Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the ServiceMaster’s Third Quarter 2017 Earnings Call. Today's call is being recorded and broadcast on the Internet. Beginning today's call is Brian Turcotte, ServiceMaster's Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer, and he will introduce the other speakers on the call. At this time we will begin today's call. Please go ahead, Mr. Turcotte.

Thank you, Chris. Good morning and thank you for joining our third quarter 2017 earnings conference call. Before I review the agenda and introduce the other speakers, I’d like to remind you that throughout today’s call management may make forward-looking statements to assist you in understanding the Company’s strategies and operating performance. As stated on Slide 2, all forward-looking statements are subject to the forward-looking statement legends contained in our public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance and are subject to the risk factors contained in our public filings that may cause actual results to vary materially from those contemplated in the forward-looking statements. Information discussed on today’s call speaks only as of today, October 31, 2017. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any information discussed on today’s call. This morning, ServiceMaster issued press release filed with the SEC on Form 8-K highlighting our third quarter 2017 financial results, and we have posted a related presentation, both of which can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website. We will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures throughout today’s call, and we have included definitions of these terms in our press release, which is available on our website at www.servicemaster.com. We have also included reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures in our press release and presentation in order to better assist you in understanding our financial performance. All references on the call to EBITDA today are to adjust EBITDA as defined in our press release. Joining me on today’s call are ServiceMaster’s Chief Executive Officer, Nik Varty; and Chief Financial Officer, Tony DiLucente. For those of you who haven’t had a chance to download the investor presentation from our website, I’ll walk through the agenda items shown on Slide 3. Nik will lead off with some opening remarks regarding his key activities and observations during his first 100 days as CEO of ServiceMaster and then provide an update on the Terminix business transformation and the company's strategic growth priorities. Tony will follow and summarize our consolidated third quarter financial results, review the integral business unit results, provide more details in regard to our financial statements and then speak to the updated full year outlook. We will then open up the call to your questions. I’ll now turn the call over to Nik. Nik?

Thanks, Brian. Good morning and thank you all for joining us today for our third quarter 2017 earnings call. During the quarter, we saw a good revenue and EBITDA growth across American Home Shield and Franchise Services Group. And also [indiscernible] we have normalized for hurricane Irma and Harvey and excluding Alterra customer attrition. Tony will provide details on the financial results later. We also launched a disciplined approach toward improving performance of Terminix, building on some of the investments we described earlier in the year. We are making good progress on the spinoff of American Home Shield and have embarked on developing and establishing a strategy to set up two highly successful listed companies. I'll start with Slide 4. Having now spent a 100 days with the company, I'm very confident that there is a significant opportunity to unlock value at ServiceMaster by sharpening our focus on our results and operational excellence. ServiceMaster has powerful and well-recognized brands that reach into more than 5 million homes annually nationwide. First and foremost, we see tremendous potential at Teminix through improved performance and drive long-term profitable growth through our strategic transformation plan. Terminix operates in markets with strong future growth potential and has significant opportunity to leverage its core strength to grow rapidly in the commercial business space with the right level of focus, leadership and implementation of key growth strategies. American Home Shield, or AHS, continues to be a strong and consistent performer, delivering high single-digit organic annually for the past five years. We're continuing to drive profitable growth at AHS in this vastly underpenetrated market and see significant potential in adjacent markets through the use of our industry-leading contractor network. We will continue to drive shareholder value through appliance to spin off AHS, which is on schedule for the…

