Mr. Wells: To take a step further back, I'll give you a touch of background about our firm because I think that helps put our view of the world, and how my coverage is structured, into a little bit more context. We are a boutique sell-side research firm; we came out of the traditional investment banking world. But for us, it was really a market call on where we feel like sell-side research is going. You are starting to see a bifurcation in the market, where analysts are either making the choice to go to the larger firms, such as Goldman Sachs, or Morgan Stanley or a JPMorgan - coverage teams with thousands of stocks under coverage worldwide, a fully kind of diversified banking presence, capital markets, trading and the rest - or you see small, niche-focused-type firms.
It's analogous, in our view, to what you saw in the accounting profession. At one point, there was the "Big Eight" accounting firms, and then it was the "Big Four." And you continue to see them big getting bigger and the small or middle-sized firms getting squeezed. For us, this business has been a call on where we felt like there was the most opportunity to add value from a research perspective. And so we started the business with a niche focus on the construction and infrastructure market. My coverage is structured around the equipment value chain, so I cover four of the OEMs - Caterpillar, Astec, Terex and Manitowoc - and three of the rental names, including RSC Holdings, United Rentals, H&E Equipment Services and then Ritchie Bros. on the auction side. And then we have another analyst, the firm's namesake, Kathryn Thompson, and she covers the basic materials space. So it's going to be Martin Marietta, Vulcan Materials, the aggregate cement, concrete, wallboard, roofing products group.
Our product is very much focused on on-the-ground, in-the-market-channel work, so we spend a lot of time at industry shows. We spend a lot of time making private company contacts. We strive to talk to the one or two of the largest private competitors for our public peers. It's constantly a work in progress, but we find that when you can take the combination of the feedback out of the public sphere with the feedback, both from the private competitors and then the folks associated in the value chain, it gives a much better perspective, in our view, of what's going on in the market. We think about the world with three main buckets for construction: residential, non-residential and public construction. And I would say we spend the majority of our time talking and trying to understand the nonresidential public markets. We thought there was an opportunity to add value on the non-res and public side.
We spend a lot of time in D.C., doing a lot of policy-related work, just given the fact that the public construction and the highway bill is a significant component of that market. For some of Kathryn's names, 60% to 100% of the revenues are tied to that public construction space, so understanding those trends is extremely important. And so we have developed good contacts in the House and Senate, in the Environment and Public Works Committee, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Appropriations. So we can really understand how Washington is approaching the issue, funding sources, funding levels, those kinds of dynamics, which ultimately play down the value chain as those dollars begin to be put out into the market. We even have developed a network of contacts down to the state level.
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