacks soon appears to be just around the corner.
Thank you, everyone, for your attention. I look forward to further discussion down the road. And at this point, I will open the call back to the operator for questions and answers. Thank you.