Thanks, Nik, and good morning, everyone. Turning to our consolidated results we have shown on Slide 7. ServiceMaster produced solid revenue and EBITDA growth in the third quarter. Total company revenue grew $39 million or 5% compared to the prior year. Our results were primarily driven by organic growth at American Home Shield, where we continue to see strong demand for our products in both the real estate and direct-to-consumer channels, coupled with the favorable impact of our acquisition of Landmark Home Warranty last year. Terminix delivered 1% organic revenue growth versus prior year, excluding the impact of temporary branch closures related to the hurricane and expected Alterra customer attrition, and we continue to believe that we're on a clear path to improved customer retention and organic growth. The franchise services grew organically by 7%, excluding the impact of the converted Merry Maids branches to franchises and the Master distributor acquisition in January. Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter increased $8 million or 4% compared to the prior year. The increase in EBITDA was primarily the result of a conversion of higher revenue driven by organic growth, acquisitions and lower claims cost at AHS. The ongoing business transformation initiative and hurricanes drove margin compression at Terminix versus prior year. I'll cover the third quarter performance with Terminix in more detail in a moment. Our adjusted net income for the third quarter was $99 million, an $18 million increase versus prior year, and adjusted diluted earnings per share of $0.73 was up $0.14 versus prior year. This 22% increase in adjusted net income was primarily driven by higher adjusted EBITDA and a lower provision for income taxes related to stock option exercises. Turning to Slide 8. In the third quarter performance of Terminix, revenue was relatively flat at $395 million. The…

Thanks, Tony. As a reminder, during the question-and-answer session, we encourage you to ask any questions you may have, but please note that guidance is limited to the outlook we provided in our press release and webcast presentation. Additionally, please limit yourselves to one follow-up question so we can get to everyone in the allotted time. Chris, let’s open up the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Sam Eisner with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

So on the -- I think you applied guidance for the fourth quarter for EBITDA is about $129 million, net $50 million down year-on-year. I think you have highlighted about $10 million of that walk in the higher call center cost, the market, the sales and marketing in the Terminix. I think there is net kind of $5 million which yet to be identified. Can you maybe give us additional color on what else is in there in terms of kind of the year-over-year impact in the fourth quarter?

I think we have covered most of it. We talked about year-over-year marketing increases in the American Home Shield business, also higher marketing expenses in Terminix. We also are not going to assume that we are going to have favorable weather-related impact to our claims costs in the fourth quarter. I mean, that’s actually is the prudent way that we have to really stay focused on, a normal weather pattern and we did benefit to some extent in the third quarter from unusually cold summer. So, perhaps, the claims costs in particular are probably most of the gap that you are speaking up on.

And then just maybe a second question here. You highlighted it in your opening kind of opening statements an opportunity to get into the commercial market and I think that was something that you highlight with the sell side during [indiscernible], if you can expand on that further and has that strategy being fully kind of avail at this point?

That’s an interesting question because, if you look at the strength of our business and the significant footprint we have across the country, we are in a great position to focus on some sweets pots in the commercial space, and right now we are in the final stages of developing and implementing our strategy. We recently parted ways with our current commercial business leader and we will close to finalizing announcing announcement of a leader of the commercial business. So I have you know great level of confidence in our ability to show some rapid increase, as we go forward delayed strategy with the right focus and the right leadership , we can definitely put a lot more focus than we have as a company in the past. And I see certain specific verticals that will spend much more easier for us to get into -- when I say easier, see now nothing's easy but we have to drive the level of service and customer expectations in that so it's a different focus than the residential but by creating a dedicated focus bringing in a leader with you know strong capabilities and growing national accounts we're confident that you know we can leverage this space that we have not really focused on over the past few years.

That's helpful, I'll hop back in queue. Thanks.

And I'll definitely keep you guys updated throughout and as we have been since I started here on how we progress on that strategy.

Our next question comes from the line of Anj Singh from Credit Suisse, please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Just wanted to revisit the EBITDA revision walk perhaps asked another way, could you parse out your estimate of the hurricane impact to EBITDA versus the increased investments into Terminix as we look at the $7.5 million change from your prior midpoints and the current midpoint?

Well the hurricane was $3 million of the change, and that is really you were asking else? Regarding asking, can we elaborate anything else regarding that's what we elaborate on.

I guess the way I was looking at is the hurricane impact at Q3, it seems like it was more than offset by the better contribution from AHS. Whats is the incremental or stepped up spend that's happening at Terminix is there increased investment at Terminix beyond what you're anticipating at Q2.

So we are increasing our spending in marketing year-over-year in Terminix, marketing expenses and sales expenses. So that's a big part of the increase as well. And I want to also if you're looking ahead to the fourth quarter, we're not going to forecast the same type of incident rates we saw in the American Home Shield with respect to claims cost. So that has some impact on the revision of times too. And finally, if you look at American Home Shield, remember that I have mentioned that we rephrase some marketing expenses from the second quarter into the third quarter, well we also have more marketing on a quarterly basis in the fourth quarter as well. So we really rephrase our marketing spending more backend loaded in the third and fourth quarter than we had in previous year.

