Bret Christensen
Analyst · Truist Securities
Thank you, Szymon, and thank you all for joining us. After my remarks, Bob will review our first quarter financial results. We'll then open the call for your questions. Over the past 12 months, we have made important progress to advance our strategic priorities. We have strengthened our commercial organization, expanded our sales team and enhanced our capabilities to better support practitioners and their patients. We have also sharpened our focus on maximizing value from our existing top-tier clinics, which remain important contributors to our long-term financial performance. Through these strategic and operational initiatives, we built a solid foundation that we believe supports sustainable long-term profitable growth. As previously communicated, in January, Biote voluntarily withdrew certain bio-identical hormone pellet inventory from the market. We initiated this recall out of an abundance of caution. This temporary supply disruption created a headwind to our first quarter performance, resulting in an estimated $1.7 million revenue impact and approximately $1.5 million of incremental costs incurred due to the voluntary recall. We are addressing the supply challenge as efficiently as possible. To mitigate the impact on our practitioners and their patients, we are increasing inventory levels to ensure continuity of care throughout our network. The recall affected our first quarter results and was a significant distraction to our sales force and their growth objectives as they were forced to service accounts versus focusing on growth. While the impacts are expected to continue into the second quarter, we believe this is a temporary issue, and it does not affect our long-term strategy or alter the overall demand environment. We continue to see a sizable market opportunity across hormone therapy and therapeutic wellness, and we remain focused on building sustainable revenue growth. In our last call, I noted that one of our top priorities in 2026 was to expand our sales personnel from over 90 at the end of 2025 to approximately 120 this year. I'm pleased to report that we are substantially complete with this effort with over 25 new sales personnel hired in the first quarter. We've expanded and strengthened our commercial capabilities and are ready for the future. Despite the distraction caused by the voluntary recall, our commercial team is already beginning to deliver a higher level of service to existing accounts while utilizing our increased sales capacity to grow and scale our practitioner network. In the first quarter, we trained more than 200 new practitioners, representing a 16.5% increase from the first quarter of 2025. For our top clinics, we have introduced a series of measures aimed at improving retention and supporting stronger lifetime revenue outcomes. We are enhancing our commercial framework to reinforce the value proposition Biote can offer to our leading practitioners. New practitioner training sessions remain at near full capacity, underscoring continued practitioner interest in our bio-identical hormone optimization and healthy aging solution offerings. Because the number of newly trained practitioners is a leading indicator of future procedures and dietary supplement sales, this high level of engagement further strengthens our belief that we are on the right path to restore revenue growth. As a reminder, once a practitioner is fully trained, it typically takes about six months for that new practitioner to begin to contribute meaningfully to our financial performance. As we continue to invest in our commercial team, one of our key objectives is to elevate the quality of our sales pipeline. Over the past several months, we have seen clear evidence of progress with higher-value OB/GYN and general practitioners representing a growing share of our pipeline. This reflects a more disciplined qualification process as well as our focus on recruiting practitioners with greater long-term revenue contribution potential. We believe our efforts to enhance our sales pipeline should translate into more predictable performance as we increasingly support practitioners whose clinical specialties more closely aligned with our suite of product offerings. In summary, while our first quarter performance fell short of our expectations due to the voluntary product recall, we continued to move forward on key initiatives that support our long-term strategy. I'm confident that our strategic investments and actions are expected to strengthen our capabilities and lay the groundwork for what we anticipate will be a return to growth in the second half of the year. I'll now turn the call over to Bob to review the first quarter results.