Chris Reading
Analyst · CJS Securities
Thanks, Jon. Okay. This morning I am going to have Carey cover the meat of the release, but I do want to start out with some overall color on the quarter, along with some important key aspects of how we are doing and how we look at the year ahead at this point. First of all, I can’t say enough about the fight in our team. They fought through last year with the unknowns of COVID, keeping patients and each other safe, as we worked their way through a difficult time, driving volume back to their great care, great work, while creating a safe, clean, and upbeat environment for the care of our patients. Those efforts resulted in a meaningful recovery by year’s end. Not quite the pre-COVID levels, but within spitting distance certainly. As we entered the New Year in January, volume, as it often does in January was slower, although throughout the month, we continued to gain steam. By the end of January, we finished the month at 26.1 visits per clinic per day. February started strong and was progressing nicely, when we got hit with that Southern storm that had us idle in Texas and most of Tennessee for a full week and that was a very big impact for us, but the team bounced back strong. We finished the month with the nice volume pickup and despite of that setback, which had a major impact on visits we finished February at 25.6 visits per clinic. March and since has been on a par. Really strong volumes of new patients and visits, producing a record month for us, March for operating earnings, revenue, visits per clinic per day, where we finished at 29.3, which is an all-time high for us, but I am betting that record visit lasts long. The team continues to do a great job in our facilities and our patient volumes remained strong in spite of the world not being fully upside right yet. Very solid volumes for the quarter, coupled with continued excellent expense control produced some really nice results as well. Total combined salaries in both parts of our business were only 50 -- I am sorry, yeah, 56.8% of net revenues in this first quarter. It’s been a pretty long time under normal circumstances when we have been that low. That combined with the volume, drove our gross profit for the quarter at 33.4%. Our overall gross margin was 23.1% for the quarter, up 590 basis points compared to Q1 2020. Gross margin for PT clinics, excluding closure cost was 22.9%, a 560-basis-point improvement and gross margin for our injury prevention business, which has performed so very well throughout the entirety of this time, came in at 27.2%, up over 1,000 basis points, as compared to 16.8% in Q1 a year ago. A few other highlights for the quarter before I review updated guidance. Our team has been successful renegotiating a good number of our lease contracts and they have been working on that for some time with good fruit coming to bear. Additionally, our payer contracting team has secured a number of positive pricing adjustments, with, we believe, more good things to come in this area. Combination of those efforts will certainly help us for the remainder of this year and for years to come. As a result of a number of positive factors, management is raising guidance for the year as follows. The guidance is increasing from a previously stated range of $2.40 to $2.52 to a range of $2.68 to $2.78 for operating results per share for 2021. The increase to our guidance is primarily attributable to three items. First, our performance in the first quarter was better-than-expected when we initially provided our guidance. Our patient volumes and revenues increased significantly as the quarter progressed, with March finishing as the strongest month in the company’s history from a volume, revenue and operating income standpoint, and volume continues to be very strong along with terrific cost control. Second, we added a five clinic physical therapy practice at the end of the first quarter that we expect to add $0.03 to $0.04 to our operating results per share in final three quarters of the year. And finally, the 2% sequestration relief on Medicare payments that was scheduled to end at the end of March 2021 has been extended through December 31st, which we expect to add $2 million to revenue and which equates to approximately $0.10 per share on that basis. As per our usual practice, this updated guidance range does not include any additional acquisitions that we expect to make in 2021. On that topic, speaking of acquisitions, the partnerships that we have acquired recently, as well as previously have done incredibly well through this difficult period. We have been supremely blessed with incredibly bright, talented, hard working, dedicated individuals of extremely high character. We continue to attract similarly committed individuals who we expect will join our company as our current deal flow progresses. We have a clean balance sheet and in spite of some materially large outlays in this quarter that Carey will cover. Our cash flow this quarter was excellent and our borrowings under our credit facility unchanged. We have a lot of dry powder at the moment. But with our activity thus far, we expect to get a lot of good things done as we move through the year. In closing, I just want to thank our team again for the yeoman’s work they have done this past year since COVID-19 came to our front door. They have been exemplary in all respects and we know with the hearts and resolve that we have within our group that we will continue to fight forward through the remainder of the year. Thank you for your time and attention this morning, as well as your support and belief in our team throughout this past year. It means a lot to all of us. With that, I’ll turn things over to Carey to cover our results in a little bit more granular detail.