Okay, okay, got it. And then a follow up on. If we look at your Terminix revenue adjusted for the hurricane impact, it seems like it still would have decelerated a little bit from the 2Q levels. Could you talk about what is driving the moderation and the performance and outlook adjusted for the hurricanes? Is the performance just weaker or are the translation effort is just taking a little bit longer? Just any color there. Thanks.

Anj, if you look at adjusting for hurricanes, we were flat to slightly above flat. And then we have already talked about the attrition this year. We've seen after the point that will be [indiscernible] clause expiration of the Alterra customers. So if you adjust for that our normalized revenue, Terminix is growing about 2% year-over-year in the quarter and 1% organic. So we still - and this is why we launched this systematic transformation approach to rebuild the core on our growth platforms. And we have been remaining set fast on building our ability to grow in this business because I see tremendous potential in how we approach that. Now we are at the same time and I have about being a Six Sigma Lean in force to identify or any duplication of efforts are raised in the system so this can not only help it avoiding unnecessary costs and providing a discipline investment, they will also simplify our business model significantly, which gives us an ability to unlock capacity to deliver on the growth opportunities that we were consistently able to raise the new sales or new accounts as we generate in pest business. We just have to make it simple and raise our customer engagement or customer experience level to best-in-class to continue to repaying at a higher level.

Okay, got it. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Toni Kaplan from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Could you share any statistics that you are tracking on employee turnover within the Terminix business? Just since you’ve sort of implemented new metrics and strategy, and I know it's still early, but just any sort of trends that you are seeing improve and maybe what sort of your goals are that we can measure you against in the future. Any sort of metrics we can sort of point to you going forward?

We in these last few months that I've been here, I have visited several of our branches and our touch base with plenty of our tax are outside sales professionals or branch managers and even went on rides along, could you see how they are running their share. How they interact with customers and help can we better help them. We definitely can do a significantly better drive and we are working on it July was I truly believe exemplary treatment of employees is explanation going to lead the exemplary treatment of our customers and improve the loyalty. From our attention basis on our tax we see on an average the industry rate of retentions is about 70% are well performing well above that probably also compared to a competition even it is slightly above what competition or retention rates are so. We definitely can continue to improve that also continue to improve, also continue to improve retention rates or [Indiscernible] on us so we are taking a very strong focus on how we are in this company how do we make our organization customer centric and with our tax upfront as the part of the impairment of our organization who ensure that were giving them the right tools and the right flexibility to serve our customers better. So well I'm not worried at right now but our retention rates what has demonstrated this year my goal is to help the company to take it through significantly higher levels from where it is because retention of employees does lead to have a direct correlation to how we retain our customers.

Okay, that's great. And then just one on the Hurricane. So your closest competitor mentioned cost for reacceleration post the 3Q Hurricanes, but it sounds like you are expecting there won't be an impact in the first quarter. Could you actually see a benefit as branches come back online and see sometime if it's from maybe the increased OpEx and are you being conservative when you no impact? How should be we inking about it? thinking about it?

First of all I must give a lot of high marks for the Terminix branches for how rapidly they were able to bring back business all the braches back up, how they were able to redeploy on the resources to help in areas that we are not as badly affected, and I also company's efforts to keep our employees as whole as possible and we continually provide them financial support in this typical times that even they face in the business areas. That’s going to be probably a strong hangover. I don’t think of that much of an effect getting over into Q4 but from a positive side we are driving a dedicated focus to obsess to the level of pest increase and how we can approach to that. So that is still on the pontification and how we can bring that capacity back up and build that into a capacity models to show these additional opportunities as we go forward. But then hurricane or any such event or -- definitely there is a longer-term trend. I don’t want to predict exactly what it will be in the Q4 versus next year but, we definitely is going to be positive in these areas, supporting the increased activity of pest. But we are systematically evaluating that at the stage, but also not just evaluating but building capability to support these kind of activities that we can actually fulfill the demand that could rise us from this.

