Dennis Dean
Chief Financial Officer
Hey thanks, Whit. First, before we get into the investment side, I mean, we obviously get impacted heavily by being a public company. And so I just wanted to make sure that, again, we sort of reiterated that point, that we saw excellent adjusted EBITDA growth year-over-year when you account for those costs that we incur. And I know that wasn't part of your question, Whit, but I think it's just a significant number. We just need to continue to make sure everybody's calling that out as well. But, Whit, and kind of like what I'd shared earlier, the demand has really what caused us to pull these costs forward. We've -- again, as we've always talked about quality, safety are paramount for us. And so that's caused us to really focus on bringing our nurses up to a higher standard and that we're hiring more RNs, whereas in the past, we had LPNs. We put nurse managers in place. And all of this is because, as you grow a business like we are in the health care space, you can't sacrifice quality for rapid growth. And we see the opportunities out in front of us for this growth. And so we invested these dollars primarily into the quarter. We feel like we're right at the point of maxing out from that standpoint. So we feel like the investments we've made in that arena are about where we need to be. And so we're going to be able to leverage that number as we move forward through the year. We had probably a $400,000 impact in the quarter. If we think of it from a sequential and over prior year, we had about $400,000 to $500,000 impact there related to adding these nurses and other clinical items. As Dr. Rollins talked about, investing in our surgical trainers, I mean, those are -- that's critical and that if we're going to be able to open up new centers and maybe open up new centers at a faster pace, we have got to be able to not only recruit the doctors but also to train the doctors. And so adding that second full-time dedicated physician trainer just speaks to how we see the volume out in front of us and the opportunities there. And so those are two of them out. We did have a little bit of COVID impact where we had over time and duplicate staffing and those types of things. Most of that was in the first two months of the quarter. We're not really seeing a lot of that and hope that be the case for the remainder of the year. But we'll see. I know in the past, we've been very resilient. We've been very effective in working around the COVID impact that we've had. We've been able to keep the revenue numbers going and by rescheduling cases in a timely fashion. So we feel good about that, but that obviously hit us a bit in the quarter. And then from a margin percentage standpoint, I don't think we've spoken to this very much on the call yet, but we opened three centers in the last four months. And that's a little bit heavier than what we've ever done in our history at one time. And that's driving our margins down. And the reason being is because, as you guys know, it takes us about three to four months for these centers to become cash flow positive. But it gives us a great platform for EBITDA growth as we kind of run throughout the rest to the year. That hit us for probably about 130 basis points in margins this quarter. So we really feel good where we are. We're excited. Again, making these investments now just really prepares us for what we see coming down the -- coming down that line for us.