Charles Kummeth
Analyst · Baird. Please proceed with your question.
Yes, I’d say from a sequential perspective, it will be perhaps a little bit of uplift, if nothing else, because we – the first quarter is when our annual merit increases, for example, it kick in, but it’s going to be fairly minimal. We’re obviously still in a mode of being very tight on our discretionary spend, really not investing in any – much in the way, any new hires at this point. So, we’re still being very, very careful with regards to our investment. So, I would just say nominal sequential spend from Q4 to Q1. We’re really on a kind of flat – kind of keeping any things of that growth. As you remember, Catherine, we spent a lot of time and we’re in Minneapolis so, finding top talent from the Bay Area or Boston to come here for biotech, research and work it’s difficult. So, we’ve done acquisitions in these better locations and we really worked hard to building a world-class team over the last six, seven years. We don’t see this pandemic as more than a one year to two year bubble of the real pain and the last thing we wanted to do was to ruin our team. So, we decided to [indiscernible] it up and not do any furloughing. We didn’t do any restructuring. So, we could have delivered more to the bottom line. You saw our tremendous results. So, I mean, that speaks to the tight processes we have here as an operating team. We run a very, very good template of processes, both weekly, monthly and quarterly. We know we’re spending and why. We prioritize continually. We were able to pivot a large percentage of the company towards our pandemic related – COVID related activities, and yet we still had almost near typical year-on-year NPI for products. So, we’ve done a great job there. And the lot of it came from taking the pressure off our team, them not worrying about going on furloughs or being restructured, so it’s steady as she goes here. That said, they are all watching what we spent and if we do have any attrition where we replace if needed then we certainly aren’t doing expansion in areas, other than these mission critical areas. We are, of course, adding in operations for expected ramp-up for our serology test is one example. We are certainly ramping up around Ella with 100% growth in Simple Plex, but we’re going to have resources. We’ve told China, you’re back to 24% growth. You know what you can hire. But to hire you have to grow, and we were not growing, we’re not hiring.