Our next question comes from the line of Andy Wittmann with Baird. Please go ahead.

I guess, I just wanted to ask for maybe a little bit more update on yours on spin process. Cnd certainly you guys made some progress on this one, and one that could maybe the two key questions of maybe what you are going to full time capital structure of each company and or the SG&A lowered that you might be angling on as you progress down this path?

Let me address the first part of your question, Andy. As we announced to spin three months ago and since then we made significant progress: a, bringing in highly capable leader like Dion Persson. It's hard to find somebody with -- we have practically checked all the boxes you need for this kind of complex job and we are really happy to have Geon over, he has not provided definitely a significant improvement in the processes. We are on track to deliver as promised. We have engaged to several external partners that are absolutely necessary. We deliver on the spin commitments flawlessly. But in the background we are working very hard on building two highly successful or capable leadership teams will list successful publicly created companies. The major work right now - and the fundamental reason why we even chose the spin as to allow both these businesses oh distinct strategies. So we are working on what businesses would be going forward. I mentioned earlier in my remarks about AHS having a clear strategy towards growing in nutrition spaces beyond where they are. It’s a little tool for me to share in exact details, but we will definitely be doing that going forward. And also -- with clear razor shaft spec fast focus on rebuilding the four of our growth platforms having the Six Sigma Lean approach to ensure that we very disciplinely pay for what we were investing in as we go forward. The real core of the spin as I said is it’s on track. As I said it's on track, we've got the work streams going full steam on it. We're ensuring that the resources dedicated to the spin are not impacting the way we drive our business both economy features [indiscernible] for that matter. The second part of the question, I'll ask Tony to take us in a take on the capital structure question and the G&A question.

Sure, more specifically on the timing of spin. We're still on track to complete the spin in the third quarter of 2018. We do expect to file an initial confidential Form 10 in the first quarter, this filing has to be confidential and nonpublic because the 2017 audited financial statements won't be completed by that time. We're required to do three years of audited financials, and so those become [indiscernible] at some later date. As far as, Andy, your questions on the capital structure, obviously we've already spent a lot of time looking at that and we have more time to spend going forward. We do have a general plan and structure, but we haven't made any final decisions on exactly how much leverage we're going to put on each company. I will say this our wonderful cash flow in both of the businesses gives us some flexibility but we want to take our time and do this the right way and we're working to it systematically with our advisors and in our teams appropriately. I think that was the majority of the question did I miss anything.

SG&A burden was the other portion of that.

That's nothing, Andy, one bad one to that, Andy. Obviously, again, and very methodical process. I mean the first step is to define how you want to operate both spend for both let's call it ServiceMaster and American Home Shield? And then after you define an operating model, then you build a cost model and then at that point we'll have what I would call -- an estimate that you know we could share when all that is done which is later on the process so we'll continue to keep you advised as we progress on this journey, but that's just a little bit too soon to really report that information.

I think to add on to that Andy you know obviously the clear strategy on both these is helping us develop a structure to support it the systems and cadence to drive it and the right people to deliver you know so we're very systematically working through that process and as you know we're going to be you know as the process goes by we'll be sharing additional information about the commitment that we made.

Great thanks. And then I guess, Nick, I wanted to kind of follow up on the Terminix segment and the investment situating. Really highlighted a number of those units cost including sales and marketing, but as you look at other investments in the P&L you've talked a lot of people, systems, processes, how much more investment needs to come out? Or where are you on that journey is most of it outside of in place excluding maybe couple of key hires hire. I guess I'm just trying to get a sense about what the '18 outlook for Terminix margins could do without giving guidance just kind of thinking about where you are in a sequential basis with your P&L investment.

