Daseke, Inc.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss DASI's financial results for the third quarter ended September 30th, 2021. With us today are Jonathan Shepko, CEO and board member, Jason Bates, EVP and CFO, and John Mischel, Vice President of Treasurer and Investor Relations. After the preferred remarks, the management team will take your questions. As a reminder, you may now download a PDF of the presentation slides that will accompany the remarks made on today's conference call as indicated in the press release we issued earlier today. You may access these slides in the investor relations section of our website. Before we go further, I would like to turn the call over to John Michelle, Vice President of Treasury Investor Relations, who will read the company's safe harbor statement within the means of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that provides important conscience regarding forward-looking statements. John, please go ahead.

Thank you, Valerie. Please turn to slide two for a review of our safe harbor and non-GAAP statements. Today's presentation contains forward-looking statements as within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Act of 1995. Projected financial information, including our guidance outlook, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements, including those with respect to revenues, earnings, performance, strategies, prospects, and other aspects of Daske's business, are based on management's current estimates, projections, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. I encourage you to read our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a discussion of the risks, that can affect our business and to not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to revise our forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after today, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities laws. During the call, there will also be a discussion of some items that do not conform to U.S. generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP, including but not limited to adjusted EBITDA, adjusted operating ratio, adjusted operating income, adjusted net income or loss, free cash flow, and net debt. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in the appendix to the investor presentation and press release issued this morning, both of which are available in the Investors tab of the Dasky website, www.dasky.com. In terms of the structure of our call today, Jonathan will review the highlights of the quarter and discuss our flexible business model. Jason will then walk through a financial review of the quarter, and then Jonathan will come back to wrap up our remarks with a few closing comments before we open the line for your questions. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Dasky's CEO, Mr. Jonathan Shumkin. John.

Thank you, John. Good morning, everyone. Let me begin on slide three, where I will outline a few of the notable takeaways from the third quarter. Dasky delivered another quarter of strong operational financial performance, as evidenced by the meaningful improvement to our profitability metrics, including our operating ratio, which for this third quarter was 90.5%, or 88.7% on an adjusted basis. Resilient demand and robust freight volumes across our industrial end markets extended the strong freight environment, contributing to a 13% improvement in revenue with a 19% improvement in adjusted EBITDA, which was driven by execution against our operational initiatives this quarter versus last year's third quarter. While these industry dynamics remain supportive for our business on a forward-looking basis, Continuing to opportunistically convert these rates into strong returns for our company and our shareholders remains the priority. For the third quarter, Dasky converted this revenue growth into adjusted EBITDA of $68.3 million, modestly bettering our Q3 2020 adjusted EBITDA margin to post a 16% margin this quarter. Adjusted diluted earnings per share ex-EVITA at $0.43 was a 79% improvement compared to last year's third quarter. It's important to note that these 2020 third quarter comps were each company records at the time of their print. And four quarters later, we continue driving this culture of improvement, even in the face of industry-wide challenges such as truck equipment and driver shortages. The last point I would like to acknowledge is really one that speaks to our relationships. They're not expressly observable in the headlight financials. Strong relationships with our drivers, vendors, and customers are fundamental to our business, and investing in those relationships across cycles has positioned us with a resilient and sustainable business. It's no secret that this industry is facing some legitimate headwinds, from supply chain issues afflicting the OEM to an ever-shrinking driver pool. And though we believe demand will continue to do its part in propping up rates well into next year, as we continue to execute decisively, our ability to lean on our longstanding relationships will position us to continue to drive strong margins and improve cash flow while also ensuring our customers have the capacity they need to properly manage their businesses. Before turning the call over to Jason to offer more detail around our financial performance for the quarter, I would like to take a brief moment to speak to an aspect of our operating model that played a critical role in our success this quarter. Please turn to slide four. On our last call, we spoke about priority to institutionalize our company and the fundamental shift of our mindset from one that historically relied on the performance and capabilities of single siloed operating companies to one that emphasizes the collaboration and coordination of our operations to execute as a highly functioning network. And we provided some high-level contours around our mission to rebuild our business to function within this network model, which will provide additional opportunities to better leverage the scale, capabilities, and footprint of our entire platform to better service our customers. A key tenet of this approach, however, is the flexibility inherent in our business model, one that we believe will lead to enhanced stability and resiliency and will ultimately deliver long-term profitable growth. Across our flatbed specialized business segments, the positions of strategic relevance that we maintain within each of our end market verticals, which span the gamut of industrial-facing subverticals, provide us with frequent opportunities to optimize our financial objectives by making targeted real-time decisions around asset deployment. Given that each of these end markets has its own respective cyclical and or secular tendencies, we are able to shift the supply of our capacity to most optimally balance the industry-specific demand or end market portfolio. We've talked at length about how diversity across both our end market verticals and our customer base delivers a portfolio effect that moderates volatility and allows us to concentrate the deployment of assets in areas where our capabilities are most value-added and thus most attractive from a rate perspective. This is clearly shown in our last several quarterly results. However, the competitive advantage of our network-based operational structure extends beyond simply this portfolio effect and includes other compelling features, such as the elasticity of our operating model. During the third quarter, as the market faced an even tougher supply-side environment, brought about by equipment and driver shortages, Gatsby was able to navigate this challenge by leaning more heavily on our asset-like strategies. These periods of market imbalance offer opportunities to highlight Gatsby's unique blend of asset-based and asset-like capabilities, and our third-party logistics platform, which functions within our operating model as a shock absorber, was critical in delivering on our commitment to service for our customers. As we saw in Q3 when market capacity was tight, as we flexed our company assets to the highest and best use, we relied on our owner-operator third-party logistics capabilities to backfill our fleet, thereby supplementing this incremental capacity that we were able to offer to our customers. And while this transient shift and mix toward asset-light strategies to accommodate this incremental freight demand results in lower incremental margins against those asset-light strategies, we believe that supplementing with our asset-light offerings enabled us to ensure that we continue to meet the demands for valued customers, maintain our market position, and maximize our freight capture within our target verticals. In times when the freight environment is eventually tighter and excess freight isn't as prevalent, we will shift our mix in favor of asset-based, reducing our reliance on asset-light brokerage offerings, and reallocating more freight to our more profitable owned assets. To that end, we will continue to strategically flex our operating model in a way that positions DASTi to deliver outperformance across market cycles. opportunistically taking advantage of dislocations in supply, demand, and balances to capture superior returns for our shareholders. With that, I will now turn the call over to Jason Bates to review our second quarter financial performance. Jason?