Bond Clement
Analyst · Johnson Rice. Please go ahead
Thanks, Ryan. Good morning, everyone, it’s great to be with you from our first conference call at Flotek. It's really exciting to be part of a company that is essentially no leverage, a backlog of revenue roughly 20 times the current market cap and an outstanding team of professionals with deep expertise in logistics, supply chain management, data analytics and of course chemistry. I echo Ryan’s comments on the fourth quarter achievements and I'm very excited about the direction we're now heading. As it relates to getting to positive adjusted EBITDA, I want to focus my comments this morning on SG&A and professional fee cost reductions. Ryan and his team have made great progress moving us toward profitability at the gross margin level and concurrent with this work will focus on attacking the SG&A of this company to ensure that we achieve bottom line profitability this year. You may have noticed we included a new metric in the press release called adjusted gross profit. Non-cash amortization of our contract asset reduces both revenue and gross profit. We believe the new metric provides a more accurate representation of the performance of the business. While reported gross margin for the quarter was negative $2.1 million on a cash basis, we were 75% better than that at negative $500,000. Certainly more work to do, but we are getting close. Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA improved 40% sequentially as we continue to march toward turning that metric positive during 2023. This marked the sixth consecutive quarter of improvement in adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of revenue. Again, more work to do, but we're moving in the right direction. SG&A during the fourth quarter also showed improvement as it declined 36% sequentially. It's worth highlighting that third quarter 2022 SG&A included about $900,000 in non-recurring professional fees, roughly half of which were related to evaluating an ABL structure that the company ultimately decided not to pursue. Third quarter 2022 SG&A also included a $1.9 million accrual related to potential year-end performance bonuses. To add a component of protection to our resources, we decided to reduce and restructure this bonus to focus on retaining key employees that are necessary to create shareholder value and achieve profitability. As a result, we reversed the $1.9 million performance bonus accrual during the fourth quarter. During March, we plan to pay $1.2 million of retention bonuses with the condition that recipients are required to remain with a company through the end of 2023 or be subject to a prorated clawback. As a result of this service condition the $1.2 million will be expensed evenly throughout the final three quarters of 2023. We believe having a more narrowly focused retention bonus is far better for shareholders than an organizationally broad performance bonus with no clawback protections. As it relates to the annual increase in SG&A in 2021, versus 2021, keep in mind, last year's number included a $2.9 million credit for a COVID-related ERC payroll credit. So to bridge the 2022 full-year SG&A increase versus 2021, we had the payroll tax credit in ‘21 plus $3 million in non-recurring fees in 2022 directly related to the ProFrac agreement, which I'll discuss further in a moment. The combination of just these two items accounts for nearly $6 million of the SG&A variance between ‘22 and ’21. As it relates to ‘23 SG&A, since the third quarter, we've executed on headcount reductions as Ryan mentioned, dropping full time employees by 12%. These headcount reductions include numerous management level positions. In connection with these staffing reductions, we expect to expense approximately $2.9 million in separation costs during the first quarter of 2023. This amount includes $1.5 million related to the former CEO that was previously disclosed, the bulk of the remaining $1.4 million of non-CEO related separation cost will be paid evenly over the next 12-months as stipulated in the governing agreements. Excluding separation costs, annual salary and benefits savings from headcount reductions are expected to total approximately $5 million. In addition to reevaluating corporate staffing, we are aggressively pursuing ways to reduce professional fees that have historically been too high at this company. As mentioned earlier, during 2022, there were nearly $3 million professional fees, primarily banking, legal and accounting directly associated with the ProFrac supply agreement that will not be duplicated this year. While expensive on an absolute basis when you consider the cost in light of securing a $2 billion contract, those transactions fees equate to only about 15 basis points before discounting the contract value. The elimination of just the non-recurring ProFrac contract costs represents a roughly 30% reduction in 2022 professional fees. In terms of professional fees moving forward, we have implemented enhanced monitoring and approval processes to ensure that future engagements of any professionals require executive level approval. Finally, we are working to reduce our wedge of consultant costs by bringing certain full time roles in-house and realizing overhead savings. By the fourth quarter of this year, we expect SG&A including professional fees to be less than 10% of revenues. While that level is generally accepted on a relative basis, we endeavor to continue looking for ways to reduce the absolute dollars of SG&A. Quickly moving to the balance sheet. As noted during the quarter, we closed on the sale of our Monahans, Texas facility, resulting in net proceeds of $1.5 million. We continue to execute well during the quarter in terms of converting orders to cash. Our cash balance at year-end increased to about $12.3 million versus cash at the end of the third quarter of $8.5 million. Cash balances of course will fluctuate with the ebbs and flows of working capital. As activity and related revenues increase with additional fleets added to our chemistry delivery, we will continue to focus on managing working capital by timing our collections inside of the favorable pay terms we've negotiated with our suppliers. To augment our working capital management, we have renewed our efforts to attain an ABL, supported by our receivables and/or our inventory to provide additional liquidity. Initial discussions with lenders have been positive and we're currently working through various creditor diligence requests. We'll update the market and have further updates as this process progresses. On the debt front, as mentioned in the release, we were notified during January that all, but approximately $400,000 of our PPP loan was forgiven. The balance of loan carries a 1% interest rate and will be amortized over the next 24-months. In yesterday's release, we provided an update regarding our certain items associated with our year-end audit in 10-K. We did identify material weakness in our internal controls over financial reporting as of year-end. Unfortunately, the 300% growth in our business from a year ago has had some unintended consequences in terms of the stress placed on our back office staff charged with managing the increased operational activity. We are implementing enhanced processes to shore up internal communications and augment our staff in certain areas to provide additional resources to ensure that our controls are operating effectively. We believe this issue will be quickly remediated. As it relates to the going concern of qualification and the related disclosures we expect to make in our 10-K, we're working to secure additional sources of liquidity as we just discussed in terms of an ABL. Additionally, as stated throughout today's call, we're taking positive steps toward profitability. We expect to achieve positive adjusted EBITDA during 2023 as opposed to continuing our historical trend of operating losses. We believe our efforts to manage cash and working capital combined with an improving cash flow outlook provides us with sufficient financial resources to continue to operate the business. With that, I'll turn it over to Harsha for closing comments.