As I've shared with you earlier, the first part of my journey was to get a full assessment on where the gaps in the business are, what do we need to do to drive it, and that has given me a tremendous amount of confidence that there is no reason why we can build, rebuild the core of this business back to going at or above market level. So there's two things, one is significantly elevating the customer experience, which will allow us to you know retain or improve our customer retention significantly; and the second is you know product strategy that clearly allows us to differentiate ourselves as a leader going forward. So yeah, there are definitely investments in not just marketing but also in the right organization structure, creating a focus around commercial drive the leasing of necessary investments. Now on the other hand, it's not just about how much we invest and how much we spend but how we do it, and we are launching a very, very disciplined six sigma lean approach. It is for me and this is again my past experiences while coming from - checking to work left one of the companies has been where we find look really structured way. We first of all lean out the process and eliminate a lot of the steps in the way that actually make the business model much more simpler our ability to engage with customers much easier, our ability to get flexibility and the opportunity for techs much more easier and actually definitely helps in unlocking a lot of the while capacity to serve even with the existing tech to just give a better much and better service level to our customers. And so we have lot of work to do on the efficiency…

Our next question comes from the line of Judah Sokel with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

I was hoping to ask a little bit about the commercial vertical within Terminix clearly that for strategy of your as you doesn’t expect you want to expand Terminix's exposure to and maybe if you could talk a little a bit about how that business has been trending for service demand ware and shown out what the opportunities are that you just deal exist in the commercial vertical and what are some of the challenges specially compared to residential?

In terms of our commercial business, which is about 20% of our total Terminix revenue till date, the trend in the business has been relatively flat to modest growth in the past few years and that comes with just clearly not making it one of the focus priorities and investing in the right way or approaching the right level of customers. Our strength in that business has been quite significant in the small medium-scale businesses and we are currently developing a national account strategy which we believe in certain verticals and certain specific markets were highly capable of delivering strong differentiation to capture those. My belief with the core strategy that we are putting in place bringing in a leader we -- as I mentioned earlier, we recently partnered ways with the commercial business leader who was in place for few years of bringing in really highly talented individuals ability to grow in national account, so of national accounts, creative business structure systems so that can support that will significantly upgrade our ability. This is a faster growing space in the market and I truly believe that for some of the very specific markets we have great opportunities that will probably pay off and definitely with that right level of focus and leadership.

Maybe just a quick second question on AHS business. Once again, that required saw real estate channel growing at a really nice pace and addition for the DTP channel. I think investor perception was that over the years AHS transformed that business by moving more into the DTP channel way from the real estate channel because it was a more of growth opportunity, but we are seeing pretty fast growth at both. So maybe you could touch on what the opportunity is in real estate. Do you think that the real estate channel can continue to be a high single-digit organic grower? Where do the opportunity lie ahead for AHS?

I think as I mentioned earlier, it’s number one, what I really like about the AHS business is it’s an incredible platform that the one key solid differentiator where we have about 15,000 over the countries best contractors who we are able to level load their jobs and utilize them as partners across the country to deliver increasingly better service to our customers. So both in the DTC channel and real estate channel, I see quite a lot of potential to continue to add volume. What I like about this again also is it’s a vastly underpenetrated market. If you look at our market share today, which is north of 50%, considering the market size to be close to slightly above 4 million homes, between sustainable family homes and rental properties and apartments, that’s close to 100 million owned America that just told you that there is -- and their services are being performed. The key is how do we drive our business model beyond the current way we do business, if we go the market. So we are redefining that strategy and putting significantly higher focus. So on the current warranty-based or risk-based model we see increased DTC not only in penetration in the market business also significant opportunity in the type of services we can enhance too, same thing on the real estate model we see higher penetration. I'm not sure if you caught one of our announcements recently where we launched and afford in the real estate market, which we seen significantly helping retention going forward where we have full of the engagement, we launched our 18 service. When new home on a enters his home, we have a service now that will provide us part of whole package changing all the locks and keys on their home. That provides that initial touch point, which in many cases in the real estate deal somebody inherits of that the seller and we don’t show that customer [indiscernible] they had that problem, there is a -- there is a perception on part of the owner where they are getting real value for that which should maybe paying for it. This initial compact just starts with them off in the right way to understand the value of the contract. So we are working on additional such ideas and opportunities that can help to improve this market penetration as well and we still see significant space on DTC, but also on the non-risk-based model which as I mentioned earlier that we will share as time goes by, we consolidated our strategies and launched these new efforts.

