Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Andy Kaplowitz - Barclays Capital.
Andy Kaplowitz - Barclays Capital
Your corporate G&A was a lot lower than I think most people thought and maybe Mike or Alan, you could go over sort of how you got there? How much of your business is variable cost and what are some of the initiatives that you undertook to get the lower or better than expected results?
Mike Steuert
Andy, it was lower than expected as I mentioned in my comments. We do expect it to increase in subsequent quarters. The first quarter is typically lower. We did initiate a number of cost reduction activities late last year and early this year that impacted the quarter. We’re certainly trying to control a lot of corporate G&A expenses, including travel and other items of overhead.
To your point, we worked over the last several years to move very strongly to a variable cost model, so that we can really adjust our overhead not only at the corporate level, but also on our business share units, based on the volume of activity that we see in the businesses.
That’s clearly benefiting us, but again the first quarter was lower. We don’t expect to track at that rate to the rest of the year, but we do expect to have some meaningful improvements in terms of the cost reductions in 2009, and that’s reflected in our guidance within $180 million to $200 million for corporate G&A.
Andy Kaplowitz - Barclays Capital
Alan, last quarter you’d given us some backlog guidance. Maybe you could update us if you can on it and then also sort of what are your customers now saying versus a couple of months ago? Are they anymore comfortable with the way the world is, are they less comfortable, sort of where are we in the process?
Alan Boeckmann
Andy, that’s a very good question. It depends on the market and some case even on the customer and their current situation. Clearly on the last call, we talked about backlog remaining relatively flat. While obviously the recent cancellations have created some headwind for us there, but we see some significant opportunities going forward.
As lumpy as it’s going to be, there are some sizable prospects on our list for 2009. They are really more heavily weighted towards the second half of the year and they’re in a number of business groups; Oil & Gas, mining, infrastructure, government and power, really across our whole spectrum.
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