Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Saga Communications, Inc. Q3 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Ed Christian, President and CEO. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Kay, and I was going to kind of freak you up, by the way. Thank you for holding. Your parties will be with you soon. Something like that, what should make wonder if we really were live or not. Hello, everybody, and thank you for joining us on this call. Sam Bush, as always, is here with me to discuss what we have done, and I will be here to discuss what we plan or to do, you like that, putting away the historical – your historical, not a – I’m the futuristic person on this. With that said, I’ll be back in a few minutes after Sam does finish his presentation.

Very good. Thank you, Ed. This call will contain forward-looking statements about our future performance and results of operations that involve risks and uncertainties that are described in the Risk Factors section of our most recent Form 10-K. This call will also contain a discussion of certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation for all the non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure are attached in the selected financial data tables. Saga’s third quarter results continue to show significant improvement as the economy continues to recover from the market uncertainties that are attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic issues. It’s important to note that there are still numerous uncertainties that are ongoing, including the much talked about supply chain and employment issues. That said, net revenue for the third quarter increased 19.5% to $28.8 million. Free cash flow was $4 million for the quarter. Station operating expenses were up $2.1 million with $1.7 million of that being due to increases in sales-related expenses, including commissions, sales surveys and advertising and promotion expenses. Operating income was $4.6 million. Net income was $3.5 million or $0.58 per fully diluted share. Gross political revenue for the quarter was $256,000 in 2021, compared to $1.8 million for the same period in 2020. Year-to-date through the end of the third quarter, gross political was $894,000, compared to $3.1 million for the same period last year. Without political, gross revenue increased 26% for the third quarter and 21.5% year-to-date. While we don’t expect to return to 2019 revenue levels for the full year in 2021, we are pushing to get close to the 2019 monthly revenue levels as we approach the latter part of the year. Net revenue for July and August were both approximately 10% below 2019, while September was only down…

Thank you, Sam. I’m going to talk about a few things today. And I got to tell you, there was a great deal of capital expense that we’ve had in the last couple of years. We’re not going to sit here and go back and go through everything that you know about the historical area of the company, where we’ve come from, what we’ve done. But we do have a couple of things that I want to talk about today. And let’s talk about the general marketplace. And I’m not going to tell you too many things that you already know. But boy, it’s been a whirlwind thing in terms of what’s happening because every time we turn around, something new occurs in terms of global events or local events or whatever it might be. That makes us have to pivot and quickly pivot to find new ways of inventing ourselves in sales and marketing. And we’ve had that. And we’re never one to really talk about a lot of complaints or anything like that. In fact, I was just thinking about something and looked it up to make sure I was correct on it. But 1975, Henry Ford always at that time, President of Ford Motor Company, was supposed to be in a meeting in London and instead was at a meeting in California and was found himself arrested by the small police department right at Santa Barbara and spent – actually spent a night and was released in the morning. Well, the word leaked out in Santa Barbara that Henry Ford was being released from a small jail in, as I said, below Santa Barbara. And so when he came out, there was a lot of police – not police, but a lot of reporters, radio TV news,…

Yes. We did get a couple of questions. By the way, I agree with you that the numbers are historical and statistical. But what you’re talking about is where the future comes from, and that’s the important part of the business from – on an ongoing basis. Anyway, the questions we got, we got a couple of them in. They’re fairly similar to what we’ve had in the past, and that is about capital allocation relative to what we’re going to be doing with the dividend relative to increasing it potentially back to the $0.32 a share that we, at one point, got to early last year? And then two, about potential use of capital for stock buybacks? And then three, which we’ve already answered in our press release was why not pay down the long-term debt with the excess cash? And goes on to make a point that we believe in that companies with very low debt or no debt should be worth more than companies that are over leveraged. But long and short of it is we have reported in the press release that we paid down the final $10 million in our outstanding debt on our revolver, October 27. So we are now officially debt-free. And Ed, I’ll let you talk about the dividend potential increases and stock buyback.

Well, we do also have our credit line, we should say that just in case. And that basically – and we have a lot of cash. Thank you. We’re very happy about it. It puts us on a great feeling. And we talked about this for several months, but actually longer than. Why are we still carrying this a little bit? Why don’t we just right the check, so we don’t have to worry about Mr. Banker showing up at an improper time if something went wrong? I mean that’s a very short statement to it, not necessarily true because we do have good – great banking relations with the ones that we did. We still consider them our partners and friends for looking at future investments. And by the way, we’re not done with acquiring. We’re looking at that. That’s an ongoing task for us is to find those opportunities that make sense for us, even in somewhat difficult times, but we intend to continue to grow the business and proper defined ways that make sense for us as radio broadcasters who will say as radio broadcasters. And those are areas that are important for us. We will – we talked about dividends. We did declare one which we felt was appropriate for where we were in terms of revenue and still somewhat of an uncertainty going on. Believe me with my commitment to Saga Communications and the dividends that I get, I’m certainly like to see them coming and continue to increase, and so do our managers who have had stock in the company, and other people here. We are – the goal is to certainly build back to levels of revenue, levels of earnings, which will support it and never compromise on the business, which is why we finally said, well, come on, what is $10 million? Just pay it off and be done with it. And actually, one of our investors even said to us, okay, fine. Just pay off and pay off this $10 million, and we appreciated that to get rid of it and then go on and build the business and then remember us in dividends as you go forward. And we are constantly looking at this and trying to arrive at appropriate price points at appropriate times within the company because we will not compromise the company itself. I’m overpromising and under-delivering. And that’s one of the big things we are always aware of in that. Did I miss something, Sam?

No, I think that covers it all. I think we’re good.

Well. We thank you for – and we try and keep it to 30 minutes, and this is exactly where I see the clock right now that, that’s where we’re headed. So anybody has any questions for Sam, or if they have any questions to me, we are very friendly and very open, and you can just call us here, and we’ll be glad to answer individually those areas that we might have missed in our discussion today. So with that said, Kay, we turn it back to you for a thank you. There is no – anything else missing, Sam?

No. Kay, we’ll wrap it up as we go.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This [Call Ends Abruptly]