Our next question comes from the line of Gary Bisby with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, guys. Nik, the first question for you. You talked a lot about the disciplined approach you want to put in place, the Lean Six Sigma opportunity, just more accountability throughout the Terminix organization, and I guess who really needs to drive that and who' is impacted by these changes. Is this is largely a corporate? Or is there a lot of work that needs to be done at the branch level? And as part of that, how much disruption does changing the cultural approach these processes likely have on the business and over what time period would it be reasonable to begin to see the benefits of these efforts? I assume there's a sort of long period of time where you put in all the changes before it really begins to benefit the business. Any color on that would be helpful, thanks.

The key to succeeding on such a journey is to have a clear structured approach that normally you can articulate to our shareowners and you guys on the analyst side, but it's our ability to articulate that right down the line to our text. So the key focus right now is how do we unclog some of the things we’ve done in the past that didn't serve us that well, but focusing on investments on the right thing where we enable the tech in this business is a fairly simple business. It's all about the customer experience that the tech leaves with the customer. It enhances retention significantly -- so we've demonstrated our ability to grow on new sales, the key is we have to work hard to improve that retention rate to get the next revenue growth you know moving significantly higher. So it will take time, but for me to drive a cultural change the first thing is have a clear strategy that gets a buy in, which we are fairly close to articulating across the board in the company in the next coming weeks. Driving that is the organization structure, as I mentioned, clearly we're driving the focused approach on residential and commercial, the residential leaders already in place, I mean managed to get that done within two months, which is pretty good and we got a real solid proven leader who has demonstrated in the past driving significant growth, working across hundreds of company-owned franchises and branches at Bridgestone, and also been able to demonstrate major turnarounds within a relatively short period of time. So to me this is a journey where we need to get back to the growth levels that we want, but also ultimately I think Gary the key focus for me is staying steadfast with an approach to drive at market or above market growth going forward not only with the customer levels but with the fully revamped product strategies that we are about to launch.

Okay, great, and then just a follow-up. There've been some efforts begun last year to consolidate certain things like marketing and some of the digital efforts from Terminix into the AHS business effectively which was centralized. I know you're reversing all of that, but how much of that was done and how much either spend or disruption is there in pulling the Terminix marketing efforts and advertising efforts out from that central group? Is that already done or is that something that's going on now? Thank you.

Let me tell you probably the one -- the best return investment we've got is really taking our ability of our employees to significantly improve the interface with the customer by upgrading the technology. So giving iPhones and iPads to every employee to have tools in the hand when they approach a customer, so that improve the pre-engagement ability that improves their full service engagements make notified of their customers on our dispatch need app for the customers sees more like an mover like format where the tech is approaching the home, improved our on-time delivery with the customer versus previously doing this over this hang the yellow tag and leaving we have significantly enriched that. So that's the quite a lot of money. We invested in providing much better vehicle to both our tax and our outside sales professional that carries a lot of brand value with trucks driving around. It improves a lot of recall. It improves the morale of the people and how they approach the customers as well. So there is a lot of great things that were done. And yes, I'm not being critical about the marketing efforts and outlook, I think with our current strategy we are improving significantly our ability to segment those markets where we can see the biggest bank or above and refocusing on our marketing investments and in those areas and those treatments like certain specific type of pest in that area, just to get a maximum return on investment on how we approach these markets. It's a matter of -- it's not like I'm taking something and just completely turning it around but driving a systematic turnaround of what a world-class business should look like. Ultimately it's all about service. The real differentiator is the experience we leave with our customers and why they want to stay with us for the rest of their life, we just want to keep that life time cycle value and thinking that please that helps the very cost of acquisition in the future as well, which will definitely help us.

Great, thank you.

There are no questions on the phone lines at this time. Mr. Varty, I will turn the conference back to you.

Thank you. I want to close by affirming my earlier comments that we are focused on consistently delivering on our commitments and to improve operations and drive profitable growth. And wild change will not happen overnight. I'm very confident were taking the right steps to create long-term values for our shareholder and thank you all for joining our call today and we look forward to reporting on our continued progress in the future. Thank you.

Thanks Nik. Thank you again for your participation in today’s conference call and webcast. As a reminder, a replay of the webcast will be available on our website at www.servicemaster.com in about one hour from now. We look forward to speaking with you again on our fourth quarter and full-year 2017 earnings call at a date to be announced in February of 2018. Chris, please end the call and happy holiday everybody.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your lines.